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.”
TOTEM marks a return to book publishing for This Land Press—which, full disclosure, also publishes The Pickup—and ahead of its launch event on May 30 at the Center for Public Secrets we sat down with Turner to talk about the book, her art practice, preservation and memory, and the many voices that are present in “monumental” spaces.
How did this book come about?
Erin Turner: The public program that the book is based on was in 2023. Jeremy Charles, Apollonia Piña, and I sat down to talk about who would be the voices that should be involved in the conversation. The idea for a publication was always present, but after figuring out what that was going to look like, [the process involved] writing a framing essay, then having the transcribed lectures, and wanting it to be a very photographic-heavy piece. That then became a conversation with [designer] Ryan McGahan, who started framing that process. We already had so much beautiful research from all the slideshows that were compiled [for the lectures], so it was really just thinking about how to get the photo releases for the majority of that work. And then it just kind of snowballed—wanting to do it well and make it really beautiful.