“Love Letters to California”: A Solo Exhibition by Poet and Artist, Ellery Akers

“I love California’s natural world so much that I can’t stop drawing and writing about it,” says Ellery Akers, who has camped alone for months at a time in the California wilderness in order to create artwork and poetry. The results of her retreats will be featured in “Love Letters to California,” a solo exhibition of drawings, paintings, and poetry at the Museum of Northern California Art in Chico.

The eight-week exhibition runs from November 14, 2024 to January 12, 2025, and includes   watercolors and black-and-white drawings of wildflowers and landscapes from Northern California, including the coast, the Sierras, the canyons, marshes, rivers, and lakes.

“I love to sit outside in a camp chair and pay attention to the natural world,” says Akers,” but I don’t think of a tree or a river as a ‘subject’ to draw or write about. I don’t want to impose my will on what’s in front of me.  What I want to do instead is listen. I ask: “What’s it like to be you? My greatest pleasure as an artist is to become what I’m looking at: to throw my consciousness into a tree, a stream, or a leaf, and feel my way into its life from the inside out.”

Akers often uses unconventional tools, rather than a brush, including sticks, twigs, whisk brooms, and string, “all of which give me access to energy and emotion. Many of my drawings are created by using a stick dipped in ink: the ink is wiped away many times and re-drawn to build up texture and incised lines, as in a print.”

Her artwork has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and art centers, including the Anchorage Museum in Alaska; the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, California; the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington; the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, Oregon; and the San Diego Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Watson Cross, Jr. Award from the National Watercolor Society.

She is also the recipient of 14 poetry awards, including the 2024 Blue Light Book Award for A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Art, a collection of drawings and prose poems that accompanies the show and was published by Blue Light Press in September, 2024. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and published in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other journals.

For additional information visit https://elleryakersartist.com