At the end of last year, I said I wanted to see “more art with teeth.” 2025 is opening with a big ol’ bite in that regard. I started my Year In Art with the incendiary “Waking The Witch” at Living Arts last month, and this month’s gallery openings show no sign of letting up.
When the world is falling apart, in between doing what we can by making calls and showing up to protests, making time for art is its own act of resistance. Art is autonomy, defiance, connection. Art is radical expression—a movement against the silencing and gaslighting that runs rampant through political movements bent on control. In a time like this, listening to the voice of an individual creator is one of the most empowering things you can do.
You can find a full list of First Friday events in the Arts District here. And here are some of the voices I’m most excited to listen to this First Friday (and First Saturday!) and throughout the month:
“Wordplay” by May Yang
Liggett Studio, 314 S. Kenosha Ave.
Opening Friday, 5-8pm
Tulsa’s May Yang—the founder of Flash Flood Print Studios—makes gestural, intensely saturated art using a language of color and shape and movement that hits right in the sweet spot of my brain. It’s “abstract,” but that doesn’t mean unemotional or inaccessible: quite the opposite. The relief paintings in her solo show, “Wordplay,” draw from typography and handwriting and come out of her experience as a first-generation Asian American in Oklahoma, where her frustration around communication barriers inspired a creative journey toward reconciling different layers of language.
“Words exist at the heart of each work I create,” she writes. “These source words are digitally cut, resized, and obscured into new compositions, resulting in paintings that are vibrantly colored, active in composition, and reminiscent of a hidden language. The physical act of painting serves as a cathartic and compulsive ritual. The act of continually redrawing the composition (digitally, in tracing, and finally in paint) is integral to the process, mirroring the degradation of communication over time.”
“Backstories” by Doug Cannell
108 Contemporary, 108 Reconciliation Way
Opening Friday, 6-9pm