Wall Flowers: Patrick Gordon Paintings
Philbrook Museum of Art
through January 3, 2026
You’ve still got time to drop into Patrick Gordon’s world at Philbrook, and I can’t recommend a more restorative way to end this year. Wall Flowers, a luxurious retrospective spanning the legendary Tulsa artist’s 50-year career, closes January 3, and it’s so worth making space in your holiday calendar to visit. Especially if you’re feeling a little scraped and raw, take one dose of this show and you’ll be all set on beauty and pleasure for a long time.
I keep coming back to Wall Flowers in my mind, long after first seeing it; it’s like drinking a draft of something delicious and bright, a gorgeous sangria or a rich red wine. It’s also, for all its massive scale, incredibly cozy, thanks to the masterful curation of the Philbrook team, which has built what amounts to a house inside a museum that was originally a house. This nesting effect is both charming and astute, since so much of Gordon’s work has to do with close-drawn, intimate spaces where massive stories unfurl through the smallest details—domestic zones where bold creative light shines through.
With its multiple jewel-toned rooms and wallpapered walls with little openings cut into them, Wall Flowers feels like a life-size theatre set that you can walk around inside of. One room features an overstuffed floral couch, next to which Gordon kept regular live-painting studio hours during the run of the exhibit. This sensitive show is as much about the artist as about the artist’s work—which, for a man who paints 10 hours a day, every day, is an appropriate and beautiful tribute. But it's also a space of abundant generosity: peeking through those “windows” in the walls, one can imagine oneself in one’s own home, seeing many-layered scenes and phases of life from a single place.
Gordon grew up in a creative home in Claremore and landed at the University of Tulsa in the 1970s alongside a cadre of outside-the-norm Oklahoma artists who found their own way, during a war-haunted time, in the committed and passionate process of art. This show introduces him with jubilant florals, a trio of black-and-white photographic portraits, and a series of watercolors whose patterns and palettes feel like my deepest, most treasured 1980s media memories. A full-to-bursting cabinet of Gordon’s memorabilia, artfully arranged, stands like a diorama of a life in which beauty, humor, labor, learning, and love dwell comfortably together.