Art Focus Oklahoma Jan/Feb 2016

ArtOFocus k l a h o m a

O k l a ho m a V i s ual A r ts C oal i t i on

Vo l u m e 3 1 N o . 1

January/February

2016

Art Focus

Ok l a h o m a

from the guest editor A new year, a new issue! In this case, it’s a special issue, devoted to writings related to OVAC’s pioneering Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship Program. As a past participant in the program (in 2012) and a mentor and facilitator for this year’s iteration, I am proud of what it and OVAC does for the arts in the region. To my knowledge, there is no other program like it in North America, and it is especially important to see OVAC extending its support of artists across the state by encouraging home-grown criticism and curating.

The opportunity to publish in this special issue of Art Focus represents not only an important step for the program’s fellows, but also for our still developing state-wide arts discourse. To further our collective discussions about art, we’ve shaken up the usual categories—profiles, features, and reviews—and seized these pages to think critically about our roles as art writers, curators, critics, and artists, not just in Oklahoma, but in the larger region.

In this issue, the page becomes a site for creative expression and thoughtful reflection. It functions as a laboratory space, one of exploration, questioning, and immense potential. The collected essays remind us of art’s many roles—its capacity to unite, to delight, to provoke, to trouble, and to transform the ways in which we see the world and our place in it. I hope that you will respond to the various calls to arms contained within, by forming your own questions, devising your own guerrilla initiatives, organizing exhibitions in unexpected spaces, examining the ways in which you parse information, or even contributing to future issues of Art Focus.

So with this issue, I invite you to join the conversations started by our fellows. Write in to OVAC (publications@ovac-ok.org) with responses, circulate the articles and debate the ideas within them, and continue, as you already do, to shape the direction of the arts in the state and in the region. After all, the “art world” isn’t some monolith that exists outside us, in another state or country. We too are the art world. Let’s make it heterogeneous, active, and LOUD!

Kirsten F. Olds

Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition 730 W. Wilshire Blvd., Suite 104 Oklahoma City, OK 73116 ph: 405.879.2400 • e: director@ovac-ok.org visit our website at: ovac-ok.org Executive Director: Holly Moye director@ovac-ok.org Editor: Lauren Scarpello publications@ovac-ok.org Art Director: Anne Richardson speccreative@gmail.com Art Focus Oklahoma is a bimonthly publication of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition dedicated to stimulating insight into and providing current information about the visual arts in Oklahoma.

Mission: Supporting Oklahoma’s visual arts and artists and their power to enrich communities.

OVAC welcomes article submissions related to artists and art in Oklahoma. Call or email the editor for guidelines.

OVAC welcomes your comments. Letters addressed to Art Focus Oklahoma are considered for publication unless otherwise specified. Mail or email comments to the editor at the address above. Letters may be edited for clarity or space reasons. Anonymous letters will not be published. Please include a phone number.

OVAC Board of Directors July 2015–June 2016: Renée Porter, Norman (President); Susan Green, Tulsa (Vice President); Michael Hoffner, Oklahoma City (Secretary); Gina Ellis, Oklahoma City (Treasurer); Bryon Chambers, Oklahoma City; Bob Curtis, Oklahoma City; Hillary Farrell, Oklahoma City; Jon Fisher, Moore; Titi Fitzsimmons, MD, Oklahoma City; Ariana Jakub, Tulsa; John Marshall, Oklahoma City; Travis Mason, Oklahoma City; Laura Massenat, Oklahoma City; Amy Rockett-Todd, Tulsa; Douglas Sorocco, Oklahoma City; Dana Templeton, Oklahoma City; Chris Winland, Oklahoma City; Dean Wyatt, Owasso.

The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition is solely responsible for the contents of Art Focus Oklahoma. However, the views expressed in articles do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Board or OVAC staff.

Member Agency of Allied Arts and member of the Americans for the Arts. © 2016, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.

All rights reserved.

View the online archive at ArtFocusOklahoma.org.

Support from:

On the cover, clockwise, starting from the top left: performance of RvB; Arturo Sandoval, Pattern Fusion #12; Sara Schneckloth, Coyote Fence (detail); Kris Kanaly, Plaza Walls mural (detail); installation view of Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist at the Oklahoma Hall of Fame; Liz Roth, Mt. Adams: Reflected View, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 inches; Melaney Mitchell and Blair Schulman, Guerrilla Docents; Katie Pendly, To Descend (detail); work from Threshold: The Promised Land, curated by heather ahtone and Laura Reese, StART Norman, Norman Arts Council, 2014.

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contents

Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Program Special Issue

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4 About OVAC’s Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship Program

Redefinitions and Provocations 5 8

Keeping the Faith: Finding Space for Graffiti in Oklahoma

Lauren Scarpello and Parker Seward re-examine the role of graffiti in the state

Redefining Craft for a Contemporary Context

Krystle Brewer considers the nature of craft today

10 Reverb-Bodies: Locating Performance Art in Kansas City Jessica Borusky carves out a vocabulary for performance art

12 Contemporary in Context: An Argument for Living Art in History Museums

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Kyle Cohlmia takes a look at Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist at the Oklahoma Hall of Fame

14 Guerrilla Docents: Subverting the Carnival

Melaney Mitchell invites us to experience First Fridays (or Second Saturdays) in a new way

Inside the Studio 15 Drawing with Sara Schneckloth

Liz Roth introduces us to Schneckloth’s vivid, mysterious drawings

Reconsidering Curating 16 Curate. Art. Now.

Laura Reese probes the role of the extra-institutional artist-curator

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18 The Wrong C Word

Liz Roth asks readers to ponder creativity

19 Instances of Time + Points in Space

Allison Campbell captures an exhibition at the University of Oklahoma Fine Arts Library

22 Ekphrasis: Art and Poetry Riffing off of Aaron Whisner’s bright, bold images, poet Lisa Lewis reflects a world textured by pop culture, novelties, and nostalgia

25 Business of Art Ask a Creativity Coach: DIY Retreats

26 OVAC News 28 Gallery Guide

(p. 5) Detail of Plaza Walls mural, 2015. (p.8) Krystle Brewer, Untitled, Azalea, ceramic and thread in shadow box, 8 x 8 x 4 inches. (p. 10) RvB, by J. Ashley Miller (with Ian Teeple), performance documentation, La Esquina, Kansas City, March 2015. Photo by Tim Amundson; courtesy Jessica Borusky.

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP About OVAC’s Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship The writings contained in this special issue of Art Focus Oklahoma were completed as a capstone to The Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship (OAWCF). The program aims to train promising writers and curators by expanding their professional education and experience. This distinctive, year-long program awards selected fellows the opportunity to participate in a structured and innovative curriculum designed to encourage new writing and curatorial projects. The Fellowship offers each participant the opportunity to cultivate skills and knowledge by providing access to leading regional and national curators, critics, organizers, and academics through public lectures and intimate, hands-on workshops.

The 2015 fellows gathered in Oklahoma City and Norman six times throughout the year and also traveled to regional partner cities in Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Louis to meet with leaders in the art communities therein. Fellows completed required readings and writing assignments throughout the course of the program. During four of the sessions, nationally prominent and active arts professionals attended the sessions, engaged in dialogue with the fellows, presented on public panels, and met with the fellows one-on-one to critique and coach their writing samples.

Additionally, fellows collaborated to design experimental curatorial lab projects. These projects will be executed in February at MAINSITE Contemporary Art in Norman.

The opening reception will be a part of Norman’s second Friday art crawl on February 12, 2016, from 6–9pm.

This is the third installment of the OAWCF program, which was also held in 2010 and 2012. OVAC presents this program in partnership with the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the University of Oklahoma School of Art and Art History with additional support from the Norman Arts Council and MAINSITE Contemporary Art. Regional partners include the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO), Bemis Contemporary Art Center (Omaha, NE), and The Luminary (St. Louis, MO).

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OVAC is looking forward to the next iteration of this program in 2018. For more information, please visit write-curate-art.org.

Shannon Stratton, co-founder of Threewalls;

2015 Mentors Chad Alligood, Curator, Crystal Bridges

Daniel Tucker, artist, writer, curator, Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Manager in Social and Studio Practices, Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA.

Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

Robert Bailey, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. Chloë Bass, independent conceptual artist

and cultural critic, Brooklyn, NY.

Julia Cole, interdisciplinary artist, educator and community strategist; Rocket Grants Coordinator, Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Orit Gat, a New York and London based writer; Contributing Editor, Momus, and Managing Editor, WdW Review.

James McAnally, artist, critic, curator; Director, The Luminary and Executive Editor, Temporary Art Review, St. Louis, MO. Amanda McDonald Crowley, curator and

cultural worker; Curator in Residence, Alt-w Design Informatics, New Media Scotland.

Kirsten Fleur Olds, PhD (OAWCF

program facilitator, panel moderator, and guest editor), writer and curator, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK. Buzz Spector, installation and book

Chief Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY.

Karen vanMeenen, Editor, Afterimage, The

Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; lecturer, Rochester Institute of Technology Department of English, Rochester, NY. n

2015 FELLOWS

Jessica Borusky, Kansas City, MO Krystle Brewer, Tulsa, OK Allison Campbell, Norman, OK Kyle Cohlmia, Oklahoma City, OK Melaney Mitchell, Kansas City, MO Laura Reese, Norman, OK Liz Roth, Stillwater, OK Lauren Scarpello, Oklahoma City, OK Tiffany Sides, Tulsa, OK

artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Art, Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

Lorelei Stewart, Director and Curator,

2015 Partners

Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); faculty, Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate program, UIC, Chicago, IL.

2015 Sponsors The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

KEEPING THE FAITH: Finding Space for Graffiti in Oklahoma

by Lauren Scarpello and Parker Seward

Swank graffiti on Plaza Walls

In the vernacular of most Americans, the word “graffiti” often has very little association with art. Social service organizations such as Keep America Beautiful (and affiliates) have campaigned against it for years—placing it into the broad and general category of urban blight.1 Additionally, efforts to control the practice municipally through taxpayer-driven removal programs have fueled the adversarial “us vs. them” mentality. As a result, most folks today don’t give any critical thought or aesthetic value to its existence.

In an attempt to appeal to societal fear and confusion surrounding graffiti, Oklahoma City artist Randall Barnes invents a 1 Keep America Beautiful, “Graffiti Control,” keepoklahomabeautiful.com/graffiti-control.

mythology of an archetypal Kung Fu hero as a graffiti-remover. Inspired by his time working for the Oklahoma City Police Department’s graffiti unit, Barnes has established much of his artistic career on buffing—a term used to describe graffiti removal. He engages in the actual physical act of buffing, but then also creates paintings and woodcuts of Kung Fu-inspired narrative scenes. Barnes portrays himself as a main character in these parables, typically pictured buffing walls and wielding a long-handled paint roller like a bo staff.

He has a social media presence with the hashtag #EmbraceTheBuff. The imperative usage of the word “embrace” has the semblance of a patriarchal directive—a “just accept it” feel to it. This hashtag was also

the title of a recently opened solo show in the Project Space at IAO Gallery this past September.

The exhibition was touted as a Hip Hop Kung Fu Graffiti Removal Art Extravaganza and featured live performances. It opened the same weekend as the inaugural Oklahoma Hip Hop Festival. Thirty years following the release of the film Wild Style, director Charlie Ahearn said in an interview that the rise of Hip Hop in New York in the late seventies and early eighties was so much more than just the music; it was a culture, of which graffiti was an integral part.2 So, Barnes is either 2 Amanda McDonald Crowley, “WILD STYLE: a story of 1980s New York graffiti through the lens of hip hop culture: an interview with Charlie Ahearn,” Artlink 34, no. 1 (2014): 39.

(continued to page 6)

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP

Detail of Plaza Walls mural by Kris Kanaly

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(continued from page 5) unaware of graffiti’s significance in the history of Hip Hop, or just defiant of it. Either way, it is more than just the physical work that is being buffed. We are talking about the attempted erasure of history.

In reimagining himself as a hero in his vignettes, Barnes posits himself as an avatar of ethos. But in appropriating aspects of cultures that are not his own, and by staging a war against an art form traditionally used by the marginalized and alienated—for whose ethics is he fighting? Whose hero is he?

Norman Mailer’s influential long essay, The Faith of Graffiti, defined graffiti as an art form. He once wrote, “Graffiti writers were somewhat opposite to criminals since they were living through the stages of the crime in order to commit an artistic act.”3 There is no arguing that the unsanctioned use of spray paint on property that belongs to someone else is illegal. But considering location and intent can offer us a lens of empathy and an opportunity for critical thought.

Graffiti is considered by those who practice it to be a pure form of expression created out of necessity by those without any other option. In the past, some artists for whom commercial gallery spaces were not an option, including black and Hispanic artists, used it as a method of expression. But even beyond that, at the heart of the matter, it has been and continues to be a coping method and survival tool. Ahearn, in speaking about the motivations of New York graffiti writers said, “These writers were living day by day…it was an alternative to their day to day living.”4 Graffiti as a response to societal inequity means we all play a role in its creation, and therefore, we are all stakeholders.

Graffiti pieces are painted for the writers themselves and for other graffiti artists. They want to capture the attention of the public, but without the attachment to outcome of most street art. Whether approval is given or not, graffiti writers continue to create out of a burning desire to have a voice. It is a vehicle of choice by those who feel they have no 3 Norman Mailer and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti (New York: It Books, 2009), 11.

4 Crowley, “WILD STYLE,” 38.

voice because it compels viewers to look. In a large city, how many thousands of people pass by a spot every week? The graffiti writers who make their marks there will pass through, and everyone will know it. It’s a way of saying, “I was here. I do exist.”

By using graffiti as the ultimate reclamation of existence, most serious graffiti writers create prolifically. They typically operate by a code and work on public surfaces that will garner a lot of views, but not personally impact average folks—on spaces such as trains, underpasses, abandoned buildings, etc. In doing so, they are also creating inherent critiques on the irony and semantics of “eyesores” and “public property.” Is it truly “public” if the actual public is not free to interact with it how they choose? Why is it that a property owner can allow a building to fall into disrepair and not receive legal consequences, but spray painting on the side of that same building can carry felony charges?

Most graffiti writers won’t paint on momand-pops, sacred spaces like churches, and almost never over another writer’s work. If graffiti happens on these spaces, it might be a casualty of the uninitiated—an inexperienced writer who is not yet familiar with “the rules.”

Or perhaps the person making the marks is not a graffiti writer at all, but rather someone with hurtful intentions.

There is a current effort devoted to carving out a space for graffiti to exist in Oklahoma City as legal art. The Plaza Walls project is a stretch of alleyway behind the businesses on the North side of 16th Street in the Plaza District. The walls are owned by real estate developer Steve Mason and curated by local artists Dylan Bradway and Kris Kanaly.

During the 2015 Plaza District Festival this past September, the first round of selected artists was invited to come out and conduct live painting for the public.

The Walls are celebrated as a rotating “mural” space, with no specific mentions of the word “graffiti” (perhaps as a result of the negative associations with the term). However, the opening event saw several area graffiti writers come out of the shadows and create

masterpieces alongside the muralists. Pieces that read “Rhak,”“Leonard,” and “Gems” spoke of a traditional graffiti influence while incorporating a more modern touch of letter style. The duo “Swank” and “Bowzr,” whose work can be seen in and around the greater Tulsa area and beyond, painted side by side, creating pieces focusing on a near flawless transition of colors within each letter. Dylan Bradway and “Joxen” created work that revealed a graffiti influence without focusing on actual letterforms. The resulting Plaza Walls space forms a veritable graffiti gallery that is an undeniable testament to the strong presence of graffiti in this state, despite all odds.

The Walls are significant beyond just providing safe and legal wall space for graffiti writers. The walls are curated by two wellrespected local artists. So audiences are provided with an opportunity to consider and appreciate the artistic qualities of graffiti writing outside the realm of conventional thought. Mailer saw the graffiti aesthetic as a natural part of the lineage of art history.

He saw the line quality, the bright colors, and the engulfing size analogous to abstract expressionism. The Plaza Walls leave room for viewers to engage in a similar dialogue with the artwork, without struggling with questions of ownership and transgression. In the wake of a fresh look at the art of graffiti in Oklahoma, perhaps someday a new discourse on ethics will follow. n This essay is the result of long term collaboration between Lauren Scarpello and Parker Seward.

Scarpello participated as a 2015 Fellow in the Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship (OAWCF) and wrote her contributions to this essay through the mentorship of the program; she is also the Associate Director of OVAC and editor of Art Focus Oklahoma.

Parker Seward is a painter, arts educator, and the gallery director at Oklahoma State University. He attended graduate school at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Redefining Craft for a Contemporary Context

by Krystle Brewer

Arturo Sandoval, Pattern Fusion #12, machine-stitched and interlaced; recycled auto industry mylar, recycled library 35mm microfilm, multi-colored thread, plaited braid, holographic film, Pellon, polymer medium, fabric-backed.

What defines “craft,” exactly? The term has been used variously by artists, scholars, curators, schoolteachers, and laypeople to refer to artwork made from particular materials or hand-made functional objects. When I recently asked this question to 6th-grade students on a tour at 108|Contemporary, a non-profit fine craft gallery in Tulsa, they responded, “Craft is made of stuff and art is like a drawing or painting.” While 6th graders surely aren’t the authority on the topic, I think their distinction based on “stuff” is significant and relevant. The terms art, craft, fine craft, and arts and crafts have each had many points in history when both artists and art critics redefined them, and the terms oscillate between being celebrated and denounced.

One common definition is utility. If an object has a function outside of cerebral or visual content, such as a vessel, then it receives the label of “craft.” Another common consideration for an object’s status as craft is its materials, or “stuff.”

One can reserve the craft label for only artworks made from certain materials,

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such as wood, glass, clay, fiber, leather, or metal, while one could also say craft is anything other than painting, drawing, or photography, with printmaking teetering on the fence established between the two.

The history of the term and the set of practices that have been established around it suggest a position in between these two camps, overlapping both. Regardless of materials or utility, craft comes from an acute interest in the relationship between aesthetics and form, in the way that an object’s form is inherently tied to its craftsmanship. In the work of numerous artists we see that the timeless practice of craftsmanship is as relevant as ever.

While humans have been shaping pots from clay and carving figures from wood and stone since our earliest civilizations, the discourse about craft really begins around the Industrial Revolution. As Glenn Adamson argues in The Invention of Craft, this modern moment was in fact craft’s origin. Prior to the complex machines developed in this period of industrialization, there was nothing from

which to separate craft from fine art, as everything was handmade.1 With the development of machine-made objects, the distinction between hand-made and industrially produced objects emerged. It is this new separation of machine-made and hand-made that emphasizes and favors the artist-made object. As mass production increased and prices for generic items were low enough for most to afford, the reputation of craft increased and handmade items became a luxury, as fine art had been since the Renaissance. In response to mass production, the Arts and Crafts Movement centered on the handmade object and the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake, took shape.

An understanding, even if extremely brief, of craft’s history can provide a context for how we might envision craft’s role in the future. At a time of art made of various new media and 3D printing, how can craft remain relevant? One key way artists are 1 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), xvi.

(left) Hillarey Dees, Sclerotinia Study Necklace, copper, sterling silver, wool. (right) Livia Martin, Broken Things (detail), silkscreen on plaster.

doing this is by engaging with tradition while remaining contemporary, either using traditional materials in a contemporary way, or using contemporary materials in a traditional way (or by using both traditional materials and processes to new aesthetic ends).

One example of this is found in the partweaving, part-quilt tapestries of Arturo Sandoval. Rather than weaving natural fibers, his work is composed of materials such as microfiche and holographic film.

From a distance Sandoval’s geometric abstracted tapestries appear to be computer motherboards, but a closer look reveals thousands of film frames stitched together with colored threads. The microfiche contains images of past print periodicals that are so small only the headlines can be read. This dual view provides a complex layering as the piece literally stitches inaccessible stories together while showing the containment of data in a computer. These quilts thus connect a process dating back to the first dynasty of Egypt to the technologies of the last century in a new composition.

In her series Broken Things, Livia Martin incorporates the concept of utility within craft by using vessels, such as teacups and bowls, but alters their forms in order to remove their functions. The works consist of highly polished plaster that mimic the more traditional surfaces of glazed porcelain; the result is that the forms appear as if they are melting, while the patterns remain unaltered. In this body of work, Martin questions the requirement of utility in craft as well as creates a visual dialogue to past craft practices.

The “wearable art” pieces by Hillarey Dees use both traditional processes and craft materials in a contemporary aesthetic.

Combining fiber and metal, her necklaces are inspired by nature. Dees’ work focuses on the craftsmanship, materials, and function of body adornment while exploring natural imagery of pods and cocoons to evoke the wonder of birth and death.

question of functionality remain integral aspects of the art of craft, but it is the attention given to detail and craftsmanship, and ultimately the artistic intention, that allows craft to go beyond these simplistic constraints. Given the long history of craft and its various definitions over time, artists will continue to redefine and recontextualize the meaning of craft in the future. However, as long as humans and stuff exist, the need for artists to manipulate this stuff into beautiful and interesting objects will persist. n Krystle Brewer is the Interim Executive Director of 108|Contemporary, whose craft-based artworks can be found at krystlebrewer.com.

Each of these artists demonstrates ways that craft and its practices are still vibrant in the art of today. The use of materials and the

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Reverb-Bodies: Locating Performance Art in Kansas City

by Jessica Borusky

RvB, by J. Ashley Miller (with Ian Teeple), performance documentation, La Esquina, Kansas City, March 2015.

Photo by Tim Amundson; courtesy Jessica Borusky.

Kansas City has a thriving arts scene dedicated to visual and live practices, ranking “7th in the country for concentration of visual artists per capita” according to Hello Art, a Kansas City-based arts organization.

In this context, collaborations between visual artists and other live-art practices have been framed under the rubric of “performance.” While these collaborations are fascinating and produce surprising interactions between and across artistic genres, the result is a relatively ambiguous claim toward performance art, which dilutes the term and its discipline-specific vocabulary. In this essay, I will attempt to create distinctions between cross-genre collaborations and performance art practice; my focus is on examining performance art and the particular nature of the relationship that it has historically constituted with its viewers. Specifically, I will call attention to the lush experimental music community within Kansas City and its claims toward performance art, and suggest how these claims for it as performance art, rather than

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as collaboration, potentially render invisible performance art as a distinctive practice.

ArtSounds is a popular program in Kansas City, which has fiscal and staging support from the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI).

According to its page on the KCAI website, ArtSounds explores “cross-media expression through creative concert-making… setting the stage for concert events outside the box and inside the mind’s eye and the eye’s ear.

In ArtSounds performances, vision informs hearing and hearing guides sight in this essential dialogue at the messy intersections of human experience.”

While interesting in scope, ArtSounds locates the musical experience as a primary force within this collaboration, producing an experimental musical experience. Similarly, experimental musical projects located within the Charlotte St. Foundation’s La Esquina Gallery generate mutual works between artist and musician, yet the primary locus for understanding and appreciating these works is within the context of music.

For example, I was asked to perform in composer J. Ashley Miller’s “brutal minimalist operetta,” RvB.1 Although I was brought into the project because of my past satirical performance work, my body was an agent for the musical experience.

Additionally, the performance incorporated a theatre-in-the-round seating arrangement, an organization of the space that created certain expectations in the audience for what kind of performance would entail: a conventional theatrical event. ArtSounds and RvB both create well-developed experimental musical vocabularies between artist and audience, even as they rely on traditional audience-performer relationship.

Thus while the seating arrangement creates a typical boundary between audience and artist, these works aim to complicate familiar ideas about music. This, however, is not necessarily performance art.

1 J. Ashley Miller, as quoted in Timothy Finn, “Quadrigarum’s ‘RvB’ confronts choice and polarities with music and drama,” The Kansas City Star, 3 March 2015.

In this way, local institutions such as the KCAI and The Charlotte St. Foundation foster these experimental musical conversations, therefore adding breadth and depth to how music can be seen through institutional and financial support. As a result, experimental musicians can find homes for their practices, a shared vocabulary among practitioners and audience emerges, and viewership expectations expand.

A key difference between experimental music and performance art that includes sound is that in the latter, the artist’s body is clearly demarcated as an actuator of material. What this means is that the artist’s body is the focus of the live work, and it functions within space as an individual agent, using sound as a tool for aesthetic practice. Because of this, audience expectations shift from those of a traditional theatrical experience, toward a more fluid and intimate viewing experience.

We can understand the impact and nature of the way performance art constructs this experience between performer and audience by looking at art historical precedents.

Consider the viewer’s body in relationship to a three-dimensional object without a pedestal. By removing the pedestal, a more intimate inter-relational experience between object and viewer may materialize.

In removing the trappings of a pedestal, the sculpture and the viewer’s body share space in a democratic way. The desire to relocate the sculpture and the viewer’s body as relational was a prominent idea within Minimalist sculpture. Likewise, the performing body in a performance art piece reflects the immediate spatial condition as developed through American Minimalism.

The “stage/pedestal” of the performance becomes eradicated. In doing so, a particular mode of empathetic exchange occurs, and the contract between performer and viewer is, as a result, more vulnerable.

While it can be argued that in any live artwork, the body activates material, the process by which conventional musical or theatrical performances arrive at that moment of live production is by rehearsal, a formal exercise utilized by performances in other media: reading scripts, blocking,

choreography, and musical arrangement to name a few. So when witnessing a performance, even an experimental music, dance, or theatre one, the agreement between audience and performer is contingent upon knowledge of that rehearsal process, which creates an idea of a more “polished” or “finished” live work.

While both rehearsed and spontaneous performances may produce emotional resonances for the viewer, the viewer’s spatial location within the event guides different kinds of emotional response. For example, certain performance art pieces have been intercepted by viewers for various reasons, including physical and emotional concern for the performer (the most notorious examples being Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0, 1974 and Chris Burden’s Shoot, 1971, wherein both the audience and performers shared the same space). Audience intervention becomes less likely if specified seating and staging arrangements are constructed, causing a culturally and socially understood physical barrier between viewer and artistic producer.

One for Violin Solo is a Fluxus work by Nam June Paik, produced in the 1960s. This work is predicated upon the musical instrument (violin), yet a rehearsal process becomes void when the action results in destruction of the instrument itself. Because the action cannot be undone, and the punctuating moment of the gesture becomes the obliteration of the object, and therefore its preciousness, the audience is left with an experience that upends musical performance’s trappings and expectations. Through Paik’s grand and violent rejection, the violin becomes raw aesthetic material, rather than an instrument.

This is not to say that there cannot be dialogue and overlap between these genres of artistic production. My aim in defining these boundaries is an attempt to call out and locate difference as a way to imagine an informed audience that can converse about performance art equally as well as experimental music. By trying to define performance art through its relationship to art history and audience expectation, I am hoping to add to the growing currents of aesthetic discourse within the Kansas City

RvB, by J. Ashley Miller (with Ian Teeple), performance documentation, La Esquina, Kansas City, March 2015. Photo by Tim Amundson; courtesy Jessica Borusky.

area. It is evident that, within Kansas City, experimental music artists and viewers rely on an understanding of traditional musical experience in order to create a distinction for the reception of their practices. This same attention ought to be paid to performance art practice, with viewers developing the ability to qualify performance art through its dissonance from visual art and live art practices.

There are positive moves in this direction. In the past, The Charlotte Street Foundation has peppered in performance artwork through independent curation projects, and is currently attempting to expand current dialogue to become a space for performance art production. Kansas City will need this kind of consistent institutional support to more effectively consider lines between experimental live art’s productions and performance art practice. Doing so will encourage a better-informed audience with a shared vocabulary for performance art and will productively blur, challenge, and reconfigure those lines altogether. n Jessica Borusky is an artist/educator/curator currently living and working in Kansas City, MO. Borusky received their MFA at Tufts University & School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and primarily works within performance practice and discourse. For further conversation with the author, explore jessicaborusky.com for contact information.

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Contemporary in Context: An Argument for Living Art in History Museums

by Kyle Cohlmia

Installation view of Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist, at The Oklahoma Hall of Fame at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum.

Fame implies success, power – celebrity.

To have fame means, to some extent, you are a celebrity of the modern day, someone who has proven worthy of attention (not always under moral behavior) in the community or taken on a unique leadership role. Artists have manufactured the celebrity since the embellishment of Egyptian pharaohs inside pyramids and the adornment of marble busts of Roman emperors. And today, the photographs of the famous are available in excess, as we buy celebrity magazines from grocery stores along with toilet paper and follow our favorite personalities among our actual friends on our own social media sites.

A hall of fame is, therefore, a place for the famous, a place in which said celebrities can be eternalized, celebrated, even martyrized into the existing walls of an institution, to inspire the young and provide nostalgia

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for the old. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame (OHOF) at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum is an organization that recognizes pioneers— politicians, athletes, and artists alike—from Oklahoma, by displaying portraits of yearly inductees, in the form of paintings and photographs.

There’s something to be said about walking the galleries of a hall of fame. When you’re used to attending art galleries and large-scale museum exhibitions, and are challenged by them to examine aesthetic qualities with respect to historic and artistic contexts, a gallery that displays the portraiture of community leaders can feel ironically divergent: its intent can seem so obvious and the style so naturalistic that the represented figures might come to life at any moment.

But that’s the thing about a house full of

portraits; collectively, they tell a story. The portraits in the OHOF encourage viewers to look beyond what’s literally represented in front of them and to connect with not only the individualized stories of the inductees, but also the collective story, the story of us.

An interactive exhibit in the OHOF allows viewers to look up past inductees, providing the date in which they were born and a brief synopsis of their accomplishments. These archives deliver the beginning and end of a narrative for each of the inductees; however, what feels missing is the middle component, the complications and challenges that make up a person’s story.

The OHOF also exhibits accomplished contemporary artists from Oklahoma, providing a local spice of the subversive within the walls of tradition. On view at the OHOF from September 10, 2015 to January 9, 2016

(left and right) Installation views of Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist, at The Oklahoma Hall of Fame at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum.

is a collection of paintings by Bert Seabourn, an Oklahoma native and Cherokee whose work is featured in galleries around the state as well as world-renowned institutions such as the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and the Vatican. In Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist, displayed in the Tulsa World Gallery, the exhibition showcases Seabourn’s use of bold color and stylized lines to represent his subjects, which he states are “mostly about the study of human experiences, such as Native Americans and topical issues, often depicting women, preachers, art and art critics, buffalos, horses, dogs, and cats.”

This particular exhibit highlights Seabourn’s figurative paintings. While the artist is known for his faceless portraits, the works in this exhibit emphasize physical features such as enlarged noses, squinty eyes, and elongated limbs. The lines that make up these subjects are highly stylized and suggest movement, and

Seabourn once reflected on this quality of his work, musing, “My art is like the Oklahoma wind… ever changing, growing, and finding new directions.” There is a strong presence of works representing Native Americans, as in Oklahumma and Sitting Bull, where red fills the negative space, and bold greys and yellows frame the faces whose stern expressions are suspended in seemingly transcendent landscapes. In contrast, the paintings of women involve subtler concepts. For example, the pastel-painted woman with a subdued expression holding a martini in One More for the Road loses emphasis when paired next to the strong presence of Wolf Robe, and the portraits of the women in Fire Cracker, Green Eyes, and Little Miss hang in a small vertical tryptic, lesser in size than the other, singular portraits of men.

Nonetheless, there’s something raw and emotional about Seabourn’s style, inviting visitors to the OHOF to relate to the physical imperfections of these non-traditional

portraits and to think about the social issues presented through the depiction of under-represented populations and even to the extent that the paintings of women are portrayed less confidently. Such pieces assert how work being made today has a context outside of contemporary art spaces. While we may not all become celebrities of our time, living art highlights a community’s strengths and weaknesses, the conflict and middle to our narratives, and overall emphasizes that we are collectively involved in writing the story of us. n Kyle Cohlmia received a BA in Art History and Italian from the University of Kansas and MA in Secondary English Education from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has worked previously at the Denver Art Museum, Oklahoma State University, and is currently the Museum Operations Coordinator at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum, home of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Guerrilla Docents: Subverting the Carnival

by Melaney Mitchell

Kansas City’s First Friday is usually a passive motion where one follows along silently gliding into different galleries and gathering treats from differing food trucks. The Crossroads Arts District has established itself as a space for varied audiences to engage with art. In the heat of the summer, these First Fridays erupt with people willing to stop and put their eyes on something.

With Guerrilla Docents fellow Kansas City-based art critic (and previous Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial fellow) Blair Schulman and I have a central goal: to take that passive looking and act as catalysts for conversation.

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Images of Melaney Mitchell and Blair Schulman (pictured in “Guerrilla Docent” t-shirts), Guerrilla Docents, Kansas City, 2015 Photos: Rebeka Pech Moguel

This surging crowd may have a lot to do with things beyond art—the prospect of free food, drinks, and a party atmosphere on a Friday night. It seems that culturally we have shut out the general public from the art conversation, but in Kansas City this crowd just grows larger. More often than not major newspapers have laid off their visual art critics on staff. The art world itself often buries its head in a language that is illegible to those without the education to discern meaning from it. Art education is slowly being pulled from the core curriculum of elementary and secondary schools, making talking about art or understanding how something is made a foreign concept. Culturally the arts are still vibrant, through music, videogames, and film, where the languages used in popular criticism allow audiences to interact on a deeper level.

Yet in an image-based culture we are letting go of how deeply important an awareness of critical analysis can be.

Guerrilla Docents is simple. Schulman and I stand outside in our all-black attire and ask First Friday attendees a simple question: “Would you like to come on an art tour?”

The art of First Friday sometimes does seem to get pushed aside for the food vendors, fire breathers, and other entertainment. That’s where Schulman and I come in. On one of the most crowded blocks of the Crossroads Arts District we found our first post this July and established ourselves as Guerrilla Docents. This concept originated in an editing room, with fellow Kansas City art writers working on why we were frustrated with First Fridays. It seems like a great concept to get people involved, yes, but it also has a tendency to shut out any kind of vivid conversation or discovery. Most attendees eat, shop, and quietly watch the art through the window or pass it by. If someone spends more than thirty seconds looking, let alone talking, it is a rare occurrence.

After climbing the stairs, we brought the group over to a series of Gallucci’s collages. Gallucci’s work became the perfect world for these participants to explore. Bright pinks, teals, and lime green pepper a collaged surface, with a wide range of shapes and mark-making—the colors evoke memories of children’s advertising from the early 1990s. In front of these collages, we used a modified version of a museum educational technique known as Visual Thinking Strategies; we turned the tour on the viewers for them to find context clues as to what the work is about. Rather than dictating facts, the group found their own answers to questions about what they saw in the work.

This process of interpretation validated their opinions and observational knowledge.

Our first evening at this was last August.

Kansas City-based artist Madeline Gallucci was exhibiting some of her new brightly colored abstract work at Beggars Table Church and Gallery. Located right in the center of the busiest First Friday block with an easy walk-up, this was going to be the perfect spot to attempt to engage people who were likely just out to enjoy their Friday night. Schulman and I began asking strangers, “Do you want to talk about art?!” which seemed to most like the entry to a pyramid scheme. One group of adults that had “never talked about art before” were prompted by the crowd to chug their beers and join in.

With a simple question we had infiltrated the party atmosphere, convincing the revelers to do some thinking.

Our group started off just pointing out shapes.

They found hidden images in the abstractions, uncovering sharks, ambiguous arms, band-aids, and pickles. Once we moved to another piece the group started to see their own personal experience in the work. “That looks like a sickle cell” and “... that one is totally mitochondria!”

Our tour guinea pigs revealed their status as medical students through their observations.

Group after group this same situation continued, with each new group following Schulman and me up the flight of stairs and in turn discovering narratives in the work rather than processing through gallery after gallery with eyes half open.

Since our first Guerilla Docents, Schulman and I have continued this practice each First Friday.

Sometimes the environments we choose teach us lessons about how the space may or may not be ideal for conversation. Other times we realize that informally exploring the gallery with those already there yields the best results. During October’s First Friday we stopped by artist-run alternative gallery Front/Space and had a young boy tell us the narrative of his favorite artwork by finding the shape of a high speed train in it and then running about the gallery, acting out his discovery. Visual art can make people come together and others completely come to life; it’s just a matter of how we’re able to continue to find meaning in the things we see. n Melaney Mitchell is an artist, curator, and writer from Kansas City, Missouri. She is the former director of the Subterranean Gallery and is the editor-in-chief of Informality Blog, a platform for writing and dialogue around contemporary Kansas City art and culture. See informalityblog. com for more information.

Drawing with Sara Schneckloth

by Liz Roth

(left) Sara Schneckloth, Coyote Fence, 2015, ink and colored pencil on paper, 28 x 32 inches. (right) Sara Schneckloth, Batir - Tower, 2012, ink, graphite, charcoal, and watercolor on Yupo, 60 x 20 inches.

Sara Schneckloth is exhibiting a series of drawings in the exhibition Whose Fault? at MAINSITE Contemporary Art in Norman.

Earlier this year, I caught up with her in Taos, New Mexico, where she was the Smelser Vallion visiting artist at Oklahoma State University’s Doel Reed Center for the Arts (DRCA).

On the day that I visited her at her DRCA studio, it was filled with numerous, large, strange drawings. “Have you only been here a week?” I asked. “Oh, yes. I like to hit the ground running. Residencies are a world apart, and time expands to fit the opportunity.” That day she was creating drawings, putting the finishing touches on images for a children’s book, preparing a lecture about her work for a regional museum, and organizing a drawing and video workshop for Oklahoma State University undergraduates. It was refreshing, and a little overwhelming, to see how she navigated this wide range of artistic activities with energy and humor.

Schneckloth creates drawings. Often the word “drawings” conjures up finely-rendered representational scenes, or perhaps

loose studies for more finished works.

Schneckloth’s drawings are finished works of art, and the ones I saw in her studio were big, colorful, dense works created on Yupo.

Yupo is a synthetic, waterproof paper that is slick and translucent, and once art materials dry on it, “you can take a shower with it!”

Because it is so smooth, it is hard to control effects on it: watercolors and inks pool and slide on it as if on a ceramic plate. Using material this unpredictable is just the right choice for Schneckloth.

implying something scientific. One might describe the works as abstract, but they are only as abstract as images seen under a microscope—that is, real and literal at their level of magnification. Her working process mirrors what seems to be depicted: she deftly enhances and partly encloses marks from her flowing, unpredictable materials with ones easier to control, like markers and colored pencils. Her iterative process reminds me of printmaking, and she includes digital printing techniques into some drawings. In fact, it’s hard to tell what materials she has used when you see a finished drawing—the way she creates her drawings looks as puzzling as what is represented.

The drawings are mysterious, and reminiscent of something organic. They seem to depict something that is loose and moving, but something moving within systematic rules: volcanic rocks, neurological branching systems, heat-loving bacteria at Yellowstone, or octopi waving their arms. “When I show them to biologists, they see histology slides—cross-sections of organs, anatomical specimens. When geologists see them, they are core samples, geodes, erosion patterns,” the artist explains.

Sara Schneckloth’s work can be found on her website, saraschneckloth.com.

Schneckloth creates a sophisticated visual interpretation of order and chaos, while

Liz Roth is a painter and Associate Professor of Art at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these mysteries, the finished drawings are complete, integrated and beautiful. I can’t wait to see more of her work at MAINSITE. n

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Curate. Art. Now.

by Laura Reese

Momentum Tulsa, curated by Raechell Smith and Laura Reese, Living Arts, Tulsa, OK, 2012

Curating is a hot trend. We have “coffee curators,” curated Instagram feeds, and increasingly, the term is being used liberally to apply to a variety of positions and duties. In “Quiet Moves,” Luke Turner posits that the “recent glorification of the role of the curator can perhaps be seen as a product of the narcissistic tendencies of our social media culture.”1 On the contrary, the rise of the “curator” is perhaps a renaissance of the idea of expertly formed opinions as a valuable guide for consumers. In the context of art exhibitions, curators can help us filter the mass amounts of information being presented, provide a 1 Luke Turner, “Quiet Moves,” Notes on Metamodernism, 12 November 2013, metamodernism.com

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relevant context for the work, and suggest connections viewers may not have the historical knowledge or visual vocabulary to make on their own, providing for a more rich experience.

Traditionally curators have been academics focused on the care, preservation, and interpretation of artifacts for future generations. However, curators are caretakers of not just objects, but also of information.

They are active and important, participants in the conversations that shape our culture’s zeitgeist. Thus there is an expanding niche for curatorial practice in areas outside of narrowly defined institutions.

Jean Hubert-Martin characterizes the independent curator as “the go-between among the different worlds of the artists,

the exhibition spaces.., and the public.”2 No wonder, then, that many, if not all, of Oklahoma’s independent curators serve in a variety of roles, most notably as artists.

For example, romy owens, an artist and independent curator in Oklahoma City, seizes the flexibility and potential that her position across these various roles affords her, seeing her role as “to create opportunities, develop ideas, and present art to the community that the institutions can’t/won’t/aren’t.” Another Oklahoma City-based curator, artist, and administrator, Kelsey Karper, reiterates this notion, framing independent curation as “a chance to move beyond those 2 Heather Kouris and Steven Rand, eds., Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (New York: Apexart, 2007), 36.

[institutional] restrictions and create new experiences for the community.”

The extra-institutional artist-curator has the ability to overhaul the act of making exhibitions and creatively redesign the format of showing and producing work. The exhibition itself is form. The artist-curator is no novel idea, but as community-engaged art forms rise in prominence, the work of artist as curator, and curator as artist, can radically change the way the public engages with art.

In Oklahoma, this is an underdeveloped role. Certainly, we have a growing base of independent curators that continues to create opportunities for experimentation. Institutional curators also take risks in exhibition making.

But there is always room for more, and the growing base of artists with still few exhibition spaces means there is an increasing need for artist-curators to re-think how we exhibit work.

As an artist-curator myself, I previously separated my roles: artist, curator, writer, administrator, in that order. My role as an artist came first as a lens through which to see my other practices; however, as I continue to expand my career, I see myself more as a cultural facilitator, with blurred (or non-existent) boundaries between each role. As I reconsider my own practice, I’d like to re-examine those projects that have pushed me towards this direction, and helped me to re-think the role of artistcurator in Oklahoma, hopefully inspiring other eager artists to do the same.

With a growing class of arts professionals, and continuous community developments, Oklahoma is fertile ground for more artistic ambassadors. Here, curatorial clout is not needed to create opportunities and exhibitions.

When I started my career as a curator, I had not even graduated from college. Institutions like OVAC create mentorship opportunities for curators, and almost every art gallery in the state welcomes curatorial proposals from individuals, experienced or not.

I still have little formal training in curating, outside of this Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship. It has been the stewardship and mentorship of others in this field in our close artistic community that have pushed me to create opportunities for myself and other artists.

Slice of American Pie, curated by Laura Reese, In Graafika Festival, Pärnu, Estonia, 2013

Under the mentorship of heather ahtone, who is curator of Native American and NonWestern Art at the Fred Jones, Jr., Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, I worked on the Norman Arts Council’s START project, in which we re-purposed an old lumber yard to house site-specific installations. This project challenged the typical formula of a show in which there is a set exhibition space with a specific room for work. Here, in this abandoned, historic site, we had to re-think how to conceive a space and present works to the public.

Such a charge—to create something meaningful in this context—would have excited me immensely in my role as an artist. However, in my role as co-curator, with the privilege of presenting works, I was able to bring together works with pre-existing messages, creating a new meaning. This format allowed me to be more effective in asking questions alongside audiences than just creating work in my studio.

As an administrator, I often work with different curators from around the region.

Acting as an intermediary among the public, artists and curators in a variety of projects, I have become aware of a public perception that curators (and the administrative institutions they represent) favor certain

people in each setting. Through my work, I often have to relay that the subjectivity of curators, and their informed and distinct opinions, is what makes them so valuable.

In a recent endeavor, I even included my own work in a show. This was a personal point of contention as I developed the exhibition, which revolved around a theme inseparable from my practice. Because it was seemingly unavoidable to reference my own practice, my mentor advised me to include my own work. As I grow comfortable in the role of artist-curator, not artist and curator, my contention with this favor towards my own work in a show lessens.

When we draw lines around these roles, their overlap becomes uncomfortable. If we can, as a public, stop expecting clear boundaries for people in their roles as facilitators and practitioners, perhaps we will benefit even more from their work. n Laura Reese is an artist, writer and curator in Norman, Oklahoma; for more information, see laurareese.net. Reese is also Programs Coordinator for the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP The Wrong C Word

by Liz Roth

Liz Roth in her studio, Stillwater, OK. Photo by Vibrant Kick.

I hate the word creativity.

It used to be a meaningful word, indicating something energetic, exciting, and unexpected. It was usually related to art, and implied significant originality. But then, everyone decided to use it to make what they do seem more impressive, and now we have Very Serious People describing how creative their business deals are, or their marketing pitches, or, heaven forbid, their lifestyles. Universities are offering graduate degrees in creativity now: I mean, what’s next? Degrees in enthusiasm?

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And don’t get me started on the word curating! My coffee shop claims it is curating my coffee. Can we agree that putting ground coffee in a paper filter is not the same as spending years developing a retrospective in a major museum? Could we please not use the same word? And, hey you, barista. Are you an artist? You of ALL people should be able to use the word “curate” properly.

On the other hand, we’ve got artists who are really tired of people thinking they are flakey, disorganized dreamers. These artists are fighting back, and calling themselves entrepreneurs. People, get it

together. Selling shrink-wrapped digital printouts under a tent might define you as a seasonal poster business, but not an entrepreneur. We don’t need to use the wrong word to legitimize our activities.

Liz Roth is a painter and Associate Professor of Art at Oklahoma State University and has taught courses in Art and Entrepreneurship. She is enjoying her geology class very much.

How did we get to this point?

I think we’ve forgotten what being an artist actually is. When was the last time you heard a plumber say, ”Oh, I am so passionate about my work, I would do this for free!” Or a lawyer: “I do this because there’s really nothing else I’m good at [lawyer tips head to side with selfdeprecating smile].” Artists who act like quizzical puppies get kibble, not serious recognition. Under these circumstances, it’s a wonder anyone thinks the word creative is appealing.

Naturally, we also have the related problem: people reinforcing the idea that artists are only good at some limited idea of art-making.

Someone recently asked me, suspiciously: you’re an artist! Why on earth are you taking a geology class?

I could have said, I study anatomy to be a better figure painter, and so studying geology will make me a better landscape painter.

But I think that misses the point. The point is that making art lets you satisfy and share your curiosity about the world. And curiosity is the “c” word I want to talk about.

Curiosity is the freedom, and the expectation that you have a right to be involved in just about anything. Naturally you’ll be exploring your own medium and satisfying curiosity about your craft (can I combine poured aluminum with this tree stump and not have it combust?), but you also have an excuse to learn anything you want.

Want to learn about fracking? Concrete poetry? How sound works?

Hi, I’m an artist, and I’d like to ask you a few questions for this art project I’m working on... no one questions it! In fact, no one can resist! You’re an artist! They’re curious... about you! And your art. How will you turn this conversation, this information, into art? People think it’s fun and sexy. They want try to help you out because, gosh darn it, you’re so interesting.

It seems to me that the best reason to engage with an art form is to have an excuse to pursue curiosity. It’s not that only artists have the right to be curious; it’s that curiosity is actually in our job description. Think about it. As artists, we synthesize information and impressions, and use our aesthetic skills to create something original and rich with meaning. This could be investigating character through portraiture, seeking solutions to food deserts in urban areas, commenting on advertising and its effects, or considering what is happening on Mars. I cannot possibly list all of the fascinating things that artists are curious about, or all the interesting ways that we pursue this. So as artists, we’re curious about the world, we’re curious about what our artwork will end up looking like, and we’re curious about how to create it and make it resonant for others. Curiosity drives our work, and it’s a word I can get behind.

Stay interested, stay curious, and go make some work. n

Liz Roth, Monument Creek, 2013, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches.

The University of Tulsa, School of Art presents the 2016 MFA Graduates Thesis Exhibition, February 25 through March 24, 2016. The graduates featured are Nancy Andrasko – Ceramics, Blake Walinder — Painting, Kyle Blair – Printmaking, Kalyn Barnoski — Graphic Design & Printmaking, and Megan Curtis — Painting.

These degree candidates have been working for the last few years with an area advisor and committee. They have researched issues in contemporary art and art making. This exhibition will present their explorations and research into critical studies of their work by way of art making that encompasses their interests and themes.

The exhibition will be at The University of Tulsa, Alexandre Hogue Gallery, 2935 East 5th Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74104. The first opening reception for Blair, Barnoski and Andrasko will be Thursday, February 25, 2016, from 5:00p.m. to 7:00p.m the show will run until March 8. The second reception for Curtis and Walinder will be on Thursday, March 10, from 5:00p.m.-7:00p.m and will run through March 24, 2016.

For more information, visit www.cas.utulsa.edu/art/ or call 918.631.2739 • TU is an EEO/AA institution

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP Instances of Time + Points in Space

by Allison Campbell

Katie Pendly, To Descend, 2015, porcelain and steel, installation in the exhibition Instances in Time + Points in Space, Fine Arts Library, University of Oklahoma.

“As you read this, someone is curating their bedside table, someone is curating their lunch.” – Jessica Bzran.

My past-time as a student worker at the University of Oklahoma was observing art students inside the Fine Arts Library. As I worked there, I observed students as they studied. Silently, they traversed the space.

A few retreated to quiet corners for a temporary pause in their day.

Others visited between classes, roaming through the stacks, glancing at the spines of books in search of inspiration. Some erected book towers as they excavated each resource, channeling a frenzied focus and staying for hours. Each student wove a unique pattern that I observed as it developed across semesters. When I shelved their returned books, I wondered how their experiences in the library affected their artwork.

Instances of Time + Points in Space was an attempt to temporarily archive the memories of students as way of answering that question.

The exhibition, which I co-curated with Katelynn Knick for the OU Fine Arts Library and which ran from November 13 to December 23, 2015, is a network of collected memories about a specific space and its influence on curating. Facilitating relationships between artwork

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and space is nothing new in curating, but this exhibition attempted to involve the artists with participatory methods and to prompt their careful consideration of the space, both as they had used it and as a site for the display of their work.

To do so I prompted eleven artists to recall events, emotions, and sensations surrounding their time inside the library. The artists whose work was included in the exhibition are Felix Blesch, Katelynn Knick, Eric Piper, Erin Raux, Katie Pendley, Jenna Bryan, Amy Sanders, Laura Reese, Brian Dunn, Jiaxin Jiang, and Alicia Smith. The artists’ memories visualized the relationship between the library, the artists, and the materials they used in their work. Thus the artists participated in the curating of the show by using their own processed data as a guide for their installations. Through the display of installations, prints, sculptures, and drawings, the library is re-imagined and intersubjective timelines converge.

None of the works in this show employ timed-based media, but each work references temporality with a chosen material. Memory acts a filter between the past and present, and the artists arrange objects into patterns

to document their relationship with time. Materials with origins from animals and plants evolve into archival objects, as the memories of their daily use and who used them deepen. Plastic materials are arranged to simulate the biological organization of memory and processing found in neural systems while highlighting the slow decay of synthetics. Artists used this library to curate their mind from its collection. Instance of Time + Points in Space highlights the tension between what we define as curated and what we define as collected, a gray space for artists, curators, libraries, and audiences to explore.

Alongside the artists’ installations were their recollections of the library.

These memories are also maintained in a digital archive, available at instance.space. This archive offers another instance of time and a point in space for viewers to contemplate, even after the exhibition has ended.

For more information on the exhibition Instances of Time +Points in Space, see facebook.com/instance.space. n Allison Campbell is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in the School of Library and Information Studies. She works as a curator, artist, and researcher.Â

Katelynn Knick, Where I Am Now/Where I Go From Here, 2015, dyed paper, plastic trash bags, wire, thread, installation in the exhibition Instances in Time + Points in Space, Fine Arts Library, University of Oklahoma. Photo by Shaun J. Perkins.

Join us for the 6th Annual Midtown Rotary Spelling Bee(r)!

February 26th, 2016 6:00 pm at Will Rogers Theater, OKC

$500 Grand Prize!

Tickets include German food, local beer and Bee entrance $45 in advance, $50 at the door Purchase tickets here: http://midtownrotaryspellingbeer6.eventbrite.com More info at www.okcmidtownrotary.org 21

Clockwise from top left: Aaron Whisner, Square 11, Square 9, Square 10, Square 14, spray paint on wood, 48 x 48 inches.

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ekphrasis

EKPHRASIS: Art & Poetry edited by Liz Blood

Riffing off of Aaron Whisner’s bright, bold images, poet Lisa Lewis reflects a world textured by pop culture, novelties, and nostalgia.

Poet Lisa Lewis’s books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize, 1994), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series, 1998), Vivisect, (New Issues Press, 2010), and Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize, Dream Horse Press, 2011).

Her book The Body Double is forthcoming from Georgetown Review Press. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.

Artist Aaron Whisner is co-founder of Clean Hands, a Tulsa-based mural crew and streetwear shop. As one half of design duo “live4this,” he has been actively painting since the mid 1990s. With roots in graffiti and street art scenes, Whisner draws inspiration from hand-painted signage, street textures, and type.

With each installation, progression is his goal.

Quadriptych I.

II.

We called it our lair of picnic blankets and old mistakes.

I’d watch you dig down under styrofoam for the comic books and highlighter pens: we knew how to have fun, and drawing had something to do with all our afternoons fearing the worst.

The magazines said the trend of American t-shirts with words had caught on, and they didn’t have to make sense as long as the cotton was pink and gold. Mom told us about middy blouses and the World Wars: our shero, when she caught us playing cards without rules and we wrapped our arms around her knees and she drove us later to the mechanic’s shop.

“Nowadays when somebody gets killed you can’t tell if the mourners wanted to clean out their garage or what,” he says, inscribing the day’s lesson under his sleepy eyes with black Sharpie. “That’ll never come off,” she replies, if you can call it a reply when someone changes the subject to the apropos, like the flag, or the 1980s, the fashions we’re embarrassed to admit we miss, still a bargain in some chic corners of the globe, like socks or cloches or rubber watches. Once I received a packet of yarn all the way from Italy, and I hadn’t even ordered or paid.

IV.

III.

O perfection of past glories, now more alive than in their day of cellophane and crayon, when are you coming for me, really? Have you only been teasing, dangling your sloppy hose? I have come to doubt this balance, like a plate of beans on the knees at the church picnic—and the blanket! We spread its unfolded segments out like puzzle pieces.

We overlapped.

I hadn’t yet picked up my habit of wearing a visor but someday I would lose an eye. The crown marked STILL FIVE CENTS, and our trust in those promises—now we know how right we were, and now we fight for the rich man’s ticket.

I snipped the corners of the envelope and my cuticles bled, but I’d been chewing them, prying loose divots of skin that tasted like black pepper. I always try to do things right.

For today’s performance, classic games or that episode of Columbo in which an ambitious chess player with attitude murders his rival? Or we could bust into Mommy’s make-up and paint our body parts, or spray the backyard bees with gold leaf except then we’d really be in trouble. So much nostalgia, so little time: I loved you more when you were vivid and vibrated and your open mouth breathed the sweetest.

ekphrasis

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ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP

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ASK A CREATIVITY COACH: Got Talent? Motivation Matters More

ASK A CREATIVITY COACH:

DIY RETREAT

by Romney Nesbitt

Art retreats and painting workshops rejuvenate your creative spirit and come with a hefty price tag. Tuition, travel, lodging, art supplies, time away from work, care for pets and kids all add up. An alternative is a Do It Yourself (DIY) retreat at home. You might want to book a DIY retreat if…

• You can’t afford to attend an art workshop or retreat • Family or work responsibilities will not allow you to attend a workshop • You want to practice the skills you learned at the last workshop • You need a new business plan • You have an idea for a new series but can’t seem to get started • You’re willing to devote time and energy to restart your art career A DIY retreat can provide many of the artistic benefits associated with an off-site workshop (except for socializing with new artist friends), but you have to do the work. A DIY retreat requires planning and selfdiscipline. To minimize distractions consider using a vacation day to open up a week day for your DIY retreat. If you can’t “retreat” at your house you might arrange to use a room at your church or a study carrel at your local library. The goal is to behave as if you’re away on a retreat.

Suit up, show up and do your creative work.

The day before your “retreat” prepare your work space so you’ll be ready to go. Straighten your studio area and pull out your paints, paper, books, etc., and decide on a start time. On your retreat day show up a little early and begin with a celebratory cup of coffee. Put your phone in another room to prevent distractions. You can check in with the world on your break. Commit to making a mark on your canvas or paper in the first few minutes of your retreat to remind your creative self that you are an artist on retreat. Be aware of your old nemesis Procrastination who always begins his conversation with this phrase “You can get started just as soon as you….” When these thoughts pop in your head reply, “No, I can do that later, right now I’m on retreat.”

A DIY retreat will take commitment, planning and self-discipline, and can net real creative rewards—without the extra expense. Sign up today for your next retreat! Enrollment is limited to ONE. Romney Nesbitt is a Creativity Coach and author of Secrets From A Creativity Coach. She welcomes your comments and questions at romneynesbitt@gmail.com. Book her to speak to your group through OVAC’s ARTiculate Speakers Bureau. n

How to “book” your DIY retreat: Start with the end in mind. What do you want to accomplish?

How much time can you set aside for your retreat (half-day, full-day)?

Schedule your retreat a few weeks in advance to give you time to prepare and plan. Arrange child care, negotiate time away from work or postpone regular weekend activities.

Daydream—it’s fun to look forward to what you’ll do when you go on your “retreat.”

Commit to a date(s) and mark it on your calendar.

Rediscover the Historic Paseo!

Shopping, Dining & Learning!

22 Galleries, 80 Artists, Restaurants, Boutiques, Art and Education For more information about Educational Programs contact:

405.525.2688

ARTS DISTRICT

thepaseo.org #FirstFridayPaseo

First Friday Gallery Walks every month FRI 6-10 PM & SAT 12-5 PM

business of art

25

ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP

OVAC NEWS

JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2016

The Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship (OAWCF) will open the inaugural Curatorial Lab Projects at MAINSITE Contemporary Art in Norman. Opening reception will be a part of Norman’s second Friday art crawl on February 12, 2016, from 6–9 pm. The exhibition will feature four experimental projects curated by the 2015 OAWCF Fellow cohort. Free and open to the public through March 12. Visit write-curate-art.org for more information.

Our Artist Survival Kit (ASK) workshop series continues in February with What to Expect When You’re Exhibiting on Saturday, February 20, 1-4 pm at IAO, 706 W Sheridan Ave, OKC. During this workshop participants will learn about the tools and commitment it takes to build their own frames, crates, and pedestals. Detailed handouts and diagrams will be provided to create quality exhibition materials independently. In addition, participants will learn basic matting and framing techniques, and common dos and don’ts. Soft and hybrid crate building will also be covered, along with installation tools, techniques, and best practices. This workshop is $15 for OVAC members and $20 for non-members. There is a $5 discount if you register online by February 19th at 5pm. For more information, or to register, visit ovac-ok.org/programs/ask-workshops/.

The 2016 Concept exhibition presents an evocative investigation of contemporary artists in Oklahoma, along with a regional artist

exchange. Concept contains two exhibition components. The Survey is a competitively selected exhibition of artwork in all media, selected by guest Curator Adam Welch (Pittsburgh, PA), from artist submissions.

Focus is a curated group exhibition of new work by four Oklahoma artists and four artists from partner city St. Louis, MO. Applications for the Survey component will be open January 15–March 15. The next installation of Concept will open in June 2016 at AHHA in Tulsa. The Focus exchange will open in September 2016 at The Luminary in St. Louis, MO. Momentum OKC is an interactive, multidisciplinary art event highlighting Oklahoma artists age 30 and under on March 4 & 5, 2016. The exhibition features three Spotlight Artists selected to create a small body of work under curatorial guidance, as well as a juried survey component.

This year’s Spotlight Artists are Klair Larason (Oklahoma City), Haley Prestifilippo (Norman), and Gloria Shows (Oklahoma City). There will be more than $1,500 in prizes selected by Curator Trent Lawson and emerging curator Catherine Shotick.

Additionally, there is a $100 Viewer’s Choice Award selected by the audience.

Audiences will experience film, performance, new media, installation, music and more.

Applications for the survey portion of the exhibition are open through January 25, 2016. For more information on the event, visit MomentumOklahoma.org.

This past November, we held our first Collector Level Membership + Community Supported Art (CSA) Launch Event. Collectors attended a reception with the artists and received their first piece of original artwork. The program is a new way to connect art buyers with local artists. Through the CSA Program, collectors will receive annually two original pieces of art

by Oklahoma artists and will enjoy all of the additional benefits at the Patron Member level.

The next Launch Event will be held in the spring. For more information, or to sign up, please visit ovac-ok.org/get-involved.

The next quarterly deadline for all OVAC Grants is January 15. Applications are accepted monthly on the 15th for two of the five major grant categories: Education Grants and John McNeese Professional Development in Socially-Engaged Artwork Grants. All other grant categories are reviewed quarterly. Please visit ovac-ok.org/programs/grants/ for a complete list of the available opportunities.

Art People

The Oklahoma Art Council’s new Visual Arts Director is Alan Atkinson, who received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film and video from the University of Oklahoma, where he also studied printmaking. He holds a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Kansas.

JRB Art at the Elms welcomes Michaela Jones Slavid as the new gallery director.

Slavid hails from New York and received her Bachelor’s degree from Skidmore College. n

Thank you to our new and renewing members from September and October 2015

26

M.J. Alexander and Alexander Knight Eileen Anderson John and Teresa Andrus Narciso Argüelles Shirin Asghari Lynette Atchley Ginnie Baer Paul Bagley Mary Beth Beck Gary and Donna Bennett Robert and Paula Boone Ariana Jakub Brandes Lauren Brown Steven L. Brown Rachel Brown

ovac news

Ellen Bussard Gayle Canada Jack and Stephanie Chapman Jason Cytacki and Haley Prestifilippo Marcia Davis and Sandi Seale Brian Dehart John Dugger Elizabeth K. Eickman and Marvin Quinn Beverly K. Fentress Audry Forbes Kevin Goodwin Shan Goshorn

Melissa Jacobs Gray Marcia Greenwood Grace Grothaus Grimm Sally Jo Halford Lindsay Harkness Steve Hicks Heather Clark Hilliard Shelby Hinton Eric Humphries Sandy Ingram Dan and Renee Jones Dana Jones Jody Karr Amy Kelly David Knox Debra Kroborth

Lauren Kubier Michael Litzau Kelley Lunsford Phyllis Mantik deQuevedo Scout Marshall Jan McKay Nicole McMahan John Mesa Kiona Millirons Suzanne Mitchell and Sam Fulkerson Chad Mount Maddy Murray Lawrence Naff Donna Newsom Anh-Thuy Nguyen

Mary Nickell Kathryn Offermann Dustin Oswald, Bombs Away / Dorshak Block Kim Pagonis Karen Paul Ronna Pernell Katie Prior Chris Ramsay Jeff Rawdon Kathy Rawdon Brooke Rowlands Athena Ruffin David Sanders L.A. Scott Bert D. Seabourn

Sandi Seale Byron Shen Geoffrey L. Smith Diana J. Smith Cheryl J Smith Jennifer Sneed Abby Stiglets Clint Stone Jo Sullivan Roger Tice Steve Tomlin Spencer Tracy Cecilia Villalobos Michele A. Utley Voight Jason Yauk Summer Zah

ART. CRAFT. DESIGN. JAMES HENKLE, DON NARCOMEY, & MARK HAWLEY

February 5 – March 20, 2015 Opening Reception: Friday, February 5, 6 - 9 PM Artist Talk: Saturday, February 6, 1:30 - 2:30 PM 108 East M.B. Brady Street, Tulsa, OK 74103 www. 108contemporary.org

Image: (left) James Henkle, Rocking Chair, African padauk, 40” x 23” x 34” Brady Craft Alliance, Inc., dba 108|Contemporary is a charitable organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Design by Cristina Moore, Third Floor Design, University of Tulsa School of Art

ARTIST RICK BERRY www.rickberrystudio.com

CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE PAINTINGS AND PRINTS Rick Berry’s expressionistic figurative paintings are in private collections worldwide, including those of authors Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin.

His works are exhibited in venues such as Italy’s Lucca Museum of Contemporary Art and galleries in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco.

RICK BERRY EXHIBIT will be on display at the Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery, OCU’s Norick Art Center OCU January 15 thru March 4th.

Berry will offer a 1-day workshop at OCU’s Norick Art Center Friday January 22, 2016 9-4pm with an Artist Talk Jan 21, 2:30pm

27

Gallery Listings & Exhibition Schedule Ada The Pogue Gallery Kristi Wyatt January 11 – February 11 East Central University 900 Centennial Plaza (580) 559-5353 ecok.edu

Alva Graceful Arts Gallery and Studios 523 Barnes St (580) 327-ARTS gracefulartscenter.org

Ardmore

The Goddard Center Kathy Sosa Through January 8 University of Central Oklahoma Faculty Show Opening January 15, 6 –7 pm Through February 12 High School & Middle School Annual All School Exhibit Opening February 23, 4:30 – 7 pm Through March 11 401 First Avenue SW (580) 226-0909 goddardcenter.org

Bartlesville Price Tower Arts Center 510 Dewey Ave (918) 336-4949 pricetower.org

Broken Bow Forest Heritage Center Beaver’s Bend Resort (580) 494-6497 beaversbend.com

Chickasha Nesbitt Gallery University of Science and Arts Oklahoma 1806 17th St (405) 574-1344 usao.edu/gallery/schedule

Claremore Rogers State University 1701 W Will Rogers Blvd (918) 343-7740 rsu.edu

28

gallery guide

Wolf Productions: A Gallery of the Arts 510 W Will Rogers Blvd (918) 342-4210 wolfproductionsagallery.com

Davis Chickasaw Nation Welcome Center Jim Trosper Through February 29 35 N Colbert Rd (580) 369-4222 chickasawcountry.com/explore/ view/chickasaw-nation-welcomecenter

Melton Gallery University of Central Oklahoma Juried Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition February 4 – March 10 100 University Dr (405) 974-2432 uco.edu/cfad University Gallery Oklahoma Christian University 2501 E Memorial Rd oc.edu

El Reno Redlands Community College 1300 S Country Club Rd (405) 262-2552 redlandscc.edu

Duncan

Guthrie

Chisholm Trail Heritage Center Dylan Cavin Through January 6 Our People, Our Land, Our Images January 28 – March 16 1000 Chisholm Trail Pkwy (580) 252-6692 onthechisholmtrail.com

Hancock Creative Shop 116 S 2nd St (405) 471-1951 hancockcreativeshop.wordpress.com

Durant

Guymon

Southeastern OK State University 1405 N 4th PMB 4231

Durham Metcalfe Museum 8647 N 1745 Rd (580) 655-4467 metcalfemuseum.org

Edmond Donna Nigh Gallery University of Central Oklahoma 100 University Dr (405) 974-2432 uco.edu/cfad Edmond Historical Society & Museum 431 S Boulevard (405) 340-0078 edmondhistory.org Fine Arts Institute of Edmond Christina Hagemeier Through January 31 27 E Edwards St (405) 340-4481 edmondfinearts.com

Owens Arts Place Museum 1202 E Harrison (405) 260-0204 owensmuseum.com

All Fired Up Art Gallery 421 N Main (580) 338-4278 artistincubation.com

Idabel Museum of the Red River Florence Marie Rondell LaGrande Free Collection Through January 31 Seven-State Biennial Exhibition Through January 31 812 E Lincoln Rd (580) 286-3616 museumoftheredriver.org

Lawton The Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery Tiffany Aldridge Tom Biggs Opening January 9, 7 pm Through February 26 620 D Avenue (580) 357-9526 lpgallery.org

Museum of the Great Plains 601 NW Ferris Ave (580) 581-3460 discovermgp.org

Norman The Crucible Gallery 110 E Tonhawa (405) 579-2700 thecruciblellc.com Downtown Art and Frame 115 S Santa Fe (405) 329-0309 Firehouse Art Center Healing Studio 2016 Exhibition January 8 – January 23 444 S Flood (405) 329-4523 normanfirehouse.com Jacobson House 609 Chautauqua (405) 366-1667 jacobsonhouse.org Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art Enter the Matrix: Indigenous Printmakers Through January 17 Gallileo’s World: An Artful Observation of the Cosmos January 22 – April 3 555 Elm Ave (405) 325-4938 ou.edu/fjjma

The Depot Gallery 200 S Jones (405) 307-9320 pasnorman.org

Oklahoma City Acosta Strong Fine Art 6420 N Western Ave (405) 453-1825 johnbstrong.com [ArtSpace] at Untitled PASS, Mandy Messina January 21 – March 13 1 NE 3rd St (405) 815-9995 artspaceatuntitled.org Brass Bell Studios 2500 NW 33rd Contemporary Art Gallery 2928 Paseo (405) 601-7474 contemporaryartgalleryokc.com DNA Galleries 1705 B NW 16th St (405) 371-2460 dnagalleries.com Exhibit C Brenda Kingery Through February 29 1 E Sheridan Ave Ste 100 (405) 767-8900 chickasawcountry.com

Lightwell Gallery University of Oklahoma Galileo’s World Through July 31 520 Parrington Oval (405) 325-2691 art.ou.edu

Gaylord-Pickens Oklahoma Heritage Museum Bert Seabourn: American Expressionist Through January 9 1400 Classen Dr (405) 235-4458 oklahomaheritage.com

MAINSITE Contemporary Art Gallery Retracing Through January 8 122 E Main (405) 360-1162 normanarts.org

Grapevine Gallery 1933 NW 39th (405) 528-3739 grapevinegalleryokc.com

Moore-Lindsey House Historical Museum A Traditional Victorian Christmas Through January 508 N Peters (405) 321-0156 normanmuseum.org

Howell Gallery 6432 N Western Ave (405) 840-4437 howellgallery.com In Your Eye Studio and Gallery 3005A Paseo (405) 525-2161 inyoureyegallery.com

Individual Artists of Oklahoma 706 W Sheridan Ave (405) 232-6060 iaogallery.org Istvan Gallery at Urban Art 1218 N Western Ave (405) 831-2874 istvangallery.com JRB Art at the Elms Oscar Brousse Jacobson: Tres Blanc January 1 – February 4 Grace Grothaus & The Light Show February 15 – March 3 2810 N Walker Ave (405) 528-6336 jrbartgallery.com

Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center ArtNow 2016 January 11 – 22 Summer Wheat: Everything Under the Sun February 15 – 16 3000 General Pershing Blvd (405) 951-0000 oklahomacontemporary.org Oklahoma State Capitol Galleries Ronna Pernell: Unspoken Woman Through January 17 Derek Penix Through January 24 Ted Majka Through January 31 2300 N Lincoln Blvd (405) 521-2931 arts.ok.gov

Kasum Contemporary Fine Art 2nd Annual Holiday Art Extravaganza Through January 10 1706 NW 16th St (405) 604-6602 kasumcontemporary.com

Paseo Art Space Furies & Graces Through January 23 3022 Paseo (405) 525-2688 thepaseo.com

National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum 1700 NE 63rd (405) 478-2250 nationalcowboymuseum.org

The Project Box Ebony Iman Dallas: Women in War Zones February 5 – 27 3003 Paseo (405) 609-3969 theprojectboxokc.com

Nault Gallery 816 N Walker Ave naultfineart.com Nona Hulsey Gallery, Norick Art Center Oklahoma City University OCU School of Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition January 23 – February 27 1600 NW 26th (405) 208-5226 okcu.edu Oklahoma City Community College Gallery 7777 S May Ave (405) 682-7576 occc.edu Oklahoma City Museum of Art Quilts and Color Through February 7 415 Couch Dr (405) 236-3100 okcmoa.com

Red Earth 6 Santa Fe Plaza (405) 427-5228 redearth.org Satellite Galleries Science Museum Oklahoma 2100 NE 52nd St (405) 602-6664 sciencemuseumok.org Summer Wine Art Gallery 2928 B Paseo (405) 831-3279 summerwinegallery.com Tall Hill Creative 3421 N Villa The Womb 25 NW 9th St wombgallery.com Verbode Christie Owens Through January 31 415 N Broadway Ave, Ste 101

Park Hill

Tonkawa

Cherokee National Historical Society, Inc. 21192 S Keeler Dr (918) 456-6007 cherokeeheritage.org

Eleanor Hays Gallery Northern Oklahoma College 1220 E Grand (580) 628-6670 north-ok.edu

Piedmont Red Dirt Gallery & Artists 13100 Colony Pointe Blvd #113 (405) 206-2438 reddirtartists.com

Ponca City Ponca City Art Center 819 E Central (580) 765-9746 poncacityartcenter.com

Shawnee Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art Wounaan Baskets from the Rainforest of Panama January 23 – March 13 1900 W Macarthur (405) 878-5300 mgmoa.org

Stillwater Gardiner Gallery Oklahoma State University Christy Georg: Survey January 11 – February 12 Kimberly Schaefer: Incorporeal February 17 – March 16 108 Bartlett Center for the Visual Arts (405) 744-4143 museum.okstate.edu Oklahoma State University Museum of Art Wákàtí: Time Shapes African Art Through January 16 Angie Piehl: Feral Beauty and Opulent Decay Through March 12, 2016 720 S Husband St (405) 744-2780 art.okstate.edu

Tulsa

Henry Zarrow Center for Art and Education Jon Goebel: Impressions Through January 24 124 E MB Brady St (918) 631-4400 gilcrease.utulsa. edu/Explore/Zarrow

108 Contemporary Cultivating Craft: 108’s Artist Members Through January 24 108 E MB Brady St (918) 895-6302 108contemporary.org

Alexandre Hogue Gallery University of Tulsa Adventures in Absurdity: Prints

by Tom Huck January 14 – February 18 2930 E 5th St. (918) 631-2739 utulsa.edu/art

aberson Exhibits 3624 S Peoria (918) 740-1054 abersonexhibits.com

Holliman Gallery Holland Hall 5666 E 81st Street (918) 481-1111 hollandhall.org

Gilcrease Museum Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain January 24 – April 24 Birds in Art November 22 – February 7 1400 Gilcrease Road (918) 596-2700 gilcrease.utulsa.edu Hardesty Arts Center InEx: ETA Collective Through January 24 101 E Archer St (918) 584-3333 ahhatulsa.org

Joseph Gierek Fine Art 1342 E 11th St (918) 592-5432 gierek.com Living Arts Core Connections: The University of Tulsa Student and Alumni Ceramics Exhibition 1999–2016 January 8 – 28 Mery McNett: Medulla January 8 – 28 Abby Bagby: Havisham January 8 – 28 307 E MB Brady St (918) 585-1234 livingarts.org Mainline 111 N Main Ste C (918) 629-0342 mainlineartok.com

(continued to page 30)

Sulphur Chickasaw Visitor Center Timothy Tate Nevaquaya Through February 29 901 W 1st St (580) 622-8050 chickasawcountry.com/explore/ view/Chickasaw-visitor-center

gallery guide

29

M.A. Doran Gallery 3509 S Peoria (918) 748-8700 madorangallery.com Lovetts Gallery Altitude Project February 6, 10 am – 5 pm 6528 E 51st St (918) 664-4732 lovettsgallery.com Philbrook Downtown Native Fashion Now Through January 8 116 E MB Brady St (918) 749-7941 philbrook.org

Philbrook Museum of Art In Living Color Through January 17 Barbizon and Beyond Through February 28 The Essence of Things: Design and the Art of Reduction February 14 – May 1 2727 S Rockford Rd (918) 749-7941 philbrook.org Pierson Gallery 1307-1311 E 15th St (918) 584-2440 piersongallery.com

2 original and quality pieces of art by Oklahoma artists 2 tickets to CSA Launch Events twice a year 2 tickets to 12x12 Art Fundraiser $400 of this membership is tax deductible All of below

PATRON $250

Listing of self or business on signage at events Invitation for 2 people to private reception with visiting curator 2 tickets each to Momentum OKC & Momentum Tulsa $200 of this membership is tax deductible.

All of below

FELLOW $150 · · · · ·

Acknowledgement in Resource Guide and Art Focus Oklahoma Copy of each OVAC exhibition catalog 2 tickets to Tulsa Art Studio Tour $100 of this membership is tax deductible.

All of below

FAMILY $75

· Same benefits as Individual, for 2 people in household

INDIVIDUAL $45 · · · · ·

Subscription to Art Focus Oklahoma magazine Monthly e-newsletter of Oklahoma art events & artist opportunities Receive all OVAC mailings Listing in and copy of annual Resource Guide & Member Directory Invitation to Annual Members’ Meeting

Plus, artists receive: · Inclusion in online Artist Gallery, ovacgallery.com · Artist entry fees waived for OVAC exhibitions · Up to 50% discount on Artist Survival Kit workshops · Affiliate benefits with Fractured Atlas, Artist INC Online, Artwork Archive, and the National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture.

STUDENT $25 30

Woodward Plains Indians and Pioneers Museum Lane Kendrick Through January 2 2009 Williams Ave (580) 256-6136 pipm1.info

Waterworks Art Studio 1710 Charles Page Blvd (918) 596-2440 cityoftulsa.org

Collector Level + Community Supported Art (CSA) Program $1,000 ($85 a month option)

· · · · ·

The Gallery at Wilburton 108 W Main St (918) 465-9669

Tulsa Performing Arts Center Gallery 110 E 2nd St (918) 596-2368 tulsapac.com

Become a member of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. Join today to begin enjoying the benefits of membership, including a subscription to Art Focus Oklahoma.

· · · · ·

Wilburton

Tulsa Artists’ Coalition Colleen Stiles January 8 – 30 Kathy McRuiz February 5 - 27 9 E MB Brady St (918) 592-0041 tacgallery.org

· Same benefits as Individual level. All Student members are automatically enrolled in Green Membership program (receive all benefits digitally).

MEMBER FORM ¨ Collector Level + Community Supported Art Program ¨ Patron ¨ Fellow ¨ Family ¨ Individual ¨ Student ¨ Optional: Make my membership green! Email only. No printed materials will be mailed.

Name Street Address City, State, Zip Email Website

Phone

Credit card #

Exp. Date

Are you an artist? Y N Medium?________________________ Would you like to be included in the Membership Directory? Y N

Would you like us to share your information for other arts-related events?

Y

N

Detach and mail form along with payment to: OVAC, 730 W. Wilshire Blvd, Ste 104, Oklahoma City, OK 73116 Or join online at ovac-ok.org

Double Wedding Ring Quilt, 1940. Pieced cotton plain weave top, cotton plain weave back and binding; quilted. Gift of the Pilgrim / Roy Collection, 2014.1945. Photograph Š 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

.

Art Focus

Ok l a h o m a

Annual Subscriptions to Art Focus Oklahoma are free with OVAC membership.

Jan 15:

OVAC Quarterly Grants for Artists Deadline

Jan 15:

Concept Survey Applications Open

Jan 25:

Momentum OKC Survey Application Deadline

Feb 12:

OAWCF Curatorial Lab Opening Reception

Feb 20:

ASK: What to Expect When You’re Exhibiting (OKC)

Mar 4-5:

Momentum OKC

730 W. Wilshire Blvd, Suite 104 Oklahoma City, OK 73116 The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition supports Oklahoma’s visual arts and artists and their power to enrich communities.

Non Profit Org. US POSTAGE PAID Oklahoma City, OK Permit No. 113

Visit ovac-ok.org to learn more.

Mar 15: Concept Survey Application Deadline View the full Oklahoma visual arts calendar at ovac-ok.org/calendar.

JANUARY OSCAR JACOBSON & “TRES BLANC”

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JANUARY 1

6 - 10 P.M.

FEBRUARY GRACE GROTHAUS & “THE LIGHT SHOW” OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5

6 - 10 P.M. Gallery Hours: Tue - Sat 10 am - 6 pm Sun 1 pm - 5 pm

JRB ART

AT THE ELMS

2810 NORTH WALKER PHONE: 405.528.6336 www.jrbartgallery.com