I don’t know how I’ve lived here my whole life and never noticed the ARCO building at 6th and Cincinnati. It’s one of downtown’s most stunning examples of the Zig-Zag and Streamline styles of late Art Deco architecture, built in 1949 for the University of Tulsa law school and later home to oil concerns like the Service Pipeline Company. When I walked up to its front door on a recent weekend, I spotted steel buckets and heavy curtains through the ground floor windows—part of the building’s current renovation into apartments, I thought at first. But these signs of transformation aren’t industry. They’re art: a new link between Tulsa and the wider world.
These objects are part of an exhibit called “Drift///Hold,” which features work by artists Warren Realrider, Nathan Young, Le’Andra LeSeur, Yatika Fields, and Ashanti Chaplin. Turning the corner into this show from the ARCO building’s marble lobby, it crossed my mind that there’s something delicious about a former oil company headquarters housing art that ranges across themes of nature, ancestral wisdom, and the portals between physical and metaphysical realities.
“Drift///Hold” is the first offering from the new contemporary art platform Central Standard, through which co-founders and curators Ashanti Chaplin and Lindsay Aveilhé hope to amplify the work of Tulsa-based contemporary artists and connect them with the global art world. Both Oklahoma-born, Chaplin and Aveilhé bring over 30 years of combined experience at art institutions worldwide to Central Standard. Chaplin is a Tulsa Artist Fellowship alum, a performance and installation artist, and formerly the inaugural Curator of Public Engagement at Dia Art Foundation in New York. Aveilhé is a new TAF fellow whose recent work includes editing the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Catalogue Raisonné and curating “The Soul Is A Wanderer” at OK Contemporary.
In conversations with local and international artists over the past year, they noticed a need for more spaces in Tulsa to highlight what Aveilhé calls the “really, really next-level” contemporary art being created here, especially art on a large scale like the installations in “Drift///Hold.” “We have some really great places to show work,” she says, noting that Positive Space has been an amazing addition to the local scene. “We kind of contrast ourselves to our museums, which are working in a range of time frames (so it's not all contemporary), and to [other art spaces] that are serving our local artists very well. We wanted to step outside of both of those things and create something a little bit different.”
As Tulsa strengthens its position as a place where groundbreaking contemporary art is happening, it’s a matter of scaling up the places where that art can be seen. “Ashanti and I come from contemporary museum or contemporary art backgrounds,” Aveilhé says. “Because of our connections to different institutions across the world, we thought that having exhibitions where we could invite people in from outside and really introduce ... an identity to the work being made in Tulsa and in Oklahoma would be beneficial to everyone working here.” When visitors from the Tate Museum’s acquisition team came to Tulsa recently, for instance, “Drift///Hold” was here for them to view.
While the artists in this inaugural exhibit are all Tulsa-based and TAF-affiliated, Aveilhé says that as it moves forward Central Standard will be a hub for wide-ranging collaborations and for shows that bring together emerging and established artists from Oklahoma and beyond. “It's really about continuing, with others in this community, to elevate together, to find these gaps where we can all complement each other in all the ways we're serving artists,” she says.
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It was a challenge to find a location for this exhibit, Aveilhé told me. Art like this needs space and height: not easy commodities to come by. Until it finds a permanent location, Central Standard will continue looking for allies in the local community like the one they found in Jackie Price of Price Family Properties, who quickly agreed to host “Drift///Hold” on the ARCO building’s ground floor when Chapman and Aveilhé came calling.
When she learned that the building’s exterior motifs were meant to evoke the Arkansas River—green stone for its shores, carvings that represent its grasses—Aveilhé says she was amazed by that link to the themes of the show. (Is it coincidence or some kind of cosmic gift that the forward slashes in the exhibit’s title call right back to a flower design you see as you come in the ARCO’s building’s front door?) The confluence led me to think about Oklahoma’s natural environment, the energy that fuels this city, and the multiple meanings embedded in the words “drift” and “hold”: movement and pause, flow and containment, precarity and preservation.
I’ve seen work by all these artists in scattered exhibitions around town the past few years; seeing them all in one place really does maximize their impact. In this gigantic room, viewers have space to roam around these pieces and see them in conversation with each other and with the Tulsa that rushes by outside the windows.
Warren Realrider’s Kicka â Tasa: West Bank Says___ embeds subtle sound recordings from Zink Lake Dam within steel pails that contain elements taken from the Arkansas River. Two parallel rows of pails contain river water, earth and cottonwood leaves from the river’s bed and banks, polyester sinew (used for fishing or hunting), and city water. Realrider has placed the more synthetic elements at the ends of these rows; as you move from one end toward the center, you arrive at the river water itself, then the cycle begins in the other direction, moving through earth and leaves and sinew toward city water at the other end. The layout suggests a dining table, a communal experience of what our river tells us.
Just beyond the last pails of city water stands That body of (a reflection of the sky) by Le’Andra LeSeur, a massive assemblage of inkjet prints, collaged artifacts, sound, and 13 channels of video, lit with a vivid red that picks up the orange of the sinew in Realrider’s work. This piece is an overwhelm of images, textures and movements; its flood of visual and auditory inputs mirrors the flood of water (and perhaps grace) in the baptismal imagery seen throughout the piece. Like a soul moving toward renewal, it changes in front of your eyes as the colors and shadows shift. Every image speaks to every other across its span: reaching hands, singing mouths, the glint of gold, the gentle shapes of flowers, clouds, bodies, some tucked away, some foregrounded, all part of the same urgent push toward transformation. The audio starts as a minimal hum of ritual music and crescendos through a powerful poem by LeSeur into a storm of sound.
In Ashanti Chaplin’s two installations—Sediment as Reliable Narrative: Shroud and Sediment as Reliable Narrative: Sail—only a memory of water is present. Heavy hanging fabric pools into Arkansas River sand, so that you can barely tell where one merges with the other. In Shroud, which you can walk through, traces of gestures mark mounds of sand within the fabric, like an archaeological record or the delicate work of a child’s meandering hand. These pieces suggest portals, landings, passages—even the Middle Passage, Aveilhé says. They’re an impressive continuation of the work Chaplin showed here last year, which brought dirt and dust into conversation with weighted structures like boxes, obelisks, and beaded curtains.
Yatika Fields made Double-Headed Effigy Bowl, Solstice Moon specifically for “Drift///Hold.” It’s the only painting in the show, but it more than matches the dimensionality of the installations. Fields did a series of effigy bowl murals during the pandemic; where those bowls free-floated on their outdoor walls, this one exists in a whole cosmos within the edges of a canvas. A tumult of legs and stars and water pours into and out of the bowl, which rides like a canoe under a teeming night sky.
Maybe the stillest point in “Drift///Hold,” ironically, is Nathan Young’s Roadman, which stands under a series of banners titled Black Flag for Imaginary Peyote Chapter 1. “Roadman” is a name for a priest in the Native American Church; here, this figure is a cloaked form with the sound of a revving motorcycle engine coming out from under it. Is it kneeling or riding? Praying or driving? Paused in a trance or moving faster than light? The long train spread out behind it is both ecclesiastical and psychedelic, and Young’s banners—some of which were recently shown at New York’s Art Omi—complete this ritual space with meditations on the spirituality of peyotism, which has informed his work as a noise artist for many years. (If you have an OG “Peyote Tapes” T-shirt, you’re one of the lucky ones.)
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With their meditations on elemental and human change, these truly next-level pieces speak to turning points that are both eternal and immediate, global and local. As Central Standard draws the eyes of the art world to Oklahoma artists, it also creates more space for Tulsans to consider issues that directly affect the lives of people living here. “We really want to get artists on the radar not only of outside people, but also more people in town,” Aveilhé says. “We want to continue to place art as a higher priority for people. I know there's a lot of things that need attention, especially in Oklahoma. And we think that art is kind of a throughline, that work created by a lot of our contemporary artists is really touching on all of these urgent needs as well.”
Tulsans can experience “Drift///Hold” at an opening reception Wednesday evening, which will include a performance by Warren Realrider in dialogue with Molly Bullock, whose Watershed series shines much-needed light on concerns around the Arkansas River. The exhibit, presented in partnership with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, is open through March 29, with gallery hours Thursdays through Saturdays from 12pm to 5pm. Come for the art; stay (in the space’s comfy lounge areas) for post-viewing meditation. When you walk back out through the ARCO building’s marble lobby, through the river flora doors, you’ll carry the new current of Oklahoma’s contemporary art with you.
