Art Focus | Spring 2023

SPRING 2023

ON THE COVER // Alison Ward, PRODDED, 2020, encaustic wax, collage medium, 48” x 48”, page 18. MIDDLE // Abbas Kiarostami, Regardez-moi, digital photograph, from Charles Le Brun, The Crucifixion with Angels, 1661, Louvre Museum, Paris, page 10.

BOTTOM // Bobby C. Martin, Mvskoke Hymns #2, 2021, encaustic, oilstick, collage on paper mounted on birch panel, 8” x 8.5”, page 14

Support from:

CONTENTS / / Volume 38 No. 2 // Spring 2023

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

JOHN SELVIDGE

Q&A Emergent Truths // In the Studio with Tai Tindall

AYANNA NAJUMA

REVIEW Reframing the Gaze // Kiarostami Beyond the Frame at OKCMOA

JOHN SELVIDGE

PROFILE Branches of Council Oak // Bobby C. Martin’s Family Snapshots

RENEE FITE

FEATURE Come as You Are // Allison Ward’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY at Positive Space Tulsa

ELIZABETH J. WENGER

REGIONAL PREVIEW Imago Dei // Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art at the Kimbell

OLIVIA DAILEY

EKPHRASIS The Final (?) Installment WITH LIZ BLOOD

OVAC NEWS // NEW AND RENEWING MEMBERS

Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition PHONE: 405.879.2400 1720 N Shartel Ave, Ste B, Oklahoma City, OK 73103. Web // ovac-ok.org

Executive Director // Rebecca Kinslow, rebecca@ovac-ok.org Editor // John Selvidge, johnmselvidge@outlook.com

Art Director // Anne Richardson, speccreative@gmail.com

Art Focus is a quarterly publication of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition dedicated to stimulating insight into and providing current information about the visual arts in Oklahoma. Mission: Growing and developing Oklahoma’s visual arts through education, promotion, connection, and funding. OVAC welcomes article submissions related to artists and art in Oklahoma. Call or email the editor for guidelines. OVAC welcomes comments. Letters addressed to Art Focus 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 won’t be published. Please include a phone number.

2022-2023 BOARD OF DIRECTORS // Douglas Sorocco, President, OKC; Jon Fisher, Vice President, OKC; Diane Salamon, Treasurer, Tulsa; Matthew Anderson, Secretary, Tahlequah; Jacquelyn Knapp, Parliamentarian, Chickasha; John Marshall, Past President, OKC; Marjorie Atwood, Tulsa; Barbara Gabel, OKC; Farooq Karim, OKC; Kathryn Kenney, Tulsa; Heather Lunsford, OKC; Kirsten Olds, Tulsa; Russ Teubner, Stillwater; Chris Winland, OKC

The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition is solely responsible for the contents of Art Focus . 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. © 2023, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. All rights reserved. View the online archive at ArtFocusOklahoma.org.

The energy springtime brings makes it my favorite season, especially after what seems—to me, at least—to be the longest. Despite its occasional charms, I’ve never been much of a winter fan, and so the manifest sense of the earth’s grand wake-up call, as March turns into April, comes not a moment too soon and feels like deliverance, like the world’s balance finally set right.

With so much excitement in the air, it only makes sense to go outside and celebrate, meet friends on a sunlit patio and enjoy being alive. But I find that spring also carries a vital challenge within it, an urgency that often reminds me of Voltaire’s seasonally-apt advice to grow and tend our gardens, especially in light of the indifference and even cruelty of so much of the world around us.

Because even as the breeze blows through my window, I’m writing this in the shadow of yet another mass shooting at a school, this time in Nashville. Politics notwithstanding, we clearly have work to do. Even as we celebrate this season, we must keep winter’s wisdom with us as we mourn the losses that, in our own lives or collectively, continue to define us. For our most difficult legacies to make their impact truly felt, we have to recognize them honestly, mourn them as necessary, and eventually learn to claim them as our own.

Through our art, we can do this by paying mindful tribute, by pushing back hard against time and forgetting. In its own way, all the art represented in this issue of Art Focus does this, whether through the visceral, uncompromising commemoration of loss in Allison Ward’s multimedia work (p. 18), Tai Tindall’s abstract paintings that excavate historical and personal legacies (p. 6), or Bobby C. Martin’s complex explorations of individual and tribal identities through family iconography (p. 14). Further afield, the Kimbell’s upcoming exhibition of Maya art (p. 22), offers a thousand-year-old glimpse of human myth-making, and I hope that my own attempt to engage with OKCMOA’s Kiarostami retrospective (p. 10) in some small way helps testify to the departed filmmaker’s monumental, genre-bending work.

The season calls us—in many ways. Thank you for reading.

—John Selvidge

JOHN SELVIDGE is an award-winning screenwriter who works for a humanitarian nonprofit organization in Oklahoma City while maintaining freelance and creative projects on the side. He was selected for OVAC’s Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship in 2018.

ROBIN CHASE

Tai Tindall, Congo Square 9: That Which Memory Carried Across The Atlantic, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 16” | Lindsay Peterson

EMERGENT TRUTHS // IN THE STUDIO WITH TAI TINDALL

by Ayanna Najuma

Tai Tindall is a self-taught visual artist who was raised in Queens, New York. After her undergraduate work at Oral Roberts University, Tindall received a master’s degree in social work from the University of South Carolina before returning to Tulsa in 2005. Today, she is inspired by the city’s energy and credits the Black Moon Collective for providing a welcoming space for her to sharpen her artistic vision.

As a painter, Tindall works in an abstract mode but does so to engage the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit and explore subjects meaningful to her in the realms of history, human behavior, social justice, and family. For this installment of “In the Studio,” she shared with us a work in progress, Listening for the Voice of My Matriarch, dedicated to her grandmother Blanche Mays and featuring a vibrant pink that Tindall says can be read to represent female empowerment. Similarly, many of her other works pay tribute to those whose legacies inspire her.

How did your artistic journey begin?

As a child, being creative was part of who I was. Sitting down and painting was therapeutic for me. Later, I took a trip to Dallas to see a Jackson Pollock exhibition and learned about his process, how he enjoyed the freedom

to move around the canvas as it lay on the ground and apply paint from different angles. The drip-pour technique, splashes and seemingly moving lines of his action paintings provided me a visually engaging experience— one that still now motivates me to ask, “Am I engaged creatively in my work? Am I truly connected to its energy and the power in my own expression?”  Making sure I experience that kind of personal connection with my work has guided me toward abstract art.

Abstract art is much like jazz; there is a perfect interplay of structure and chaos. I find viewing abstract art to be a starting point for ideas, for emotions to emerge. A viewer can connect to its colors and textures and interpret the creative process for themselves. I primarily work with acrylics and prefer wood panels, which hold up very well to layering with drip-pour as well as removing layers with a sander for interesting, highly textured results. Like life, there are layers of expression that present themselves differently depending on where you are in your life. I continue to explore new mediums and materials that best serve my work.

How does your social work connect to your artistic practice?

It is an integral part of my journey. I give my clients the opportunity to tell and embrace their own stories in a safe space based on how they are processing their feelings at the time. That is my way of being of service to them. I feel the same about how my art can be interpreted or received. There are layers of exploration, and people can discover their own conclusions through that process and how they are impacted.

Tai Tindall | Tony Li

What other influences have been important?

My paternal grandmother, Susan Robinson Tindal, instilled in me a strong sense of awareness and pride regarding where we came from. In the summers, when I visited my grandparents in Rock Hill, South Carolina, she took me to the church she attended and reminded me of the work that my great-great-grandfather, a slave, had done in laying the foundation to build it. Those summers, I was encouraged to continue my education and found myself reading  Up From Slavery  by Booker T. Washington. Also, a lot of my work has been influenced by poetry I’ve read.

Could you talk about your paintings inspired by Washington? As well as other series you’ve done?

The paintings in my Meditations on the Life of Booker T. Washington series each highlight character traits he exhibited on his personal journey out of slavery to becoming a renowned educator and leader. In A Flame Within, orange is used to signify courage and fire, his determination to persevere against all odds. This piece reminds me of the strength of my ancestors

as they endured systemic oppression—the major theme in this series.

35 City Blocks: Black Excellence in Greenwood Tulsa was conceived during the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and inspired by a John Hope Franklin speech I once heard addressing the significance of selfempowerment. The textures and layering in the first piece in this series speak to the facts about the massacre that were hidden for several years and the quest for the truth. A great deal of reflection and thought was given to what the founders of Greenwood envisioned as they saw what was predominantly flatland at the time and how their hopes and dreams would come to life.

In 2018, I visited Congo Square in New Orleans’ Armstrong Park. It is a place where people of color, enslaved and free, gathered to dance, worship and buy and sell goods. With the  Congo Square  series, I want to communicate the spirit of that place. My use of blue signifies water, an ocean crossed on slave ships, as well as rivers crossed or followed in search of freedom.

Tai Tindall, Over 35 City Blocks – Black Excellence in Greenwood Tulsa, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 48”x48” | Lindsay Peterson

Tai Tindall, Work in progress: Listening for the Voice of My Matriarch, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 16”x16” | Image provided by the artist

Yellow represents the light of love, community, and the spirituality of the African American experience. My color choices are often intuitive—again, I’m always looking for what keeps me engaged. I am always looking for complex moving and dancing lines, but these can be calming as well.

The University of Tulsa’s School of Art, Design, and Art History creates opportunities for students to apply what they are learning in the classroom through meaningful hands-on experiences. Last fall, undergraduate students curated the exhibition Hogue 125 Original: Sinister Beauty, which showed 8 decades of work by the renowned artist Alexandre Hogue and launched a series of events to celebrate what would be Hogue’s 125th birthday. This spring semester, a companion exhibition titled Hogue 125 Inspired: Oklahoma Landscapes ran January 19 through March 9, 2023. The exhibition, conceived of and juried by graduate students, includes the work of 25 artists who explore physical and

AYANNA NAJUMA is an award-winning journalist, art advisor, curator and public arts professional who has also been a public relations specialist for over 30 years.  Her writing has appeared locally and nationally. She has been a civil rights activist since the age of seven when she sat-in with a group of children at Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City in 1958, two years before the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. She speaks around the country on race and culture issues and those that impact women and minorities.

In both exhibitions, students realized different aspects of mounting an exhibition, such as programming, promotion, registration, and interpretation. Their work included examining archival documents in the university’s Special Collections, selecting works for inclusion in the exhibitions, writing didactic labels, crafting promotional statements, determining the gallery layout, and creating engaging programming. These types of mentored experiential learning are one of the reasons why the School of Art, Design, and Art History has a 100% career outcomes rate for 2020–2021.

Tai Tindall, A Flame Within: Meditations on the Life of Booker T. Washington, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 20”x20” | Lindsay Peterson

REFRAMING THE GAZE // KIAROSTAMI: BEYOND THE FRAME AT OKLAHOMA CITY MUSEUM OF ART

by John Selvidge

Museumgoers attending OKCMOA’s recent Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame may have noticed a poignant framing device as they crossed the exhibition’s threshold. Outside the gallery’s main door, acclaimed Iranian filmmaker’s Abbas Kiarostami’s first short, Bread and Alley (1970), played on a 12-minute loop. Once inside the exhibition proper, viewers were immediately confronted by his last film, Take Me Home , completed the year of his passing in 2016.

Shot on celluloid, black-and-white and neo-realist in style, Bread and Alley follows a young boy on his way home and dramatizes his fearful encounter with a street dog. While this film plays on our sympathies with both boy and dog in a mode of traditional filmic storytelling, Take Me Home consists of a series of more than one hundred of Kiarostami’s still photographs, taken mainly of outdoor staircases in southern Italy, which are brought to life by a digitally animated soccer ball moving through them. As the fabricated “ball” rolls and bounces for 16 minutes through these static images, it draws the viewer’s eye along a continuous downward trajectory from staircase to staircase through a delightfully impossible cityscape, its motion seemingly as playful and free as a soul in flight.

From one perspective, these two films couldn’t be more different, but from another they can be understood as variations on a theme central to Kiarostami’s films, that of a restless journey or quest, one undertaken simply but that grows more complex as it strives for resolution. For Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame , juxtaposing them from the outset helped establish a unity across the artist’s work as a filmmaker, photographer, and visual and conceptual artist. In this spirt, viewers familiar with Kiarostami

were offered an inspiring new vista for considering the Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker as not reducible to a specific medium, but as an aesthetic polymath whose vision encompasses a range of expressive possibilities.

Thanks to OKCMOA’s retrospective of his films, screened in conjunction with Beyond the Frame at the museum’s in-house theater, I decided to springboard from OKCMOA’s stellar programming to my own self-imposed Kiarostami syllabus. Filling in the gaps of the films I couldn’t attend with the help of the Criterion Channel—at $11 a month, still the best streaming platform for my money, and for those who missed Kiarostami at OKCMOA, most of his films live there—I eventually watched more than a dozen features and as many shorts. I also read Godfrey Cheshire, the preeminent writer on Kiarostami, who introduced the film series with a generously accessible lecture. I wish I had the space to relate more of what I learned about the scope of Kiarostami’s filmmaking, his panache as a photographer, his soulfulness as a storyteller, and the complexity of his national, international, and conceptual frames of reference, but several of Beyond the Frame ’s majestic moments are worth remarking on briefly.

Comprising twenty life-size images of doors that Kiarostami photographed in his native Iran, France, Italy, and Morocco before altering them digitally (mainly by adding locks) and printing them on canvas, Doors Without Keys presents illuminated surfaces that seem to ask urgent questions about the inaccessible worlds beyond them. Accompanying ambient noises, like birds chirping and muffled voices, and short poems by Kiarostami, written on the exhibition’s mazelike walls and reminiscent of Rumi or Hafez, gave a metaphysical grandeur to the experience of standing on the other side

OPPOSITE PAGE // Abbas Kiarostami, stills From Shirin, 2008, 92 minutes | JS

of something unknown and ineffable. I’m reminded of the young boy’s devoted search for the correct door in Kiarostami’s feature Where Is the Friend’s House? , or the gate in Close Up that seems to divide two worlds and emblematize desire.

We might get a glimpse of that beyond with Sleepers, Kiarostami’s 2001 video installation that gives a nod to Warhol by projecting, onto a mattress at the viewer’s feet, a 93-minute film of a couple sleeping. Very possibly a vision of paradise—or at least souls at rest, free to dream. It’s worth meditating on how Kiarostami, as reported by Cheshire, wanted to leave space for audiences “to dream their own dreams—even to take naps” while watching his films. Further echoes of the filmmaker’s non-determinative relation vis-à-vis audience to his

own works can be heard in Cheshire’s characterization of Kiarostami’s artistic sensibility as “forever in transit” and his oeuvre as a “cinema of questions.”

Fundamental to Kiarostami is the insistence that his art literally depends on members of his audience to complete it. Two works in the exhibition play with this idea by depicting the audience’s gaze directly. The first, the film Shirin (2008), concentrates exclusively on women’s faces for 92 minutes as they watch a film in a theater—or even more intriguing, the fabricated illusion of a film, never seen by Shirin’s audience, that does not actually exist despite the soundtrack and dialogue we hear or the shifts in light and color we see on its alleged audience’s faces as they react to it. The second, a series of photographs collectively titled Regardez-moi , captures museum visitors as they contemplate widely celebrated artworks from the Western canon and, through the camera’s eye, become merged with them to some degree. As amusing as these photos are, they can inspire a little vertigo. If, in some sense, we always stand within our minds at the threshold of our eyes, as our gaze constructs the world, then entering the frame ourselves and getting caught in the act of looking can seem uncanny. Or, like some half-aware dream of the world meditating upon itself, it might just feel like merrily bouncing home.

Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame and the Kiarostami Film

Retrospective were shown concurrently from October 15, 2022, to April 9 at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

JOHN SELVIDGE is the 2023 guest editor for Art Focus.

LEFT // Abbas Kiarostami, still from Sleepers, 2001, 93 minutes | JS

TOP // Abbas Kiarostami, Regardez-moi, digital photographs | JS;

RIGHT // Abbas Kiarostami, Regardez-moi: from Claude-Augustin Cayot, The Death of Dido, 1711, Louvre Museum, Paris; BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT // Abbas Kiarostami, Doors Without Keys, digitally altered photographs printed on canvas and multimedia installation | JS

BRANCHES OF COUNCIL OAK // BOBBY C. MARTIN’S FAMILY SNAPSHOTS

by Renée Fite

According to artist and educator Bobby C. Martin, art speaks directly to the human heart in ways only art can. It can give voice to those without voices by revealing stories that can only be told visually.

In his art, Martin explores the human condition through the complex identity of a man who was raised deeply immersed in Indigenous culture as well as the Baptist churches on the Mvskoke (Muscogee) side of his family. His work has always had a political undercurrent, but more recently he’s realized the responsibility to tell his own story as a mixed-blood Native person in an increasingly fractious U.S. culture. This outlook has led to deeper explorations of identity politics and how they play out in everyday Indian communities like the ones where Martin grew up in northeastern Oklahoma. His recent work probes deeper into the messy gray areas of Native identity, individually and communally—not to shock or divide, Martin says, but in an attempt to find a common ground of shared experience.

“As an artist, sometimes you find your subjects, and sometimes your subjects find you,” he maintains. Thirty years ago, Martin never dreamed that turning a few old family photographs into art would lead to a career-long fascination with these frozen images of the past, images that even today he has yet to grow tired of exploring.

“These snapshots have been my constant companions through countless re-imaginings as monumental paintings or tiny etchings, as drawings or installations and video projects,” Martin says. “These images of close kinfolk and distant relatives have become icons for me, symbols of a Native American identity not seen as ‘traditional’ but just as valid and vital to me—a tradition of Indian Christianity and mission schools that has been a part of my family history for generations.”

Martin is forthright about his religious beliefs. “The power, mercy, and peace that come from faith in a person, Jesus Christ, who came to take away the sins of the world,” he says, “is a compelling, personal experience that transcends cultural boundaries and tradition.”

Nonetheless, the photographs he works with have very personal meanings for him. He feels blessed to have been surrounded and supported by strong women throughout his life. In Martin’s art they function almost like religious icons—not to worship, but to remember fondly as faithfully looking out for his wellbeing—and also like a lifeline for him to a history that he didn’t discover until well into adulthood.

“These images have become a source of inspiration, pride and ultimately identity,” Martin says. “I have come to realize there is an almost universal recognition among viewers of my work that evokes memories of their own families’ pasts. This common ground of family memory has been a wonderfully satisfying by-product that I never expected when I began using these images.”

Martin cites the influence of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck and Johannes Vermeer because of their attention to detail but also more contemporary artists like Edward Hopper and Jasper Johns. He’s inspired as well, he says, by his friends in the Indigenous art world and what they have accomplished with their work.

Though Martin lives in West Siloam Springs, he has been a professor of Visual Arts at John Brown University in northwest Arkansas for 15 years where he teaches printmaking and serves as gallery director. Martin previously spent eight years as a professor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.

“I enjoy being around young people who are figuring out their creative paths,” he says. “Their energy helps keep me creative.”

Bobby C. Martin, Mama & Me at Onapa, 2021, compressed charcoal and gold leaf on mulberry paper mounted on panel, 36”x27”

| All images of artwork courtesy of the artist

A citizen of the Muscogee Nation, Martin is currently working on a mural for the entrance of Council Oak Comprehensive Healthcare in Tulsa, the tribe’s flagship hospital facility. It’s the largest project he’s worked on to date.

“I’m deeply grateful to my tribe for the opportunity,” he says. I’m honored to create a welcoming artwork that tells the story of Council Oak, a historic tree that marks not only the rekindling of our tribe after forced removal, but encompasses the founding of Tulsa. The perseverance of our people is an epic adventure that I’m proud to tell in mural form. To be located in a place of healing makes it even more special.”

Additionally, a three-person traveling exhibition with friends Erin Shaw (Chickasaw) and Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox/ Muscogee/Seminole), entitled  Altars of Reconciliation is currently touring the country. It focuses on these artists’ shared but unique experiences as Native Americans and Christians. Currently in Wyoming, it will travel to Connecticut this spring and remain on the road until 2025.

The rich history of Native churches has been rarely examined in the art world, particularly with regard to conflicts among tribal peoples about questions of faith. The Altars artists hope viewers experience their contemporary,

Native-themed altarpieces as a kind of sacred art and perceive how their personal as well as universal value is relevant to struggling with eternal questions. They also desire to spread awareness of the role Christianity continues to play among Native peoples and even inspire viewers to think about faith’s relevance to their own lives. For Martin, this legacy does not need to be at odds with Native traditions; it can even further one’s experience of them.

“Knowing I share that same fundamental faith with my ancestors only deepens my understanding and my love for our Creator God,” he says.

After participating in the Oklahoma Arts Council’s Leadership Arts program, RENEE FITE founded the Arts Council of Tahlequah and now serves as president. She is Managing Editor of the Stilwell Democrat Journal and the Westville Reporter and also writes for the Claremore Daily Progress. She loves watercolor and dreams of more time for stained glass, pottery, and basket weaving. Most of all, she loves being a mother of five, a grandmother of six (so far) and married to John, a musician, for 40 years.

Bobby C. Martin, Surrounded by Herron Ladies at the Camphouse, 2021, compressed charcoal and gold leaf on mulberry paper mounted on panel, 24” x 36”

TOP LEFT // Bobby C. Martin, Aunt Inez #3, 2021, etching, aquatint, encaustic, 24k gold leaf on paper mounted on birch panel 9.5” x 6”;

TOP RIGHT // An image from the traveling exhibition Altars of Reconciliation ; MIDDLE // Bobby C. Martin, Clyde the Big Red Indian Decolonises Tulsey Town, 2021, drypoint and digital on BFK Rives paper, 18” x 24”; BOTTOM // Bobby C. Martin in his studio with his monoprint Carr, Mabel 9230 | Renee Fite

COME AS YOU ARE // ALLISON WARD’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY AT POSITIVE SPACE

by Elizabeth J. Wenger

Allison Ward has been a mainstay of the Tulsa art community for several years now. As one of the curators behind Art House Tulsa, Ward has dedicated much of her time to displaying other artists’ work. Now, however, she is stepping out of the curator role with her first solo exhibition HAPPY BIRTHDAY to explore themes of hereditary mental illness and addiction, focusing especially on bipolar disorder. Opening April 15, the show features a large-scale installation, video pieces, an interactive floral sculpture, and encaustic wax paintings.

For the artist, this exhibition is the culmination of years of journaling and ideating. Centering on the suicide of a close friend on Ward’s birthday, the show strikes a curious tonal note through a reckoning with the darkness of death and the vital joy of celebrating life with a birthday. These experiences comingle through the show’s multimedia elements.

Proper to its name, the show is built around a large-scale installation of a birthday scene of candles on pedestals of various heights, but this seemingly cheerful set forms the background to works of more gravitas. Ward typically uses darker colors in her work, but this show’s inciting event requires expressive balance and striking juxtapositions.

“It’s all about contrast,” Ward said. “I want it to feel eerie and confusing.”

Contrast especially plays out in avant-garde videos that place somewhat gruesome scenes against bright sets. In one video, an umbilical cord ties Ward to a coffin full of blood and milk. In another, she cooks in a kitchen while wearing a wig attached to baby dolls that sit in high chairs. These uncanny videos explore grief and pain through visceral performance. “[The videos] reach back to

ideas of hereditary mental illness,” Ward said, “particularly to female aspects of that struggle.”

Ward’s sonic background comes to the fore in these videos through her soundtracks. One includes a lullaby, while the other is a patchwork of vocalization and found audio— essentially field recordings from Ward’s life. Throughout the show, sound will be a constant feature, accompanying viewers along their visits.

Her special attention to audio elements is no coincidence. Before focusing on visual art, Ward was the frontwoman for the touring punk band Tom Boil—and, with degrees in both vocal performance and music, she understands how to use sound to create a mood.

Ward’s interactive floral sculpture also features sound. Her work as a florist by day has intersected with her artistic and musical talents in flower arrangements that emit various noises when viewers touch the petals. The sonic floral installation at HAPPY BIRTHDAY is her newest iteration of this type. In the past, Ward experimented with live flowers tied to a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) that’s extremely versatile for manipulating music and sounds. Live flowers worked well for shorter-term installations, but they grew thin and pale after an evening of being touched. This time, Ward will use artificial flowers painted with conductive paint that, when touched, produce singular sounds from a pad of vocal cues.

While the video and floral pieces employ their own internal sound elements, overall the show will feature an ethereal soundtrack playing throughout its space. Along with Ward’s encaustic wax paintings, these elements contribute to an immersive experience in the intimate gallery.

Stills from Allison Ward’s video installations/performances Had Her Cake, Symbiotic, and Death, 2023 | Images courtesy of the artist

ABOVE // Allison Ward, Proverbial Drip 1, 2022, encaustic wax and mixed media, as shown at OKno1, Tulsa; LEFT // Allison Ward, SOLD//SPENT, 2020, encaustic wax and collage medium, 48” x 48”, as shown at Liggett Studio, Tulsa; OPPOSITE PAGE // Positive Space Tulsa, 1324 E 3rd St.

Ward has worked with encaustic wax previously, notably in her work at group shows. In HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Ward’s encaustic wax paintings are meant to convey the extreme highs and lows of bipolar disorder. “Living with chronic mental handicaps can be just a long period of on and off, dark preceded by light,” Ward said. “A never-ending carousel ride of good and bad, angelic and evil, sweet and rotten.”

With a two-sided 6x4 foot canvas, Ward enacts this binary. Melting wax candies on one side represent the highs. On the other side, the lows are represented with rotting meat formed with wax molds.

Ward’s curatorial past has helped her to “see a space and see what’s possible within it.” From the outset, Ward has been determined not just to curate a show, but also a mood. “I want to create a feeling and particular sense within the art’s space,” Ward said.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY is on display at Positive Space in Tulsa

from April 15 through May 20. Gallery owner Nicole Finley opened Positive Space in September of 2022 with the goal of showing and supporting womxn artists.

As Finley explained, “Positive Space Tulsa believes the letter ‘x’ in womxn recognizes all women, including gender expansive identities. Positive Space Tulsa is for women, nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer, and agender artists (excluding those who identify as male or as men).”

“As an artist I understand the challenges of exhibiting work in galleries—the fees, the process, the gatekeeping, etc.,” Finley said. “That can, for most artists, seem daunting and, quite possibly, unfair. As a woman, I certainly understand that gender inequality is and has been a glaring issue in the art world.”

Ward submitted her work to the gallery soon after she heard about it, thrilled by the space itself and the motivation behind it. For her, the practice of art has long been a form of catharsis. Now, through experiencing the dissonance and contrast at work in HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Ward hopes her audience will achieve a similar kind of catharsis in their engagement with her art.

Allison Ward’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY can be seen from April 15 through May 20 at Positive Space Tulsa.

ELIZABETH J. WENGER is a writer and journalist from Tulsa, OK. She has been covering Oklahoma arts and politics for ASLUTZINE since 2020. Currently an MFA candidate at Iowa State University, Wenger’s work has appeared in essaydaily.org, The Hopper Magazine, Huck Magazine , and more. Wenger’s creative non-fiction essays explore various ideas of “the natural” in politics, technology, art, and the built environment.

Censer Stand Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, 7th-8th century, ceramic, 26” × 14 9/16” × 6 5/16”, Museo de Sitio de Palenque Alberto Ruz L’Huillier, Secretaría de Cultura– Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

IMAGO DEI // LIVES OF THE GODS: DIVINITY IN MAYA ART AT THE KIMBELL

by Olivia Dailey

The groundbreaking exhibition Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art comes to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth from May 7 to September 3. The exhibition is a partnership between The Kimbell and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where it debuted last year. The show consists of almost 100 artifacts from ancient Maya cities in present-day Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico dating to the Classic period (A.D. 250–900) and loaned by museums from all over the world.

Seven themes organize the exhibition: Creations, Day, Night, Rain, Maize, Knowledge, and Patron Gods. Together, these groupings of artifacts explore the roles that gods played in ancient Maya culture. Expect to see detailed sculptures, ornaments, and ceramics telling a range of stories—not just about the gods, but also humans interacting with and sometimes even impersonating them, blurring the lines between royalty and divinity.

Many gods in the Maya pantheon paralleled the lives of people in terms of birth, living, aging, and dying. No god represents that human parallel better than the Maize God. According to the Maya creation story, the gods tried to make humans first with clay, then wood, both yielding poor results. Those creatures were awkward and did not recognize their creators. Wanting to create intelligent beings capable of worshipping them, the gods kept at it. Their third attempt used maize (aka, corn) and was successful.

Humans are created and sustained by maize. Other symbols of life and abundance, like jade and cacao, appear with the Maize God. He is seen in many iterations, from a hunky young man with a bouffant of corn silk to a tiny

creature emerging from a flower, suggesting rebirth. He is reborn again and again, every year like the harvest staple.

Unique to Classic period Maya art, compared to art made elsewhere during this time, is that artists often signed their work. Recent discoveries in Maya hieroglyphs made it possible for Lives of the Gods to credit four ancient artists for the first time in a major exhibition. The presence of signatures signifies something about how ancient Maya valued artists and scribes, and these discoveries lead both to answers and more questions to discover.

“It’s a revelation,” says Jennifer Casler Price, Curator of Asian, African, and Ancient American Art at the Kimbell for almost thirty years. Price acquired four pieces on display in Lives of the Gods for the Kimbell, and this is her third Maya exhibition at the museum. Since the last one in 2010, much progress has been made in discovering and deciphering the glyphs painted and carved in the Classic artworks.

Many of these pieces, due to their unwieldiness and priceless value, are traveling for the first time—and likely their last. Notably, Stela 51 from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City is made of limestone (a stela is a carved stone slab) and stands at nearly twelve feet tall to portray Yuknoom Took’ K’awiil, king of the ancient city of Calakmul.

As the first thing visitors see in the exhibition, Stela 51 embodies many qualities of Maya art highlighted in this show: a high level of detail, hieroglyphs, and a strict power dynamic. K’awiil shares his name with the Lightning God, linking the king to the divine and…wait, is that a person lying beneath the king’s feet? Oh yes, gods and humans are

interconnected, and the human rulers played a role in connecting the gods with their community, flexing their power along the way while cementing it in sculpture. The glyphs—surprisingly cute by modern standards, almost like bubble graffiti with faces—reveal the name of two sculptors.

A throne from the city of Piedras Negras, made during the prolific late seventh century and restored by The Met, features a limestone back with a striking composition: a supernatural creature whose eyes frame two men looking at each other.

“You have not only the heads of two figures, definitely rulers,” says Price, “but as prominent as these heads are, there are the signatures as well—the glyphic signatures of the artists very prominently displayed.”

While this show’s works and subjects may appear esoteric, they might inspire in its viewers a recognition of human resilience that can be universally understood. It’s human nature to ponder complex questions like, “Why are we here? How can we control our fate?” and to tease them

out through art. Ancient Maya city states created some of their most impressive work right before falling silent; the end of the era was also the apex of the era. Although many Maya cities fell at the end of the Classic period, in a sense their people and culture live on today. One can find a reminder of what can change and what stays the same, of our mortality and our connection to the spiritual and natural worlds.

The Kimbell, celebrating its 50th anniversary through October, has been a longtime Fort Worth gem that’s only a train or car ride away. The permanent collections and grounds are reason enough to visit, but Lives of the Gods—visible from May 7 through September 3—is a rare opportunity to see world-class masterpieces that are hardly new, but most likely new to us.

OLIVIA DAILEY has a BA in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma. She works as a media production coordinator in Norman.

LEFT // K’in Lakam Chahk and Patlajte’ K’awiil Mo[...] (Maya sculptors, active 8th century), Throne 1, A.D. 785, Piedras Negras, Petén, Guatemala, limestone, 59”× 79” × 79” | Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala; RIGHT // Sak[...] Yuk[...] Took’ and Sak [...] Yib’ah Tzak B’ahlam (Maya, active 8th century), Calakmul, Mexico, Stela 51, A.D. 731, Limestone, overall with concrete base. 11’ 7” × 64.5 × 32”, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, Secretaría de Cultura– Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

LEFT // Whistle with the Maize God Emerging From a Flower, Mexico, A.D. 600-900, Ceramic, pigment., 8.125” x 2” x 1.5”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller; MIDDLE // Maize God, Copan, Honduras, A.D. 715, limestone, 35” × 22” × 12”, British Museum, London; RIGHT // Censer Stand Probably Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico A.D. 690-720, ceramic, pigment, 44” × 22” × 12.25” | Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

EKPHRASIS // THE FINAL (?) INSTALLMENT A CONVERSATION IN WORDS AND PICTURES

with Liz Blood

We at Art Focus wish to thank Liz Blood for all the insight, humor, and hard work she brought to her “Ekphrasis” column over the years. For a proper send-off, we asked her to reflect on her experience.

How long have you been doing Ekphrasis? And how did you get the idea?

Since July 2014, Ekphrasis has been published in every issue of Art Focus except one for a total of 38 installments. I got the idea from The New York Times’ T Magazine, which used to commission a work of visual art after a poem. I did it the other way around—asking a poet to write from an artwork. I think T Magazine started their column in 2013 and retired it in 2017. I feel great and high-horsey about outlasting them.

What do you hope readers have taken from it?

I hope that readers have sensed more about the connection of things, of our world. It’s easy to feel disconnected, which lends itself to hopelessness. But as I’m trying to remind myself constantly, and as abolitionist Mariame Kaba coined, “Hope is a discipline.” Connection and meaningmaking are why we’re here, and they are the things that will keep us here.

Can you share a time when your experience of a visual art work was affected by a poem, or vice versa?

Yes, a recent example is LeAnne Howe’s response “As” to Rhiana Deck’s painting New Growth in the Spring 2022 issue. While Rhiana’s painting flung us into the presence of springtime, LeAnne took us back 100 years to the 1918 pandemic. So many of these pairings have had this dizzying effect on me. It was a treat every single time, never knowing what I’d get back—I was always surprised and reminded of our unique and personal ways of viewing the world. I’ll miss it.

After all these years, any bright ideas about how images and poems work together?

Poems often come alive through their images, and images through their poetry. They work together in infinite ways, showing us how to connect the disparate and find or make meaning from their encounters. Ekphrasis is metaphor in action. Poet Mary Ruefle said, “Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event...an exchange of energy between two things. If you believe that metaphor is an event...then you must conclude that a certain philosophy arises: the philosophy that everything in the world is connected...If metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event, then it unites the world by its very premise—that things connect and exchange energy.”

So as you move on from Ekphrasis, what are you working on now?

I’m devoting more time to my own creative work, which includes writing in multiple genres, book- and zine-making, and curating. I’ll be opening my first art show as sole curator in June at Flagship, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship’s gallery in the Tulsa Arts District. That show, currently untitled, will let several of my interests intersect: contemporary visual art, Oklahoma artists, arts writing and curation, and nature and our place within it.

LIZ BLOOD is a writer, editor, and arts worker. A lifelong Oklahoman, her work focuses on place, memory, contemporary art, and, increasingly, the environment. She is a multi-year recipient of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and its Arts Integration Award, which she used to make the “Creative Field Guide to Northeastern Oklahoma,” a 200-page book celebrating the region’s biodiversity and featuring more than 50 Oklahoma artists and writers.

TOP // Laura Da’s “Sustainers” and Yatika Starr Fields’ White Buffalo Calf Women, AF Fall 2017; MIDDLE // Leanne Howe’s “As” and Rhiana Deck’s New Growth, AF Spring 2022; BOTTOM // Lauren Zuniga’s “In the End, We Always Get the House” and JP Morrison Lans’ Bluebeard’s Wife Eating a Pomegranate, AF Jan./Feb. 2015

BECOME AN OKLAHOMA INSIDER.

OVAC NEWS

As we approach our 35th year of serving Oklahoma’s visual arts community, OVAC continues to invest in opportunities for artists and the public to connect in ways that benefit local economies and also our quality of life. However, we don’t do it alone. We belong to a network of nonprofits, business leaders, and arts advocates who help cultivate a stronger arts ecosystem.

In March, OVAC celebrated the 22nd year of Momentum, our annual exhibition that uplifts Oklahoma’s young artistic talent. Thanks to the event committee, venue partner Sailor & the Dock, and our many sponsors, this year we featured over 100 works by 41 artists under the age of 30. Through Momentum, OVAC plays a critical role in supporting artists in their work as they connect with a comprehensive support network and reach new audiences.

This spring, we have other enriching opportunities to share with you. On April 18, we are gathering with fellow arts champions Oklahomans for the Arts, and many others, for Arts & Culture Day at the Oklahoma Capitol to promote policies that support the arts and increase public funding. We encourage you to learn more about this ongoing conversation at ok4arts.org.

Also in April, applications opened for the 2023 Thrive Grants program. Through a partnership with the Andy Warhol

MEMBERS

Chel Adler

Anita Albright

Mary Jane Alexander

Kylie Anderson

Maria Anderson

Elliott Andrew

Marilyn Artus

Marjorie Atwood

Whitney Batres

Sarah Bear

Michael Bendure

DiAnn Berry

Hayden Bilbrey

Julie Boyd

Julia Boydston

Bobbi Bresett

Larry Bristow

Teran Brown

Lauren Bumgarner

Timothy Bush

Kuwantu Cammon

Michael Campo

Mallory Cantrell

Bryan Cardinale-Powell

Jennifer Casey

Foundation of Visual Arts, Thrive offers grants of up to $10,000 for artist-led, collaborative projects that are accessible to the public. On April 17-21, the 2022 Thrive awardee Art Friends hosts a free workshop series with daily online programming on topics such as art practice and business development.

In May, we begin accepting applications for the next cohort of the yearlong Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship program for those who desire to expand their art writing and curatorial practices and participate in the current contemporary art dialogue. And then the Tulsa Art Studio Tour will return June 3–4, 2023. In an open-house style, this event showcases the talent of artists who live and work in Tulsa. Artists are now being recruited and tickets will go on sale in early May.

Artists who participate in our programs credit OVAC with being key to their success. We encourage you to stay informed about opportunities like these by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you too can benefit from OVAC’s programs and services.

Best for the springtime, Rebecca Kinslow, Executive Director

Amber Casper

Hannah Cerne

Robin Chase

Mark Cheek

Terry Clark

Aaliyah Climes

Hailey Clooney

SaDawna Coburn

Judith Coker

Shelly Collins

Cori Crawford

Jack Crouch

Raven Crowl

Peter Cullum

Madeline Curry

Bob Curtis

Carrie Daley

Abby Davenport

Ross DeFehr

Jenny Dillon

Amber DuBoise-Shepherd

Sarah Dumas

Madison Dunn-

McLaughlin

Aimee Eischen

Christopher Eldridge

Brenda Esslinger

Kris Fairchild

Jenna Feezel

Firehouse Art Center

Cynthia Fletcher

Lauren Fourcade

Susan Foust

Jeremy Fowler

Cindy Fox

Barbara Gabel

Paige Gaglio

Erin Gericke

Madelyn Goodnight

Taylor Graham

Destiny Green

Sheree Greider

Jean Griffin

Luke Gronemeyer

Sue Hale

Chase Hall

Amy Hanson

Lindsay Harkness

Alysha Harmon

Carla Hefley

Calli Heflin

Aditi Heins

Michelle Herholdt

Pamela Hodges

Theresa Hultberg

Lauren Hutson

Carleisha Jackson

Jonathan Jimenez

Julius Johnson

Zoe Jones

Lilly Klontz

Wesley Kramer

J Mark Larson

Jay Laxton

Gentry Leach

Jenny Lee

Lauren Lester

Jaquelin Lopez

Annie Lovett

Alexis Lyons

John Marshall

Bobby Martin

Tara Mason-Harris

Annie Matthews

Heather Mayes

Terry McGraw

Dominique McPhail

Erin Merryweather

Aubrey Mills

Dragana Milovic

Lumen Miramontes

Oscar Molina

Nichole Montgomery

Kathleen Myers

Lawrence Naff

Alexis Nelson

Kris Newlin

Rhonda Nolen

Oklahoma Academy of Classical Art

Kirsten Olds

Keith Oler

Hayley Owen

David Padgett

Taylor Painter-Wolfe

Duncan Payne

Zoe Peters

Dan Lynh Pham

Matthew Phipps

Gerald Piper

Spencer Plumlee

Mia Pons

Cheryl Price

Kelley Queen

Chris Ramsay

Dylan Richardson

Alberto Rivas

Benjamin Roberson

Jessica Roberts

Delaney Rumsey

Ruth Sanchez

Katherine Sanders

McKenna Sanderson

Ryan Sandfort

Madeleine Schmidt

Neka Schultz

Candace Shanholtzer

James Shelley

Emily Singleton

Laura Smith

Iryna Snizhenko

Bob Sober

Douglas Sorocco

Juliana Spencer

Allyson Stumpf

Kindra Swafford

Jordan Tacker

Jackie Teague

Candace Telford

Doyle Terry

Russ Teubner

Elizabeth Thomas

Verdean Thompson

Tylor Traxler

Audra Urquhart

Melanie Valentine

Natasha Van Gorder

Shantel Wallace

Carol Webster

Shanley Wells-Rau

Treka Wenner

Marjorie Wetwiska

Christopher and Lori Winland

Madison Winter

Dean Wyatt

Annaly Xiong

Malcolm Zachariah

Zach Zecha

Rebecca Kinslow, Executive Director

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