The Satanic Temple of New York unveiled on Monday designs for a Satanic monument on the steps of the Oklahoma State Capitol. The edifice, featuring plenty of occult symbolism and smiling children, is proposed for the site adjacent to the capitol’s controversial Ten Commandments statue.
Oklahoma
Posted inArt
This Museum Kills Fascists
OKLAHOMA CITY — Is this land really made for you and me? That was the original tone of doubt at the end of Woody Guthrie’s classic folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” and now anyone can see its original lyrics exhibited below a halo of illuminated guitars in the new Woody Guthrie Center.
Posted inArt
After the Oil’s Gone: Turning a Boomtown’s Forgotten Downtown into an Arts Center
The new downtown satellite of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa is part of a reinvigorating of the Oklahoma city’s downtown.
Posted inArt
Finding Hidden Stories in Tombstone Art
OKLAHOMA CITY — Military cemeteries seem incredibly uniform with the simple headstones showing little more than rank, name, the dates of life, and a symbol of religion. Yet there are still some hidden messages in the stones. This is especially true in a place like Fort Sill, where Buffalo Soldiers, American Indian POWs, and Army soldiers going back to the 19th century are buried.
Posted inArt
The Cubist Cowboy Rodeo
OKLAHOMA CITY — Both Cubism and the cowboy rodeo rose to prominence in the early 20th century, and their wrangling of energy into one clashing place is a shared kinetic spirit. Yet Wayne White’s massive mechanical puppets may be the first art to really embrace their kindred energy.
Posted inArt
An Evolving Art Oasis on the Great Plains
OKLAHOMA CITY — One of the most meditative art museum experiences is out in the middle of the Great Plains, in a place you would likely never think to look.
Posted inArt
The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne Talks About the Womb, Damien Hirst, Acid, and Yoko Ono
“I’m mostly a visual artist, I think,” Wayne Coyne told me in a recent phone conversation. That the frontman of The Flaming Lips, one of the biggest experimental rock groups out there, sees himself as a visual creator more than a musician is not too surprising. This is after all the band that’s landed a UFO on stage, made one of the weirdest cosmic horror holiday films of all time with Christmas on Mars, and regularly starts its concerts in a flurry of confetti with Coyne himself rolling in a hamster ball over the crowd. (And it’s not only their recent work, just look at this concert video from 1996 of “Abandoned Hospital Ships” and watch the swirling DIY light installation pulse on with the crescendo.)
Posted inArt
Space-Age Architecture in an Unexpected Place
Like ghosts of a future that never arrived, the United States is littered with space age relics that landed in the 1940s to 1960s in the form of diners, banks, motels, and other commercial architecture. While the futuristic style definitely made its mark on the big coastal cities, like with Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center in New York and Los Angeles International Airport’s Theme Building, it was also popular in a much more unexpected locale: on the Mars-like red earth of Oklahoma. Despite being a rather conservative place, the state fostered some pretty wild architecture, and you can still see its remnants as quiet oddities in the cityscapes. Oklahoma City especially has wonderful examples of this retrofuture trend, known as “Googie” architecture.
Posted inArt
Oklahoma Zoo Transforms Their Animals into Artists
Sure, humans tend to be the most dexterous of the animals, with their fancy thumbs and articulated motor skills, but can any people artists be as adorable as Speedy the three-banded armadillo? Unlikely. The South American mammal, whose defining skill is curling into a ball, is one of the many creatures creating art at the Oklahoma City Zoo as part of their “Art Gone Wild” program that uses painting as an avenue of animal engagement.
Posted inArt
Beyond the Curio: A Native American Artist Who Never Quite Breaks Free
Woody Crumbo spent six decades of the mid-20th century promoting Native American art to the mainstream, where often it was seen as a novelty or niche by wealthy collectors. Through printmaking, he mass produced his depictions of animals, dancers, and other vibrant images so that anyone could afford his work. Yet despite his prolific career, which included participating in hundreds of exhibits, painting murals inside the US Department of Interior, and having hundreds of his pieces acquired by museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, Crumbo’s art has, somewhat ironically, become a niche interest, often overlooked even when his influence in bringing Native American work into the contemporary art world remains a powerful presence.
Posted inArt
Oklahoma Art Is OK!
Ever since I moved to New York, I’ve been telling people that great contemporary art is coming out of my homestate of Oklahoma. Benrimon Contemporary in Chelsea is finally bringing some evidence to New York in the group show Red Country Pictures. The exhibit focuses on one particularly influential little college on the plains, East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.
