The Pickup's Culture coverage is brought to you by Tulsa Artists' Coalition Gallery, 40 Years of Empowering Tulsa Artists. Visit TAC Gallery to see American Highway Revisited by VC Torneden and Melinda Harvey Green, June 5 – 27, 2026.
Built between 1937 and 1948 and adjacent to Route 66, Ed Galloway’s Totem Pole Park shows up on nearly every list of out-of-the-way Oklahoma attractions. Its central feature is a 90-foot-tall structure designed as a tribute to the American Indian, covered in iconography that Galloway largely drew, it’s said, from photographs in National Geographic.
As usual in Oklahoma, there’s much more to the story. In her new book, TOTEM: As Monument and Archive, Tulsa-born, New York-based itinerant artist Erin Turner and an array of artists and historians dig into the history of Galloway’s totem pole—which Turner helped restore starting in 2015—as well as into larger questions about monuments as sites for storytelling, commemoration, and complicated histories. The art writer, critic, and activist Lucy Lippard has called the book “simultaneously sympathetic and analytical,” noting that “the collected texts address the contradictions between stereotyping and good intentions, entangled histories and local politics.”