“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.”
As it turns out, Tulsa always had a population of irregulars, many working in odd corners of the University of Tulsa, through the early Tulsa Artists’ Coalition, and at Living Arts, which celebrates its 55th anniversary this year. The current exhibit at the gallery — “Living,” on view through August 24 — brings some of that lineage into view.