Lauren Henson: “DIVA” & Faith Green: “The Tales Of A Girl Rabbit”
Living Arts of Tulsa
December 21, 2024
I went to a lot of art shows in Tulsa in 2024. And I noticed something: the clearer a gallery is about what it’s doing, the stronger its exhibits tend to be. Vision matters, and even more than vision—specificity. Point of view. Guts. Looking at Living Arts’ 2025 schedule, I’m happy to see several exhibits coming up that look more robust, more pointed, more “contemporary” than ”DIVA” by Lauren Henson and “The Tales Of A Girl Rabbit” by Faith Green, the two shows the gallery selected to close out its year in December.
Programming an exhibit of fun ladies’-empowerment art right before the holidays makes a certain kind of sense. The pieces in these shows would have made amazing Christmas presents for, say, a young woman getting her first apartment, or an aunt celebrating her retirement, or maybe just a huge Madonna fan. And they might have hit differently if, say, Kamala Harris had won the election.
As it was, in the aftermath of a majority of white women voting for Trump, I was underwhelmed by the invitation to reflect on the ways in which famous women like Queen Elizabeth II, Jane Austen, Lucille Ball, Frida Kahlo, the Statue of Liberty, and Jackie Kennedy—much less a woman cavorting around Oklahoma with a rabbit mask on—were “a testament to” something or other.