"Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma" Gallery Guide

Issues and Perspectives

All images by Todd Stewart and courtesy of the artist.

Cover and this page: Chat Pile [detail], 2008

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Todd Stewart Associate Professor of Art, Technology, and Culture Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts University of Oklahoma

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath On May 10, 2008, the town of Picher, Oklahoma, was hit by an EF4 tornado.

Destroying over 100 homes and killing six people, this was the last in a series of natural, environmental, and economic catastrophes to strike the town. A center of lead and zinc mining, Picher had been a boomtown in the early 20th century. It owed its birth to the mining industry, but when these companies abandoned the town 50 years later, they left behind an environmental disaster.

Personal, cultural, and historical narrative is what defines place.

I first visited Picher in 2008, shortly after the tornado. The tornado had leveled houses in a significant part of the town, leaving only building foundations and pavement still in place. The ground was layered with material artifacts – photographs, books, clothes, toys, letters, etc. All lay bare on the ground, all dislocated, all removed from their original context. The town was mostly abandoned. Buildings sat empty and, in many cases, open. Although most of the town’s residents had left, indications of their lives were everywhere. I realized that this would not be the case forever. I knew that eventually this place would become a landscape with little physical evidence of what had been before. During the next few years, each time I returned to Picher, I found less and less remaining – the landscape increasingly enveloping everything left behind.

Picher was in the process of disappearing, of slipping into non-existence.

For many years my concerns as a photographer have been centered on the idea that landscapes are embedded with memory and history – that personal, cultural, and historical narrative is what defines place. The photographs, artifacts, and other materials included in this exhibition are documents of the catastrophic history of Picher, Oklahoma, and the traumatic displacement of those who considered it home.

Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma

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Robert Nairn Sam K. Viersen Family Foundation Presidential Professor School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science

Director Center for Restoration of Ecosystems and Watersheds (CREW)

Associate Director Gallogly College of Engineering Water Technologies for Emerging Regions Center, University of Oklahoma

“Life in us is like the water in a river.” Henry David Thoreau eloquently

summarized the fundamental life-giving importance of water to all life on this planet.

Water is life. Unfortunately, we do not always value this critical resource.

At the Tar Creek Superfund Site in Ottawa County, lead and zinc mining left a tragic environmental legacy. Mine waters have polluted Tar Creek and other streams with ecotoxic concentrations of trace metals for nearly four decades, since the massive manmade caverns first filled with groundwater and spilled to the surface in 1979. Back in 1984, the problem was considered so colossal, so overwhelming, that it was deemed untreatable due to “irreversible man-made damages.” These waters have flowed unabated, staining the stream channels and flood plains orange, smothering aquatic life, limiting beneficial uses, and impacting not only environmental quality, but the collective psyche of area residents.

We can learn much about life and water from the way Mother Earth handles stresses...

We can learn much about life and water from the way Mother Earth handles stresses like seemingly-irreversible pollution. Through ecological engineering – the design of sustainable ecosystems integrating human society and the natural environment for mutual benefit – the OU Center for Restoration of Ecosystems and Watersheds (CREW) has designed, constructed, and continues to evaluate two mine water passive treatment systems in the Tar Creek watershed. By providing the correct conditions for natural processes to cleanse the waters of their toxic burden, these man-made ecosystems improve water quality and allow recovery of streams. The hope is that the water in this river will once again give life.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Tar Creek below Contamination Area [detail], 2014

Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma

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Chat Pile [detail], 2009

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Jeremy Short Professor and Rath Chair in Strategic Management Price College of Business Management and International Business University of Oklahoma

The famed economist Milton Friedman once stated, “There is one

and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

This sentiment lies in stark contrast to a more ‘golden’ rule where individuals are encouraged to treat others in a manner beyond such pure self-interest.

The devastation of Picher begs us to reexamine our core priorities surrounding our expectations of how industry and individuals should interact.

The devastation of Picher begs us to re-examine our core priorities surrounding our expectations of how industry and individuals should interact. These scenes ask us to ponder the creation of a triple bottom line advocated by some individuals where people, profits, and planet are all viewed with equal import. Such questions continue to reign supreme in the minds of many today as a daily outpouring of opinions surrounding how natural resources domestic and abroad should (or should not) be harnessed to serve the good of individuals, communities, and corporations who would set the course for their dispersal.

Research in the area of corporate social responsibility informs us that while individuals tend to associate much corporate malfeasance with the industry dynamics of ‘bad’ industries, most of the blame can be more accurately laid at the foot of specific firms and their actions. Should we continue to care about the remnants of Picher or cast these photographs as the results of an unfortunate event akin to the tornado that devastated the city years later? Do the images of Picher serve as a tragic reminder of mistakes long past, or a solemn harbinger of a new America to come?

Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma

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Nicholas Bauch Assistant Professor of Geo-Humanities College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Dept. of Geography and Environmental Sustainability University of Oklahoma

Director Experimental Geography Studio

What was it like when these playground horses’ bodies pummeled into the ground under the force of the 2008 tornado? The most daring child could never ride them with such abandon. The coiled springs connecting plastic to earth are pulled up, stretching into a straight iron bar, then back again, spinning and slamming the yard toys over and over in a whirling, frenzied gallop. How did these animals survive?

After all, they are the survivors. They are the ones who can tell us what it feels like to live in a post-natural world.

We have already entered into a new paradigm of what nature means, and how we relate to the non-human world.

What happened in Picher since 1995 is a harbinger. Environmental Humanists are on to this when they talk about “emergent ecologies,� an approach that takes 21st century environmental destruction as a foregone conclusion. We have already entered into a new paradigm of what nature means, and how we relate to the non-human world.

At stake is what is animate and not, what has agency, and what remembers. Memory lives in these horses, which, in a post-natural world, is a way of saying the horses remember. They are the proud, prancing new inhabitants of this hybrid town, the life of which weaves grass roots and chemical pollution to grow equine objects who share the same human longings of stability and escape. Just look at them trying to get out of their pen. They are the children of a legacy of economic oppression, perfectly adapted pseudo-mammalian life forms that cherish the decisions of their ancestors, indifferent to the violence that separated them.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Playground [detail], 2010

Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma

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Storefronts, Connell Avenue [detail], 2010

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Sterling Evans Professor, Louise Welsh Chair In Oklahoma, Southern Plains, and Borderlands History

President, Agricultural History Society Department of History University of Oklahoma

Picher, Oklahoma, is a poignant reminder of the environmental and health

hazards involved with extractive industries. In this case it was lead and zinc mining in the northeast corner of the state where, since World War I, the Tar Creek mines produced the metals needed for the manufacture of ammunition. The lead and zinc mined here was especially important for making bullets in World War II. With decreasing demand and increasing environmental concerns, however, the mines closed in 1970, leaving mountains of lead-laced waste outside the town. The contaminated chat piles covered more than 25,000 acres. Soon acid mine water was polluting Tar Creek, turning it red, and causing sinkholes to open in the piles, seriously threatening anyone who ventured near, including children who played in the area. The EPA did not declare Tar Creek a Superfund site for cleanup until 1981, and residents did not start leaving Picher until 2006, when houses, churches, and the local school were about ready to cave in. At 40 square miles, the toxic area remains one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites. Worsening the already dangerous environment, in May 2008, a violent F-4 tornado struck Picher, destroying 24 city blocks and causing the deaths of six people. Despite the contamination, at the time of the storm, there were still 20,000 people living there, but soon after, most residents left, thanks to a government buy-out program for their homes.

Oklahomans would be wise to learn from this ecological and social tragedy to avert such disasters in the future.

Natural events, combined with dangerous and environmentally unsound mining practices, created an Oklahoma ghost town, as this photo exhibit so clearly illustrates.

Oklahomans would be wise to learn from this ecological and social tragedy to avert such disasters in the future.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The University of Oklahoma fjjma.ou.edu