Artist and community leader Dorris Akers remembered

By James Windell

When Dorris Akers passed away on July 25, 2026, she was remembered by many friends who knew her in different ways.
Kerry Hagy, Director of the South Haven Center for the Arts, says that Dorris was “a dear friend to many artists in South Haven and Southwest Michigan.”
“We met in 1990 when she was at the Maritime Museum and I was at the South Haven Center for the Arts (SHCA),” says Kathy Catania, cofounder of Water Street Glassworks in Benton Harbor. “Dorris was a pioneering artist in South Haven. She brought a wealth of knowledge and experience with her when South Haven’s arts scene was just getting started.”
Thea Grigsby remembers Dorris as a great friend, wise old soul, brilliant artist, naturalist, and slow food champion. “She founded and collaborated on so many of South Haven’s cultural organizations and was an active member of the community for over 50 years,” says Grigsby, artist and previous SHCA Director. “She was very active until the end in nature conservation, bird watching, politics, women’s rights and local food initiatives as well as fundraising for various causes.”
And for Megan Bennett, Dorris Akers was an important figure in her life.
“I have known Dorris my whole life,” says Bennett, the Director of the Blue Star Art Collective. “She was friends with my parents from the early 1970’s when we first arrived here in South Haven. She was especially close with my father, Robert Battles, and they did some similar work with found objects and creating sculpture. I was lucky to have known her as well as I did and she was the last one-person show in my gallery for 2025.”
As an artist her last show was at the Bennett’s Blue Star Art Collective in September, 2025. The Beacon interviewed her then and she talked about her life and her career as an artist.
Akers was born in western Kentucky in 1939, graduated from high school in Dalton, Georgia and went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA in drawing, painting and printmaking in 1962.
“After graduation, I began exploring various craft mediums: weaving and fiber, leather and shoemaking,” she said in that last interview. “I taught some of these subjects in art centers and at the Chicago Academy of Art and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”
She pointed out that being creative was a dominant theme throughout her life.
“My mother was a drawer, and my father had a woodshop, so I was around creativity my whole life,” she said. But she added that she didn’t set out to be an artist.
“Believe it or not,” she said, “I started out in fashion. That was because I was always sewing my own clothes and my sister’s clothes, too. I even made wedding dresses, so I was sure that that’s what I should do.” However, her career in fashion design didn’t last long. “Because I found it to be horribly, horribly boring.” Instead, she switched to fine art and studied printmaking.
Akers, however, made her mark in the art world by turning found objects into art. In a short autobiography for an art exhibit, she wrote that her fascination with found objects began in the 1960s after seeing an exhibition at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. “Single man-made objects were presented as art exactly as found with the evidence of age and wear having changed them. After that I began to see the visual world in a different way – especially as it relates to art and aesthetics. Everything became a potential design element. Using found objects in my art began in the 1990s with 3-inch x 3-inch works submitted for exhibits here at South Haven Center for the Arts. Two- or three-dimensional, they grew in size from that point. Currently, I produce mostly small wall-mounted assemblages. Using only found objects, my aim is: To obscure the purpose and change the meaning.”
Hagy says that Dorris’ work was “ever evolving, ever curious, and very thoughtful.” Hagy adds that over the years that she knew Akers, “I saw her approach to found object art to be an evolving process. Her pocket gallery exhibition here in 2023 consisted of dozens of 12-inch by 12-inch abstract cardboard pieces made from found objects and packaging that were really beautiful.”
Catania says that her work addressed the beauty and form of the objects themselves. “It could be calm and stately, or funny and whimsical, depending on what she used,” Catania says. “Sometimes you could figure out the object’s original purpose and have a better appreciation of how she incorporated it. Other times, the object was a mystery and spoke volumes for itself.”
Acknowledging Akers’ fascination with found objects, Bennett emphasizes that the found objects she used could be elevated to “art” by putting interesting elements together and showing it as a piece of art. “She did amazing work with glass that developed from working at the glass factory in St. Joseph,” Bennett says. “Dorris’s art is thoughtful, beautiful and has a clean, minimal quality but it is also steeped in texture, color and a mixture of elements to create small pieces that reflect what she was interested in.”
 Besides her career as an artist, Akers was also a curator and non-profit administrator. “She was best known as being the first executive director of the Michigan Maritime Museum and as the founder and organizer of the South Haven Farmers Market,” says her friend Klindt Houlberg.
“As a non-profit administrator,” says Catania, “Dorris had a large impact on the organizations and communities she served. She was a pioneer in the region as the first Director of the Michigan Maritime Museum in South Haven and of Water Street Glassworks in Benton Harbor. When you are the first at anything, you ‘break ground’ and pave the way. Dorris made a lasting contribution to these now well-established non-profits and had a huge impact on their viability.”
Michael Fiedorowicz, a previous Director of the SHCA and currently Director of Roti Roti Art Center in Buchanan, indicates he knew Dorris as the founding director of the Michigan Maritime Museum, but she would become an advisor and friend. 
“I met her when I started at the South Haven Center for the Arts when I was the executive director in 1994,” Fiedorowicz says. “She had introduced me to folks, informed me of who’s who, and included me in some beach gatherings. She was scrapy enough to start a museum on a houseboat in about 1976, bringing a professional managed collection of nautical artifacts to South Haven. Eventually, a building was acquired and the Michigan Maritime Museum expanded.”
When Akers was interviewed last year, she said that since she had been producing art ever since she was in high school and since she was then 85, she may have run out of things to say as an artist. But then quickly added: “I don’t know that for sure.”
As it turned out that was her final exhibit.
But Kathy Catania sums up Dorris Aker’s incredible life by saying she was “truly one-of-a-kind.”
“The arts community always looked up to her,” Catania says. “She also lived an admirable ‘green’ lifestyle that reflected her artistic sensibilities.”