Hang around for a little while at Carson House and people start handing you things: a pencil, a sweater, a sprig of lavender, a slice of cake. When I walked up to its hot pink porch one Wednesday last month, the door stood open to the morning sunshine as longtime Tulsa yoga teacher Nicole Peltier prepped the space for a class. Soon, a stream of people started meandering in—community elders, educators, restaurant servers, arts workers—and before long, the two front rooms were packed wall-to-wall. By the time the group was gathering on the floor for a post-class conversation circle, several people had asked my name, offered me coffee and snacks, and smiled at me with faces that glowed after an hour of deep nervous system rejuvenation. I’d never been to Carson House before, but after only an hour it was starting to feel like home. I came back for a clothing swap a couple of weeks later.
Located near the entrance to Riverview’s historic Carlton Place District, the house stands in a neighborhood that’s been a quiet haven for healers, creatives, and spiritual community for generations. But when the artist Anne Pollard James bought this place in 2006—a sort of “show yourself what you can do” move after a divorce—she had no idea what it might become. It turns out there was already a clue to its destiny in the fine print. “It had been zoned as a community house in some past iteration,” Pollard James discovered.
She opened the space as exactly that last year, envisioning it as an extension of a personal art practice that she’s recently taken full time—a practice she’s still discovering the dimensions of. With a sense of style as striking as the visual world of her paintings, she’s tall and friendly and no-nonsense, even about her vulnerabilities. When we spoke, she was just coming down from a huge show at Price Tower in Bartlesville, feeling the uncertainty that can come after a massive outlay of creative energy. “I haven’t totally found my footing after the show,” she admitted. “This is all a new experience for me. I’m just learning what it means to be an artist. And with this house—I feel like I’m finding it with me. It’s all the same process. I have no answers. I just know that I’m in the right space.”
Taking The Plunge
Some people shift into full-time art-making by building a bulletproof business plan; others find a nonprofit umbrella, are super savvy on social media, or depend on a wealthy patron. Pollard James, who is 51, did it the trust-fall way: after decades in the real estate industry, culminating with commercial work in the Arts District, she made a jump into the unknown when she heard the call to art—which came totally unexpectedly. The first murmurs started during a yoga retreat, when she was 47. “My takeaway from it was that I wanted to be more creative,” she said. She started with poetry, then a clay class with Cristiana Prado, then a figure drawing class with her neighbor JP Morrison Lans. She’d never explored visual art before; “I was so annoyed because I couldn’t do anything,” she remembered. “And I was like, this is obviously what I need to do if I can’t do it.” Taking Drawing 101 from Ross Myers at Ziegler’s turned out to be the key to the door of Pollard James’ new life. “I’d give him a kidney,” she said. “He was like, ‘If you can't do something, I'm going to teach you the trick so you can see how to do it.’ It took away whatever mysticism I have around creativity. I’d definitely thought you have to ‘be an artist’ to be an artist.” She started learning to paint right when the pandemic hit, with help from local artist Marjorie Atwood and encouragement from TAF fellow Karl Jones.
One year later, before gallery sitting at Liggett Studio where one of her first paintings was on view, she had an epiphany. “I needed to pursue art,” she realized. “I needed to have it in my life in a permanent, real, focused way. Working within the Arts District, I saw that you can use your art to feed all these ways to make not just a living, but a life. So that was the day I decided I was going to go towards this thing. Two weeks later I was crippled with the most raging self-doubt ever.” But with affirmation from her husband (the musician Brad James) and friends, she took the plunge. Hers had been the more “robust” income in her household, but an intentionally no-frills lifestyle with no kids and some savings made it feasible to trust her intuition and take the financial risk. “There was a moment where I had to say, okay, I have to assume that I'm making nothing. But that's also the reason I wanted to quit my day job: to focus on ‘this is the process.’” (She attempted to go part-time at first, but for her, trying to keep a foot in both worlds meant less-than-satisfactory outcomes in each.)
“I Love, Love A Group Of Kickass Women”
Her commitment to open up space for art in her life soon led to opening up that house she’d bought so many years before. She moved her easels and paints into the property’s back building and got to work. “The clouds parted,” she said. “It made me think, this house is giving me so much, I have to give it away. When I decided that I wanted Carson House to be something creative, I also wanted it to be something that encouraged my art practice, which is totally community-based.” Before long, with its poetry workshops and yoga and art classes, led by community members, the house was just as alive as Pollard James’ paintings. Tulsa’s seeing a movement lately (at Belafonte, WOMPA, The Studio, and more) toward interweaving individual art practices with community life. Carson House takes that one step further: neither the space nor Pollard James’ art were designed as a business venture, but as an embodiment of her faith in the power of community to embolden and support self-trust. “In a perfect world, access is always free,” she said. “Something happened to me with art that I was not expecting. I didn't plan for it.” That’s the kind of kismet (or destiny, or just a turn of the wheel) that the space gives others room to find. As in art, so in life: to follow “the process,” people need each other.
Like in her paintings, it’s mostly, but not exclusively, women in these rooms, which Pollard James works hard to ensure are safe spaces. “The real eye-opener is how many people are just starving for a sense of community,” she said—particularly women, whose experience in public spaces is often marked, she noted, by the difficult paradoxes listed in America Ferrera’s much-quoted Barbie monologue. “I don’t need this to be the Anne Pollard show,” she continued. “I love, love a group of kickass women.” For Lauren Lunsford, who until recently led the long-pose Life Drawing sessions that originated decades ago at Philbrook, shifting the classes from her Rainbowland space into Carson House’s care meant more space could open up in her own life. “Anne is doing such an amazing job and she has this new energy that [the class] needed, and it’s evolving in a new way,” Lunsford said. “I think it’s important that a space like this exists and continues programs like this for artists wanting to practice and connect with other artists.”
“You can’t always go and change the world, but you can make immediate shifts in your community,” Pollard James said. “This whole Carson House experience is [full of] things that selfishly I know I need—and I also think I’m not the only one who needs them. It felt like the more I opened up the space, the more the space opened me up. The more you connect with people, the more open your heart is to that experience, it’s kind of shocking how much you get back.”
