Material inquiry shaped by history, utility, and the geologic logos of clay.

Akiyama is deeply embedded in Tulsa's civic and craft infrastructure. With his fiance, he co-leads Addis Ceramics, hosting open studio days and free workshops during Kendall Whittier's 3rd Thursday art walks. His recurring commitments to public access include teaching wheel throwing at 3rd Street Clayworks, serving on the Tulsa Farmer's Market Education Committee, and acting as a council member for the YMCA East Central branch. Previously, through 108 Contemporary, he piloted a youth clay workshop program at the Tulsa Dream Center.

His studio practice is recognized nationally and internationally. The Michelangelo Foundation inducted him into the Homo Faber Guide in 2026, and he is represented by Companion Gallery in Tennessee. He has held residencies at Toshiko Takaezu's studio, the New Harmony Clay Project, and Shigaraki Ceramic Culture Park in Japan.

Regionally, 108 Contemporary awarded him the 2022 Founders Award in Art & Design and the 2024 Hogan Visionary Award, and Oklahoma Contemporary invited him to exhibit in Art Now: FUTURE/IS, opening September 2027.

My practice centers on an abiding attention to the origins and geologic behavior of clay. Through ceramics, I explore subterranean movement, mineral collision, erosion, and crystallization as both physical processes and conceptual frameworks.

I am especially drawn to vivid ores, fractured stone, and the hidden structures beneath the earth's surface. I use them as formal and material points of departure for vessels and sculptural forms.

In the studio, I build with layered clays and minerals, allowing texture, color, and heat to determine form as much as my hands do. Cavities that suggest cups, bowls, or other functional domestic objects emerge from these geologic accumulations. Repeated firings draw out dense, emergent textures that sit between vessel, specimen, and landscape.

I consider these works propositions about interdependence. By collapsing distinctions between texture and structure, surface and body, function and sculpture, I aim to challenge the view of humans as separate from the environment. Clay records pressure, timing, failure, and transformation with unusual honesty.

Teaching is not separate from this practice. It is one of the main ways I test what clay can do outside the studio. I have built molds, pottery, glazes, and art objects, and I know industrial ceramic processes that most ceramic artists never touch. This breadth has shown me there is no single correct path in ceramics, and that understanding shapes how I teach.

In workshops and demonstrations, I sit with people while the clay resists or gives, helping them stay inside their own moment with the material: frustration, joy, or the confusion between the two. I work to create conditions in which people make their own work rather than reproduce mine.

Clay is not only a material to master. It is a medium through which people discover confidence in their own hands. Everyone deserves the wonder of clay. I see instruction as a continuation of the same inquiry that drives my studio work: how hands-on experience reshapes the way people relate to land, labor, and imagination.

Clay offers something that most substances do not: it requires time and touch that cannot be abstracted or sped up. The forms I make and the conditions I create for others are attempts to keep that contact visible and available. It is a way of staying present to what is already underfoot.