ON THE COVER // Alicia Smith, still from Teomama, 2018, video performance, page 6. MIDDLE // Micheal W. Jones, Autumn at Elk Creek, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”, page 14. BOTTOM // Mack Brim, Keeping Up Appearances, 2022, oil on canvas, 24” x 16”, page 18.
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CONTENTS // Volume 40 No. 2 // SPRING 2025
4 6
18 10 14
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
JOHN SELVIDGE
SEED STEWARDS AND GOD CARRIERS // In the Studio with Alicia Smith KATE BATTERSHELL
REVIEW FEAR AND LOATHING IN STILLWATER // Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing at the OSU Museum of Art
MANDY MESSINA
FEATURE ON TARGET IN BROKEN ARROW // Arts@302 Hits Its Mark SALLIE CARY GARDNER
PREVIEW THAT WILL BRING US BACK TO DOE // Mack Brim at Positive Space in Tulsa KRISTEN GRACE
PREVIEW RENE WING A LEGACY // A Place for Art at Norman’s Juneteenth Festival OLIVIA DAILEY
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.
2024-2025 BOARD OF DIRECTORS // Douglas Sorocco, President, OKC; Jon Fisher, Vice President OKC; Matthew Anderson, Secretary, Tahlequah; Jacquelyn Knapp, Parliamentarian, Chickasha; Marjorie Atwood, Tulsa; Barbara Gabel, OKC; Farooq Karim, OKC; Kathryn Kenney, Tulsa; John Marshall, OKC; Kirsten Olds, Tulsa; Chris Winland, OKC
Until recently, I’ve probably leaned into these editorial letters more than I should, enjoying thinking of myself as clever or arch—pretending to be Dick Cavett or some bullshit like that, but I’m over it now. I’ll be honest, most of the time I can hardly see past my grief at having lost our mother, who meant the world to my family, just a few months ago. I wish it could go without saying, but when I’m writing these days, anytime I don’t acknowledge this loss somehow, it feels like lying.
But within the larger community, so far 2025 has meant difficult days for a lot of us—especially us sensitive, artsy types who usually break left of center. I barely know anything now, but I trust that it’s time to get back to basics, take nothing for granted, and tend to my own house before going off on the next crusade. Prioritize self-care, but also let’s stop lying to ourselves (and believe me, I know this one well). If a lot of us glorified “the resistance” a tad too much, that self-congratulatory noun, how do we refigure our ideas of what it means now—actively, viably, and verb-ally—“to resist”?
No surprise: art helps. In this issue of Art Focus, Alicia Smith reimagines Indigenous resistance in a strikingly generative, futuristic mode (p. 6) while Norman’s Juneteenth Festival promises to defy current trends of historical erasure in our national public sphere (p. 22). Celebrating how a peerless octogenarian artist like Ralph Steadman (p. 10) revealed the madness of his time might well help us unleash a similarly Gonzo attack on ours—a satirical project not far removed from painter Mack Brim’s searing examinations of the male gaze and subject-object relations (p. 18). Even the kid-friendly arts classes and other wholesome fare at Broken Arrow’s Arts@302 (p. 14) help remind us that some things must exist for their own sake and thus cut against the grain of a zeitgeist that seems to grow more callous, ignorant, and cruel by the week.
Thanks to everyone for their kind thoughts lately. Let’s talk more about how we can help brew the antidote.
—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.
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SEED STEWARDS AND GOD CARRIERS // IN THE STUDIO WITH ALICIA SMITH
by Kate Battershell
Alicia Smith is a multidisciplinary artist who moved to Tulsa this year for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Beginning her studies at the University of Oklahoma, she moved to New York to complete a Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts. She has worked in multiple mediums from textiles and ceramics to painting and photography, but her recent focus has been on her films–an apt medium given Oklahoma’s recent rise in the filmmaking world. Rooted firmly throughout her body of work is her Indigenous Xicana heritage.
Can you tell me about your current project?
For the next three years I will be working on my Toci project, which means “our grandmother” in Nahuatl. It is a video art project that tells the story of a group of Aztec women who escape the colonization of Mexico by flying a pyramid to Mars and establishing a space colony there. The women view Mars as a post-menopausal woman and the grandmother of “Tonantzin” or “our mother,” the Earth Mother they left behind. I filmed “Chapter 1: The Bat Women” back in 2023.
I’m reaching out to floor loom weavers in Tulsa to get assistance with some woven garments I’d like to make for “Chapter 2: The Axolotl Women.” I have already written the song for it and designed the sets I will build for both Chapter 2 and “Chapter 3: The Spider Women,” but I still need to write that song. All the songs for my project are based on our traditional songs, which I embellish to fit my story.
Toci brings up some frankly underrepresented themes in the science fiction space. What brought you to the idea of Native women-led space colonization?
On a personal level, my artistic practice was fueled by my fear of ongoing cultural genocide for a long time. That’s a lot of active grieving that can be mentally fatiguing to keep
up, so I wanted to make something more light-hearted. I had been kicking around this idea for a few years before I met with the great Beatriz Cortez during my time as an artist in residence at Banff’s Centre for Arts and Creativity. She made me understand how urgent this work really is.
It started as a way to make fun of racist ancient alien documentaries, but it became something so much more healing and profound than I ever could’ve imagined. It gave me the gift of imagining an alternate reality where our ways were still safe, protected, and preserved—our codices, our bundles, our sacred regalia still kept by us and treated how they should be.
This goes further still when you consider that as Indigenous people, we are often relegated to the past and are supposed to be extinct. When Temuera Morrison put on that Mandalorian armor, it was one of the first times we got to see an Indigenous person in a futuristic context. Unfortunately, a lot of discussion of space and space exploration still uses a lot of imperialist language and sentiment. This project for me has the potential to right that, even if just for a moment in this alternate reality.
Often artists have a chosen medium, but you work in so many. How do you see your range of work in this context? Do you gravitate towards one medium or another?
When I was in undergrad there was a need to emphasize one medium or another for academics’ sake. I specialized in Printmaking and Contemporary Sculpture. I definitely still use printmaking to process new ideas or symbols I’m exploring in my work. It’s a foundation I’ll always come back to.
Going to grad school at SVA in Manhattan was an incredible experience for me in a host of ways. For one, they challenged me to step outside my comfort zone and use all the other mediums I learned in or outside of the classroom,
OPPOSITE // Alicia Smith and Tūranga Morgan-Edmonds, Between the Infinite, 2025, serigraphy, woodblock print, 26”x20” | All images courtesy of the artist
TOP // Alicia Smith, still from Erendira, 2018, video performance; ABOVE // Alicia Smith, still from Toci, Chapter 1: The Bat Women, 2023, video performance OPPOSITE // Alicia Smith, still from Tonantzin, 2022, video performance
along with any new ones that tickled my fancy. New York, in general, has a really intense air of possibility, and nothing is off limits to you. There are no “lanes” to stay in. Video art became a perfect way for me to use all my skills to realize a piece. Whatever I have to do to accomplish my vision, I do it.
You deeply enmesh your activism with your art. How does the political landscape that surrounds us, here in a red state like Oklahoma, play into your current artistic practice?
Being a product of an education system, I internalized the message that my ancestors were just bloodthirsty savages who contributed nothing, and therefore I was nothing. It’s been a long road away from that, and we cannot lose ground now.
As Alice Walker said, “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” The existence of Black and Indigenous people in this country is a persistent reminder of what the powersthat-be want to desperately forget but can’t. Eve Tuck writes about this in her paper “Glossary of Haunting,” which I highly recommend. A genocide happened. We are supposed to all be dead, but here we are—“ghosts” as Tuck wrote, post-apocalyptic beings.
My most recent print Between the Infinite—made in collaboration with my friend Tūranga Morgan-Edmonds, a Māori artist and musician—is a great example of where my activism is now. I am a seed steward, and that ethos boils down to the fact that the fight for any one community’s sovereignty is not their fight alone. We must link arms together and fight together to ensure we are all protected.
I’m currently using the prints to raise money for Toitū Te Tiriti, a grassroots Māori organization fighting to protect the Treaty of Waitangi.
Is there a piece of yours that is particularly meaningful to you? Teomama was the piece that started it all for me. [Ed. note: a film still from Teomama provides the cover for this issue.] It was the first time I felt I had full permission to do whatever I wanted, and it came out more exquisite than I ever could’ve hoped. Teomama in Nahuatl means “god carrier.” It’s the title given to the ones who carried our medicine bundles. Our medicine bundles did not just hold the bones of our gods and ancestors, but also were intrinsically tied to our identity as a people. The piece was my response to the question, “Where is home when you are a dispossessed person?” The answer is your body. Every cell of your body sings the song of your ancestors, and that can never be taken from you.
You can learn more about Alicia Smith and her art at aliciasmith.work.
KATE BATTERSHELL is a recent graduate of OSU. She freelances in art collection management for artists and collectors in Oklahoma. One of her filet tapestries was exhibited in OVAC’S 2025 MOMENTUM art show in Oklahoma City. She can be contacted at katebattershell@outlook.com
FEAR AND LOATHING IN STILLWATER // RALPH STEADMAN: AND ANOTHER THING AT THE OSU MUSEUM OF ART
by Mandy Messina
When Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was initially serialized for Rolling Stone magazine, the writer insisted that the only illustrator who could authentically capture the electric impulses of his genre-bending work was an English artist named Ralph Steadman.
Boston Globe editor Bill Cordoso later defined Thompson’s style as “Gonzo journalism,” a mode that felt unhinged at the time because the reporter became a protagonist by actively improvising his way through unforeseen twists in the story he experienced and retold. Steadman’s characteristic embracing of fateful accidents on the page was a natural twin to Gonzo’s radical commitment to integrating the unexpected. Half a century later, their fateful partnership had attracted a multitude of further propagating opportunities for Steadman—from wine merchants to book deals to prestige television, movies, documentaries, and a whole lot more besides.
Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing, a retrospective exhibition featuring 60 years of the artist’s work, is currently on display at OSU Museum of Art in Stillwater. There, before I had the privilege of interviewing the 88-year-old artist, I overheard two young Steadman fans relate that they’d traveled from Texas to come see it. While I hadn’t come further than Oklahoma City that day, I found myself unexpectedly wrenched about 9,000 miles away upon seeing an iconic goat tower from my childhood, Amazingly, Ralph Steadman had visited my hometown in a then-freshly-post-Apartheid South Africa.
The artwork that took me there— Charles Back, Fairview Estate with Goat Tower, Cellmaster and Friends —depicts third-generation wine estate owner Charles Back II, flanked by his legacy of the iconic goat tower at Fairview Wine Estates in Paarl and the beneficiaries of The Fair Valley Workers Association, which he founded in 1997. Under Apartheid in South Africa, Back was one of only
a few farm owners who advocated for and implemented better labor conditions for his workers.
In the 1980s Gordon Kerr, the marketing director of Oddbins, a British wine merchant, asked Steadman to produce ten drawings similar in style to his iconic illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This request spurred a 12-year working relationship with Kerr which led Steadman and his wife Anna to travel the globe, collecting wineries like stamps in a passport through sketchbooks and journal entries that were later assembled into two books on wine and whiskey.
Eventually, Steadman visited and represented everywhere from Hawaii to Chile, but his prolific travel started with his first assignment in the United States. In the exhibition’s catalog, Steadman reflects on his amazing luck during his first trip to the US. “It was early 1970 when I was asked to travel on assignment to illustrate the Kentucky Derby for an article for Scanlon’s Monthly … A guy called JC Suarez asked me, ‘How’d you like to go ta’ Kentucky and meet a Hell’s Angel who’s just shaved his head?’ And that was how I met the one person in all of the USA I was supposed to meet, Hunter S. Thompson.”
Together they forged a new style that grated against the conventional standards of the time. Gonzo journalism’s exaggerated fictions extracted a situation’s overarching truth. Though its telling may not have been factually accurate, the fierce “authenticity” of the story felt undeniable. Perhaps that’s why these two creators, Thompson and Steadman, played so well together and for so long. Steadman’s visual response distilled Thompson’s work, which in turn exploded images out the end of his pen.
Using deliberate exaggeration to communicate a larger truth of a story achieves an incredible effect in an
CONTINUED
ABOVE // Ralph Steadman, five works from the partnership with Gordon Kerr as exhibited at the OSU Museum including (lower middle) Charles Back, Fairview Estate with Goat Tower, Cellmaster and Friends | Mandy Messina; BELOW // Ralph Steadman, Treasure Cave, 1984, pen and ink on paper, from Treasure Island (Harrap, 1985) | OSU Museum of Art; OPPOSITE // Ralph Steadman, Self Poortrait, 2006, ink and collage on paper
illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. A bright, radiant yellow is cast in the scene’s central role, the treasure, with the very practical effect of highlighting the surrounding figures’ menacing grins. These “gentlemen of fortune,” as Steadman characterizes the pirates in the book’s introduction, are “hell bent on getting rich quick,” their smiles emblematic of the highway robbery of the era’s pre-industrial, oceanic global tradescape.
Mark Twain is frequently credited with the aphorism “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” My interview with Steadman briefly touched on the critical period in history when he was born—slap-bang between two world wars during the Great Depression. His advice to artists facing uncertain periods in history was unexpectedly practical: never use pencil first, he told me. Instead, take courage and dive directly onto paper with pen and ink.
Such a tactile commitment to co-creating with the unexpected and the limits it can impose renders our contemporary habit of endlessly revising or reversing (Ctrl+Z) our “mistakes” rather spineless. In doing so, we shortchange ourselves out of the fruitful tangles that, with luck, come from working within
the creative restrictions only accidents can provide.
Since Steadman worked with the element of chance so consistently over the years, one of the go-to techniques we chatted about was how he splashed his old brush-cleaning water on paper. He told me that all the silt and skins of ink and paint, which tends to collect at the bottom of the jars of water used for cleaning his brushes, arrange themselves into an accidental form, after drying on the paper for a few days, that he would not likely have imagined or created himself. After adding select pen strokes and spare structural lines, as he writes in his catalog, “then I do something spontaneous, and I either succeed or it’s buggered!”
His collaboration with Ceri Levy on several books depicting extinct or endangered animals relies heavily on this technique. The skill necessary to render an unintelligible blob of color into a recognizable animal, like a manatee with a few spare strokes, brings to my mind the concept of pareidolia—essentially a type of visual pattern recognition, through which one can make meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated elements or events. In a panel discussion with Ceri Levy for the print run of their third book and exhibition together, Steadman mentions how, in his “dirty water splashing phase,” the textures created provide a foothold to gauge patterns within them “the same as looking at a cloud.”
Considering this level of courage, trust in process, and improvisation in collaboration with the unknown, I imagine that other artists have been drawn to work with Steadman because of his lifelong commitment to Gonzo. Whether it’s through his practice of incorporating accidents and/or his consistent willingness to brush up against something Promethean over his 60-year output, it’s clear that Steadman has become the protagonist of his own, impressively singular artistic narrative.
Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing can be experienced through May 10 at the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, 720 s. Husband St. in Stillwater. Please visit museum. okstate.edu/art for more information.
MANDY MESSINA is an artist who lives and works in Oklahoma City.
ON TARGET IN BROKEN ARROW // ARTS@302 HITS ITS MARK
by Sallie Cary Gardner
If an arts center could be invented that caters to every age, every learning ability, and every artist, it’s hard to imagine how it could serve any better than the three-year-old Arts@302 in Broken Arrow. Located near the heart of downtown BA’s Rose District and also known as the Brown-Kimbrough Center, Arts@302 offers more than thirty six-week art courses five times a year and many one-time workshops on disciplines as diverse as ceramics, fiber arts, and jewelry making. Basic classes, such as drawing, are also offered.
“It’s a beautiful building,” said Jennifer Deal, Arts@302’s executive director, and she’s not wrong. The first-floor gallery is an airy, sunlit space with ceilings 15 feet high. Although the building is contemporary, one feels as if it’s been on Main Street for many years—which is no accident, because the architectural firm Narrate planned it that way. Fronted with red brick, Arts@302 features plate glass windows 25 feet wide as well as smaller windows that mimic shops’ transoms.
Artists across Oklahoma who are looking for new markets for their works would do well to submit to shows at Arts@302. New exhibits are mounted every month or two, and the facility takes a commission of 25%. Artists can be assured that their works will be shown to a well-heeled audience, since Broken Arrow has long been one of the most affluent small towns in our state. Two exhibits curated by staffer Abby McNett have attracted almost 200 people to their openings, and their themes have been broad based like the February/ March exhibit Ruin and Regrowth: Reckoning with Nature
Programs at Arts@302 are designed for kids as young as three all the way up to senior citizens. Although the current programming schedule, as of this writing, features six sessions of pottery wheel throwing, most of the classes are less traditional, such as Building a Flower Crown, 3D Needle Felting, and Stained Glass Glazing. According to staff, many classes are created with the idea that students will have an original artwork to take home at the end. One of the most
popular adult classes is Date Night Wheel Throwing which already has waiting lists for the three springtime sessions currently offered. Costs range from $35, for one-time workshops, to $375 for three days of painting pet portraits. Some classes are offered for the whole family. “Our strength is in the diversity of the things we do,” Deal said.
Programs at Arts@302 include the performing arts in addition to visual arts. Arts@302 is involved in popular Broken Arrow community events such as Broadway Boot Camp, Chalk It Up, and Tuesday in the Park, musical performances at BA’s Central Park every Tuesday night in June. The Children’s Choir at 302 has members as young as three years old.
Target groups for programs are also diverse. At-risk children are bused from two BA elementary schools for Kristin Chenoweth’s Artists of Promise, a free after-school program supported by the internationally known singer and actress. A program known as Big Idea Studio is geared toward adults with disabilities.
Arts@302 is run by Deal, a former art teacher, six staffers, and a pool of 40 part-time art instructors. Though it started over two decades ago as a partnership between the Broken Arrow school district and several BA arts organizations, it’s now overseen by the 14-member board of ARTSOK and the Regional Arts Alliance of Broken Arrow, an organization merging the former Broken Arrow Performing Arts Center Foundation and the former Broken Arrow Arts and Humanities Council.
The original plan was to turn an old school into an art center, but when that fell through, Kelley Rash, president of the board of AVB Bank and matriarch of the Brown-Kimbrough family that owns the bank, talked the city into donating a lot on Main Street. An old building on the lot was knocked down, and the city of Broken Arrow sponsored two bond issues to fund the new arts center. Major investors include
ABOVE // Arts@302/the Brown-Kimbrough Center in Broken Arrow | All images courtesy of Arts@302 BELOW // Opening reception of the recent Ruin and Regrowth exhibition in the Arts@302 gallery
AVB Bank as well as Kristin Chenoweth and her parents. According to Deal, the arts center was required by AVB to secure three years of operating expenses before opening.
The May exhibit at Arts@302 will feature the married couple Debra and Micheal Jones, two artists and retired teachers long known in Broken Arrow. The show, titled Hope You Like Red, comprises Debra’s weavings and Micheal’s paintings, which start with a layer of bright red paint upon which the artist then renders impressionistic landscapes with bits of red peeking out from their backgrounds, giving an effect of images almost bouncing off the canvases. Debra has woven equally colorful tapestries that feature many of the same hues as Micheal’s paintings, probably because the two take inspiration from their many visits to southwest Oklahoma and Colorado.
Micheal got the idea to use red as a substrate from his teaching days. “I used to tell my students that if you change one thing that you usually do when you paint, you will open up a whole new avenue of creativity,” he said. “I was in the
habit of toning my canvases with a wash of burnt umber. Taking my own advice, I changed that background color from brown to cadmium red. And yes! It opened up a whole new series of paintings for me.”
Art lovers and educators will remember Micheal as an art teacher in the Union Public School District for over 20 years, where he taught art classes for elementary through high school students. After that, he taught at NSU Broken Arrow and Rogers State University for another 20 years before retiring from teaching five years ago to paint full time. Debra has now retired from teaching elementary and special education students.
It’s easy to see that these two artists love landscapes, although Debra’s tapestries are abstract. Debra often hangs her tapestries from small branches and weaves native grasses in with the yarn. The way this couple works provides a lesson in collaboration. “Micheal encouraged me in my artwork and made me my first loom out of pushpins and canvas stretchers,” Debra said. “It worked perfectly. And I
LEFT // Micheal W. Jones, Timberfall, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”; RIGHT // Debra Jones, Staccato, 2024, embroidery floss, 5” x 11”
Participants in the Date
Wheel
have a good sense of design, so when I see that a design isn’t working in one of his paintings, I tell him, and he usually changes it.”
You can learn more about Arts@302 at arts302.com. Micheal and Debra Jones’ Hope You Like Red can be viewed there, at 302 S. Main St. in Broken Arrow, from May 2 through May 31.
SALLIE CARY GARDNER is retired from a long career in writing and public relations. She enjoys contributing to the Oklahoma arts scene through her volunteer work with the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition. Sallie is a popular storyteller at monthly Tulsa story slams and has competed in annual Grand Slams in 2023 and 2025.
ABOVE//
Night
Throwing class TOP RIGHT // In the gallery during Arts@302 ‘s 2024 exhibit Galentines BOTTOM RIGHT // A children’s sculpture activity
THAT WILL BRING US BACK TO DOE // MACK BRIM AT POSITIVE SPACE
by Kristen Grace
Oklahoma artist Mack Brim is a figurative oil painter. Her introduction to art began when she was a child, spending treasured time with her grandmother who was a lawyer by trade but also had her own print-making studio. The studio often hosted artists who taught workshops and camps. She remembers growing up around artists and being exposed to a variety of art styles and techniques as a source of deep joy. She recalls a childhood rich in art—making her own paper, drawing, and painting with watercolors. In college at the University of Oklahoma, she began to experiment with oil painting, which is now her primary medium. She creates from her home studio in Oklahoma City, often teaches private classes in the Paseo District, and hosts her show Object Permanence at Positive Space Gallery in Tulsa this May.
What inspired Object Permanence?
There are a couple of layers to it. I heard an observation the other day that the animals on girls’ clothing tend to be prey and the animals on boys’ clothing tend to be predators. I don’t know how universally true that is, but I found it very interesting to start thinking about those dynamics in a sense of masculine and feminine imagery. This body of work is examining those ideas visually.
In your work for this show, we see a boot crushing a smaller foot with painted toenails, a young person with long hair watching a tornado from a window, and a trophy wall filled with animal heads next to a pin-up girl. There is a sense of dread in these works, also a sly sense of humor. Do you intend the predator to always be male?
Much of my work tends to be feminine-focused. In this body of work, there tends to be a looming presence of something that seems to be “not feminine.” It’s not necessarily masculine, but it does seem to feel like an ominous presence.
There is also the idea of subject and object, both in our greater society and in art. I’m exploring the idea that when you paint something, they become your subject. I’m always
exploring the line of when the subject becomes an object. I’m very interested in playing with that line—specifically while painting. In choosing what I am painting and how I decide to paint it, am I turning a subject, a full human being, into an object?
What contributed to your interest in and awareness of the pull between subject and object?
In art history, there is a great conversation around women, female figures, women’s bodies as the subjects of paintings and art. When is she a subject, and when does she become an object? Does it come down to the artist’s intention? Does it come down to the perception of the viewer? Being a woman who creates art, does that mean that I am immune from objectifying women in my art?
I am exploring. I want to make work that humanizes people, but I don’t always know that I succeed. Focusing on both portraiture and still lifes, there is a deep connection between personhood and object. When you are depicting women and women’s bodies, they are always going to become objects to certain viewers.
Have you seen an artist who paints women subjects do this well?
I really love the artist Jenny Seville. She will have an exhibition in Fort Worth later in 2025. Her work is garish and unsettling, and it feels like she is toeing the line between subject and object at times, but she captures a human body having a human experience. I feel that she is holding the contrast between subject and object, too.
What role does color play in your work?
I have found that there is warmth and grounding in natural tones, and I have been exploring using more neutral tones. I am moving towards painting a series in all sienna tones or maybe even black and white.
Where do you see yourself moving next creatively?
Painting vignettes of modern life, capturing moments of feminine experience inspires me. I think this documentation and exploration might even help us find the meaning of life. I am always inspired by the women in my life.
Object Permanence will be shown throughout the month of May at Positive Space, 1324 E. 3rd Street in Tulsa You can see more of Mack Brim’s art at mackbrim.com and on Instagram at @madamemack.
KRISTEN GRACE is a journalist for 405 Magazine and 405 Business Magazine, a freelance copyeditor for Callisto Media, and a graduate of Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA program. She has authored a picture book for children, The Stepmother Who Believed in Feathers, as well as Wings, a collection of feminist fairy tales, both available from Literati Press. She has recently published poems in Focus Magazine, Mid/South, Freezeray, Behind the Rain Anthology, and other literary journals.
ABOVE // Mack Brim, Big Game, 2025, oil on canvas, 40” x 20”
LEFT // Mack Brim, Two-Step, 2024, oil on canvas, 18” x 12”
BOTTOM LEFT // Mack Brim, loom, 2025, oil on canvas, 36” x 20”
RENEWING A LEGACY // A PLACE FOR ART AT NORMAN’S JUNETEENTH FESTIVAL
by Olivia Dailey
Similar to the way that art can help navigate complicated topics, the Juneteenth holiday is both a celebration of Black culture and a reckoning with U.S. history. On June 19, 1865, two years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers came to Galveston, Texas, and delivered the message of freedom to the enslaved people there, effectively establishing Juneteenth as Black Independence Day. Even though Juneteenth has been celebrated for over 150 years, it only became a federal holiday in 2021 after a wave of increased awareness of social justice issues brought it to a wider American consciousness as an opportunity to learn and reflect. Now, that momentum of racial enlightenment looks somewhat different as three words—diversity, equity, and inclusion—have received much hate in recent times. Since the new administration took office in January, ‘DEI” has been scapegoated, banned, and removed from federal websites, school curricula, grant proposals, and beyond. DEI has recently been scrubbed away in a more literal sense as well: At the former Black Lives Matter Plaza, the BLM mural—the yellow block letters of the galvanizing phrase running along a pedestrian walkway in downtown Washington, D.C.—were removed this March by power of an executive order.
Despite the zeitgeist whiplash, Juneteenth will continue to be celebrated now and far into the future. To its credit, the City of Norman recognized the holiday in 2020, one year before it became a federal holiday, and it will be celebrated again this year at the Fifth Annual Norman Juneteenth Festival in Reaves Park. As founding Norman Juneteenth Committee Member and current chair Tyra Jackson put it: “Regardless of how you codify someone’s personhood, you’re not going to stop them from telling their stories, from telling their history, from celebrating all that they’ve accomplished, or all that they have yet to accomplish.” When the state of
the world, nation, or state can feel beyond our control, as it often does, it’s helpful to focus where our commitment to change can make the most impact: locally. Getting to know our neighbors while finding community together and working to make things better are all antidotes to division and hate.
The festival’s mission, as stated on its website, is to provide “an educational, family-friendly celebration of Black culture.” Festival fixtures so far have included live music, food trucks, fireworks, different kinds of vendors, a domino tournament, and more, but this year will feature a new visual art component, a permanent sculptural display to house art that will rotate each year. A preview sketch of the display shows a concrete base holding up a tilted, double-sided square metal frame. Neither a traditional sculpture or a vehicle for a traditional mural, this mural receptacle is designed to house two 4’ x 4’ artworks, behind polycarbonate to protect them from the elements or the park’s rogue baseball, under a stylized fist at the top of the frame and above a placard and solar lights at its base. Nick Lillard, Norman Juneteenth Committee Art Projects co-manager, is fabricating the metal frame. While the festival is sponsored by the City of Norman, the structure and mural artworks are fully funded by the Norman Arts Council, and neither would be possible without partnerships from both entities.
The structure and the art it will showcase are anticipated to be unveiled by the festival date, but I learned the first two artists for the project—Denae Smith and Marcus Eakers— just before this article went to press. When choosing artists, the committee wanted to spotlight local artists, established or emerging, whose work could capture a truth about the Juneteenth holiday. The process of selecting artists and giving them the freedom to produce art both powerful yet palatable is necessarily one of trust. So far, the
TOP // The Norman Juneteenth Committee stands next to Jaiye Farrell’s 2024 festival banner. | James D. Jackson
LEFT // Dancers at the 2023 Norman Juneteenth Festival. | James D. Jackson
RIGHT // Jahruba and the Street People perform at the 2023 Norman Juneteenth Festival. | James D. Jackson
plan is to have two new works by different artists displayed each year. What happens each year to last year’s artworks is yet to be decided, but their unique lineage presents an opportunity for the participating artists and the festival’s committee to grow over the years.
In the broad sense, art has always been a part of the festival in one form or another, whether live music or the creative vendors who sell their artistic wares. Last year the committee commissioned a painting by artist Jaiye Farrell—in a sense, the festival’s first honorary spotlight artist. Farrell’s painting was striking with graphic colors: a yellow background with patterned black lines, an outline of a fist, and JUNETEENTH figured in black.
ABOVE // Denae Smith, Transcendence, 2024, acrylic paint and dried roses, 66” x 41” | Image courtesy of the artist
LEFT // Marcus Eakers, Soaring, 2024, painted mural on brick, 130” x 84” | Image courtesy of the artist
A youth art exhibit will also be introduced this year. The Juneteenth Committee has worked with a local school to produce art made by kids aged 6-18 to be displayed during the festival. The committee wants the festival to engage kids in “an early conversation about their own artistic expression,” Jackson said. In this spirit, last year the Firehouse Art Center partnered with the festival to host a kids’ art activity, and there are plans to continue this partnership in the future.
Especially for those of us who live here, the Norman Juneteenth Festival is making our corner of the world a brighter place. Public art is inherently accessible and meant to be enjoyed by all. As Cody Giles, chair of the Norman Public Arts Committee of the Norman Arts
Council, said of the new art installation: “It’s not just about adding color to the park—it’s about honoring a story, sparking reflection, and making sure everyone in our community feels seen.”
The Fifth Annual Norman Juneteenth Festival will take place on Thursday, June 19th, at Reaves Park, 2501 Jenkins Ave. in Norman. The festival is sponsored by the City of Norman and is free and open to all Norman residents. If you are interested in attending—or in participating as a performer or vendor—please visit normanjuneteenth.com for more information.
OLIVIA DAILEY earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma. She works as a program manager at a transportation research center in Norman and is a frequent Art Focus contributor.
ABOVE // Sketch of the future art installation. The outline figure is included for scale, and the art in the receptacle is a placeholder. | the
Norman Juneteenth Committee
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