We have seen some art this year, indeed we have. But it’s not over yet. December brings new exhibits on themes I think we can all relate to, from “hidden beauty” to “the American South’s relentless war against women and the queer community” to “WTF is even real??” Tulsa’s artists and curators know what’s up—let their work do its work on you before the holidays creep up.
NEW STUFF
First Friday at Tulsa Artist Fellowship
December 5, 6pm
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Archer Studios + Flagship
In addition to the usual dynamic range of the Fellowship's open studio offerings, this month's First Friday includes a limited preview of awardee Alicia Smith’s film series Toci. Guests will have exclusive access to the set of “Chapter 2: The Axolotl Women,” which features Tonacatecuhtli, the Aztec God of Abundance, expanding Smith’s larger narrative universe where science fiction and Aztec cosmology intersect. In Toci, Indigenous women flee the 1492 Spanish conquest in a pyramid-vessel—Teocalli—that carries them to Mars, creating a postmodern mythos grounded in historical fabrication and cultural resilience.
In the studios’ entry gallery, you'll find music videos from the forthcoming Oklahoma Premiere of New Wave, screening December 6 at Circle Cinema in partnership with Tulsa Film Collective and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Blending classic songs, synths, and lyrics in tiếng Việt, New Wave captures how the rise of a sound sparked a vibrant culture of music, fashion, and late-night dance floors, creating sanctuary and release during a challenging chapter for the Vietnamese diaspora.
“Silent Voices In Sacred Spaces” by Allison Ward
Living Arts of Tulsa, 307 E. Reconciliation Way
December 5-20
From her tooth-rattling noise sets to her devastating performance art to her exceptionally curated group shows, Allison Ward—co-founder of ArtHouse Tulsa—has been one of the most ferocious voices in Tulsa art for many years. Now, as she pursues an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ward is taking her practice to new levels. Her new show is a month-long solo exhibition examining the subjugation of women and LGBTQIA2S+ individuals in Southern Christian denominations. Experience a 9-part video cross, pulpit video performances, recorded testimonies from those raised in the church, and a sound installation of childhood hymns—all within a liminal space installation recreating the rural Oklahoma church of her youth.
“Hidden in Plain Sight” by Kimberly Yates
Tulsa Artists’ Coalition, 9 E. Reconciliation Way
December 5-27
Time to slow down and look closer. In photography that's been exhibited across the Midwest since 2022, Kimberly Yates uses her macro lens to find the micro details that make up the world we tend to take for granted.
The State of Craft 2025
108 Contemporary, 108 Reconciliation Way
December 5-January 24, 2026
This gallery regularly outdoes itself in showing us the best of what regional fine craft artists are up to. The 2025 edition of its annual State of Craft show brings together 34 examples, in materials that range from textiles and wood to clay and mixed media, with forays into jewelry and sculptural furniture. "Storytelling is front and center," says juror Pauline Verbeek, "whether it is a specific personal narrative or the need to share a more universal human experience manifested through imagery, text, and the use of color, both subtle and bold."
“Ancestors & Spirit Guides” by Sharon Allred and Romney Nesbit
Liggett Studio, 314 S. Kenosha Ave.
December 5-18
Quantum theorists and spiritual traditions agree: there's more that makes up "right now" than what we can see. Art is probably better positioned than either science or scripture to help us visualize that possibility. In "Ancestors & Spirit Guides," Sharon Allred’s images explore the psychological myths and idols of our collective past, while Romney Nesbitt’s paintings illustrate the worlds that can become visible when we open our consciousness through meditation and imagine a place beyond this life.
"Unreal" by Jacquelyn Strycker
Positive Space Tulsa, 1324 E. 3rd St.
December 6-20
In "Unreal," Jacquelyn Strycker—a Brooklyn-based artist with a practice merging printmaking, collage, and textiles through the process of risograph printing—presents objects that look like one thing but are decidedly another. These works occupy the space between representation and reality, functioning as ideas of quilts, ideas of textiles, ideas of domestic objects rather than the objects themselves. Strycker’s works maintain this amorphous quality, hovering between categories, refusing to settle into a single identity. “Unreal” invites us to reconsider what we value in objects, and what makes something “real” when authenticity itself has become such a slippery concept.
"Only The Landscape Has Changed: Works by Pentti Sammallahti, Chico Seay & Wesley Stringer"
The Hulett Collection
December 6, 2025-February 14, 2026
The Hulett Collection is the place in Tulsa to see photography that changes how you see. The lyrical, reverent, soft-spoken works in this show consider the textures and rhythms of land, air, water, and all sorts of organic life, revealing vast and intimate worlds within the dimensions of "black and white."
ONGOING
“Drawing Parallels: Connecting Local and Incarcerated Artists Through Creative Exchange”
JustArts Gallery, 320 S. Trenton Ave.
JustArts is a new gallery on Studio Row with a unique mission: it's a community space that amplifies the creative voices of artists who are currently incarcerated across the country. The gallery's exhibitions and programs bring system-impacted artists’ work into public view, build relationships across walls, and ensure that when artwork sells, income goes directly to the artists and their loved ones. JustArts' current show, Drawing Parallels, pairs Tulsa artists with artists in prison through creative dialogue.
Annual Holiday Show
M.A. Doran Gallery
Through December 24
M.A. Doran's annual Holiday Show features a survey of new works by gallery and guest artists—including some of the finest in the region, like Holly Wilson, Otto Duecker, JP Morrison Lans, and Sarah Sullivan Sherrod. This show presents painting, sculpture, fine craft and handmade ornaments, making it a festive stop as you're cruising Brookside this holiday season.
“Wall Flowers” by Patrick Gordon
Philbrook Museum of Art, 2727 S. Rockford Rd.
Through January 3, 2026
If you’ve been in Tulsa longer than about a day, you’ve probably seen Patrick Gordon’s work. His hyperrealistic floral paintings have been hallmarks of Tulsa’s fine art scene for decades; now, this first-ever museum retrospective of his work reveals his career’s full dimensions, and interests that go far deeper than simple decoration. Spanning 50 years, this array of more than 50 paintings includes early watercolors, gigantic oils, portraits and still lifes, and lesser-known but no less extraordinary politically engaged works. A great opportunity to be surprised by an artist you think you already know.
“Monument Eternal” by Le’Andra LeSeur
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
Through January 10, 2026
Monument Eternal began as the artist’s personal reckoning with Stone Mountain, Georgia—the site of the Ku Klux Klan’s 1915 resurgence—through video, sculpture, photography, and sound. Her investigation into American landscapes where racial terror has taken root, and where its memory remains unmarked or distorted, continues now in Oklahoma through her fellowship.
The iteration of Monument Eternal you’ll see at the Flagship shifts focus to the 1911 lynching of Laura Nelson and her son, LD Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma. With no official marker on the site of their lynching, what remains is an online image: gruesome, persistent, and dehumanizing. Through five new sculptural and photographic works, LeSeur creates alternative memorials where quietude and refusal are intentional.
“My practice continuously considers ways in which art can transform violence into something beyond,” LeSeur writes in her artist statement. “Monument Eternal transforms memories of violence, remnants of violence, and even physical embodiments of violence into transcendences.”
"Burning Flags": Photography by Glen E. Friedman
Woody Guthrie Center, 102 E. Reconciliation Way
Through February 15, 2026
Need an infusion of anarchic energy? This is right on time. Photographer Glen E. Friedman’s iconic imagery of early hip-hop, hardcore punk and skateboarding arrives in Tulsa this month, after showings in Paris and Barcelona. Featuring over 50 photos and several audio essays read by the subjects, “Burning Flags” presents images of artists like Ian MacKaye, Ice-T, Tony Alva, Jello Biafra, Chuck D., Alan “Ollie” Gelfand and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels.
