Downtown Parking Garage Concert Series: “Super Imposed”
100 W. 1st St.
July 11, 2024
What’s the point of a downtown parking garage after all the workers go home for the day? What about a plastic bag after it’s done carrying your Granny Smith apples and energy drinks? Or a pile of tree limbs left behind after a storm or a visit from the PSO power line crew? What do we do, honestly, when systems that we were told would sustain us turn out to be crumbling, abandoned, unsustainable?
That got meta pretty fast, I know. But the longer I stood (dripping with sweat, gratefully slurping a strawberry mango ice pop from the Frios truck outside) in the concrete bunker of the 1st and Boulder parking garage during the underground runway event that popped up there last Thursday, the more questions like that—from the immediate to the sociopolitical—kept rising up and hanging together as casually-slash-intentionally as some of the garments on view.
Produced by Oklahoma Fashion Alliance’s Lolly Mclain, Atlas Fielding, and Parker D. Wayne in collaboration with Tulsa Creative Engine and the Downtown Tulsa Partnership, with support from Tulsa Remote and Tulsa FMAC, “Super Imposed” was the latest in a series of conceptually incisive, jubilantly unclassifiable events from OFA over the past year and change. The evening’s official lineup included three sets of music and a fashion show under the umbrella of a new initiative called the Downtown Parking Garage Concert Series. There was some after-party business that went on into the following morning, supported by OFA but not a TCE/DTP/TR/TFMAC thing. (Lots of acronyms, folks: a sign of an evolving creative ecosystem.)
A parking garage is a hell of an acoustic challenge for a musician, but it’s a prime spot for messing around with reverb, as the evening’s first performer, Peter Tomshany, noted on his socials after the show. I got there, thankful for free parking, during the excellent Sega-style “computer music” set by Kid Naps (Henry Roanhorse) that followed. The “concert” portion of the event (which DJ HiddenxDisplay wrapped up) felt like listening to busker music in a New York City subway station, with thwacks and blips bouncing off the walls as the space filled up with people in sequins and overalls who were chill about their multitasking: wave at friend, check chat, check fit, bop to beats, give hug, look for taco truck.
The crowd was heavily but not exclusively Gen Z and young Millennial, full of active artists and kids looking to break in. There’s a multilayered scene being born in Tulsa and it’s a beautiful one, massively diverse and affirming, and the response to this gathering reflected not just the social reach of OFA but the appeal of its approach to … just about everything. (Some of the older attendees looked like they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves, like Facebook sitting in a room with TikTok.)
Everyone’s attention focused quickly as Wayne introduced the runway moment and boom, down the slope came ten models to music by Peyton Flocks, walking into three huge spotlights projected onto the wall of the parking garage by lighting designer Logan Sours. The fashion show featured a collection called BOONIES—described by designers Swan Shekinaa and Icky Split as “cunTry cute from the stixxx” and “a limited brand on its way to the grave by design”—interspersed with pieces by the artist known as C.A.P.