In the Studio with Malcolm Zachariah

By Mandy Messina

Malcolm Zachariah doing an ArtMoves demo. Photo credit Carly Davis of Arts Council Oklahoma City

Malcolm Zachariah, La Convivencia, 18 in x 24 in watercolor on cold-pressed Arches paper, 2019)

How would you describe yourself professionally?

I would say, I’m an artist and scientist. I feel like I’m focused in broad areas—all the arts, all the sciences.

When did you start becoming involved in the OKC arts community?

I burnt out on the PhD track and came back to OKC in 2014. I just made art for a whole year until I got my job (at the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality) in 2015.

How did you become so involved in such a short period of time?

It’s mainly showing up! I just started to attend events, because I wasn’t aware of much outside of the Paseo District, and the OKC Festival of the Arts. I didn’t know that there was such a vibrant community! Also, Downtown has changed a lot from when I was growing up to what it is now.

Which came first for you, science or art?

My mom was just talking about how I always started with art first. At my kindergarten graduation, (where we dressed up as our future careers), I was a painter. I started in first grade with these kirigami sculptures: I was cutting and folding paper birds, from my Birds of the World book. I liked dinosaurs—Jurassic Park had just come out that year—maybe that was the trigger?

Could you expand a bit on this integration of art and science?

In both art and science, you learn by experimentation and being rigorous. My sketchbooks are basically a continuation of my lab notebooks. Science teaches you to be observant and very methodical, and I’ve integrated that into my art practice.

For instance, I started keeping marine coral reef aquariums in middle school, and even I went to grad school to study marine drug discovery. That’s how I learn best—by making connections to other things that I understand.

Marine biology is definitely the inspiration for the watercolours. Fish sometimes use colour as a warning, ironically, that also gets them caught, because home aquariums are often installed with black lights to make the fluorescent colours more vibrant.

Also, as someone who’s interested in materials, I feel like being a biochemist in particular, gives you x-ray vision mostly in identifying materials. This thing is made out of fiber, plastic, etc.; those are all molecules and atoms.

Have you had any new developments in one of the mediums you work in?

I had an Art Group (ARTGRP) studio visit where the group asked if I’d considered adding colour to my kirigami. I told them that it’s very difficult to colour those after you form them, because the paper can get wrinkly. Learning about paper at Artspace at Untitled really helped. Collaborating with Emma Difani (printmaker and fellow ARTGRP member) has been great because we each know our practices well and we don’t have to tell one another what to do. We each do our parts and combine them together. When we made a life-size yucca plant last year, we were just thinking about

Cuesta Cortada, 80 in x 56 in x 40 in (variable) screenprint, dye, paper, 2019, A collaboration with printmaker Emma Difani

Lion’s Den, 9 in x 18 in x15 in (variable) screenprint, dye, Strathmore 500 cotton paper, 2019, A collaboration with printmaker Emma Difani

how I would design the shape and how she would get the colours on a flat piece of paper, and how to then cut and fold it. It was an iterative process.

Could you tell us more about ARTGRP, and how you got involved?

I met the ARTGRP founders as they were doing ARTMOVES demonstrations in Downtown OKC, because that’s where my job is. I’d just take my lunch breaks to see all these people and get connected.

ARTGRP started with former art students who felt disconnected from the arts after graduation. As a self-taught artist, the monthly studio visits were very informative.

It’s the same practice in the science community: you have to learn to talk about your work and get feedback. What made me nervous about showing my kirigami was that I hadn’t seen anyone else doing something similar—would it be accepted or not? because eventually I’d like to take bigger steps and get into public art installation.

How has this pandemic affected ARTGRP, and your own practice, respectively?

I’ve been much less productive than I normally would be. All I’ve done are the virtual kirigami workshops, and the ARTGRP Instagram LIVE events.

One of our leadership team members talked about this church group that was doing a day-long relay event, so we adapted that format. We had the artists do demonstrations of their work, studio visits and included artists’ Venmo information for viewers if they wanted to support them directly. We had time slots for each artist, and they were scheduled over a weekend. It’s been a great learning experience for us.

What motivates your teaching in your workshops?

I’ve learned from my ceramics teacher Susan Cromer Yback at House of Clay—and all of my various teachers—how to describe what the process is, in bite-sized pieces. I started doing martial arts after college and they have a system where the senior student eventually becomes the teacher only by teaching on their own. When you get to a certain level you’re supposed to be helping out the less advanced students. I think that that system—like the apprentice and master system—is a great way to learn how to teach.

Any aspirations for the next few years?

I’ve been part of the OKC public [PreQualified] Artist Pool, but have not applied for anything because I feel very intimidated by expensive projects. I’d like to translate the kirigami sculptures into an outdoor installation with more durable material. Learning how to bend metal, cut it. Celebrating nature, especially wildlife in public art installations, I think resonates with a lot of people. n

Mandy Messina is a non-binary, South African artist, writer and educator living and working in OKC. Their work can be found at mandymessina.com

Edited by Liz Blood

Ekphrasis is an ongoing series joining verse and visual art. Here, poet Steve Bellin-Oka responds to a painting by John Wolfe while recalling the life and death of Matthew Shepard, a 21 year-old student who was killed in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in 1998.

Poem after John Wolfe’s “Residence, Anadarko Okla.” for Matthew Shepard

If we think of time as a whole bolt of cloth we cut swatches from, blue cotton that begins slowly to immediately

fray, then for a moment you were the newest well-built thing in the world:

the perfect angle of your peaked roof, the unwarped frames of your windows, the glass so clear it almost isn’t there.

Then those who planned you hanged white curtains, arranged the furniture—

the table in the kitchen with its smooth wood legs, the brown leather loveseat against the dustless living room wall.

The closets grew gray suits, a patterned morning dress with sunflowers, the yellow

still brilliantine and deep twenty years before it faded to newly ripe lemon rind. And the bassinet in the other room upstairs,

the one whose walls they papered with cartoon race cars. As the body does,

when it’s allowed to grow older, the bones of the house eventually will begin to creak, the plumbing to lose in its constant wrestle

to contain the push of water that flows like blood through arteries. But that much

is the future: as the painter puts away her brush, the canvas filled with another well-made thing, the house you grew up in

with its green lawn and shrubs spreading forever out of the frame, no one knows but she

how they will beat you and hang you like a picture on a cattle fence outside of town. No one knows you will not live. No one knows

John Wolfe, Residence, Anadarko Okla., 2019, acrylic on panel, 36” x 36”

John Wolfe was born in Vernon, Texas in 1947. He attended public school in Davidson, OK, college at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, and graduate school at the University of Central Oklahoma. John taught for 35 years in Mid-Del Public Schools and was an adjunct at Rose State College and Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. Now in retirement, John is a full-time studio artist. Steve Bellin-Oka is a 2019–2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry. He is the author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), which won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, as well as two chapbooks, Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017) and Out of the Frame (Walls Divide Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Four Way Review, and have received nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net prize.

Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada’enuxw First Nation/Canada) KanKagawí (The Seam of Heaven), 2018, Glass and wood, Two glass panels, each 8 feet high

new complex will serve Oklahoma City-area students and children, impacting the artistic community into the future.

Rand Elliott’s design for the Oklahoma Contemporary building, with a façade that reflects back Oklahoma’s changing light from sunrises to sunsets to sun-showers, is an attraction in and of itself. To me, the porousness of the façade with nature—boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve in a hazy colored reflection—symbolizes openness and connection. Rather than being a container for art, the center is an organic part of its community.

The beauty of the plains is that no matter where you’re standing, everyone has the same view. Pandemic or not, Oklahoma Contemporary has been working diligently for ten years to give that view to everyone, and we can’t wait to see it. n

Penny Snyder is an avid museum-goer, urban explorer, and writer. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2016 and is the PR & Media Manager for the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Read more of her writing at penny-snyder-writes.squarespace.com.

Leo Villareal (NY), Star Ceiling 2, 2019, LEDs, custom software & electrical hardware, aluminum, 120” x 240” Photo: Alex Marks.

Camille Utterback, Entangled, 2015. Dual channel interactive installation on scrims. Commissioned for Installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo credit JKA Photography, 2015.