Editor's Note: Famed Oklahoma architect Bruce Goff commissioned a young artist named Olinka Hrdy from Prague, Oklahoma, to create murals for the Riverside Studio (also known as the Spotlight Theatre) he designed in 1929. In this story, which originally appeared in This Land on September 15, 2011, Holly Wall goes in search of the artist—and the murals, whose whereabouts are unknown.
One of Oklahoma’s great mysteries, either unknown to or ignored by most of its populace, is what became of a collection of nine murals created for Patti Adams Shriner’s Riverside Music Studio in Tulsa.
The designer of those murals, Olinka Hrdy, is another mystery altogether.
Famed architect Bruce Goff designed the Riverside Studio, which was built in 1929 atop a hill on Riverside Drive near Houston Avenue, facing the Arkansas River. The two-story white stucco structure, which houses the Tulsa Spotlight Theatre—presenter of the 58-year-old melodramas The Drunkard and The Olio, as well as various children’s plays—is one of the city’s favorite architectural gems, the one we point to as a prime example of the Art Deco we pride ourselves on.
The thing we fail to mention is that it once boasted the country’s first example of modern abstract decoration.
Goff designed the studio for Shriner, his music teacher, and commissioned Prague, Oklahoma artist Olinka Hrdy, a student at the University of Oklahoma, to create its décor, a set of murals inspired by musical evolution.
Geometric in pattern and composed of bright, bold colors, the murals signified various forms of music: primitive, vocal, piano, symphonic, choral, string, and modern. Five feet wide and 13 feet long, the paintings decorated the studio’s recital hall, situated above the air vents and running the length of the wall until they met the ceiling, where they made a sharp 90-degree turn and continued on for another foot.
The murals were Hrdy’s first foray into abstraction, and they launched her artistic career. Frank Lloyd Wright noted “something good” in them when he invited her to Taliesin East, the summer home he used to educate architecture students.