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.
So did the city remove these boulders because of a moral awakening, a Christmas Carol-esque visitation by the Ghost of Golden Drillers Past that made officials realize it was time to stop waging war against the unhoused? Hell no! There’s money to be made, folks!
According to the Metropolitan Tulsa Transit Authority, the boulders’ ousting is part of a larger plan to sell the bus station and turn it into “mixed-use space,” real-estate-speak for overpriced apartments on top of fancy little wine bars where you can grab a drink with the girls before a country show at the BOK. By removing the boulders, a goiter on the neck of an otherwise interesting piece of urban architecture, the city is presumably making the sale more straightforward and clearing the way for some city official’s brother-in-law to buy the property at a primo rate.
This is one of those rare moments where capitalism and good sense are kind of aligned, although this feels mostly accidental. These boulders sucked big time and I’m glad they’re gone.
But the future loss of the bus station is sadder news. For the last eight years, I’ve worked at a company with an office directly beside the Denver Avenue Station and have observed from my window the comings and goings of the area, the countless people who use the station to congregate and socialize, to shelter beneath when it’s raining, and to occasionally have fights in the adjacent street. It’s part of the rich fabric of our city and will probably be a less accessible place to navigate once it moves elsewhere downtown, likely to somewhere less convenient.
But what of the boulders, you ask? In an act of ultimate irony, will they themselves become homeless in the wake of this forcible eviction? Worry not for our dear craggy friends. They are to be “reused at municipal stormwater facilities,” no doubt to inspire and impassion the employees of these spaces, who will find themselves lucky to share space with such priceless art.
