Born in Portland, Oregon, Louis Akin is associated with Grand Canyon views as well as scenes from Hopi Indian life. He is likely the best known of the Arizona landscape painters in the early 20th century.

His family had emigrated from Iowa to Oregon in 1852. As a young man, he worked as a sign painter and then studied in New York City with William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond. In 1901, "Harper's Weekly" published his illustrations," and in 1903, he was sent by Santa Fe Railway personnel to paint the Hopi Indians in Oraibi, Arizona. For eighteen months, he stayed in the Hopi Pueblo of Oraibi where he rented a room for seventy-five cents a week. By 1904, he had completed a series of Hopi paintings and, given the name "Mapli," he was...