“Living”
Living Arts of Tulsa
Through Aug. 24, 2024
I’m not sure how, growing up in the Tulsa burbs, I got so obsessed with the fringes of art. Maybe it was through my mom, a musician, who hooked pre-teen me up with the arts programming on the Bravo channel, where I first got a glimpse of people like Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, John Cage — the whole 20th-century lightning storm of contemporary practice.
These artists seemed worlds away from where I was living. And then I found out about Living Arts.
Going to its New Genre Festivals during my high school and college years was a revelation. I’d been to Philbrook and Gilcrease and theatre and ballet, but this was different: I never knew what I was going to experience, and that was the draw. Later, coming back to Tulsa after years in New York City, I found at Living Arts a little bit of what I’d found out there — art that stood in a thrilling, uneasy relationship with the expected, the predictable, the “normal.”