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.
Tragic news has swept the downtown arts scene: the Denver Avenue Boulders are being forcibly removed from the newest, hottest gallery space in the IDL (aka the downtown bus station).
Daring to challenge conceptions of what even the most open-minded person might consider to have artistic merit, this renowned installation achieved the rare feat of making something derived entirely from nature deeply unnatural. The boulders were of such a uniform size and placed so close together in such a neat, pointy line that they became downright perverse, the urban and the wild in an ill-fated marriage, like seeing a bunch of mannequins striking sultry poses at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
And that was before you considered their entirely transparent agenda of making life more hostile for the downtown homeless population, who had previously reclined, conversed, and generally existed on the sidewalks.