Tour de Quartz
101 Archer
January 3, 2025 – February 28, 2025
Growing up in small-town Oklahoma, I knew what Quartz Mountain was—not the actual state park in the southwestern part of the state, but the esteemed Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute (OSAI) that’s held there each summer. I don’t remember anyone from my high school ever getting accepted to OSAI, though who knows if any of us ever auditioned. It was too intimidating, an inaccessible world at a school that, like a lot of schools across Oklahoma, focused more on football than art or academics.
For the students who do attend, the program is often a game-changer. OSAI is a two-week residential academy for Oklahoma high school students that provides space for them to explore visual, literary, or performing arts. Over 230 students from across the state attend each summer, and classes are taught by artists who’ve won Pulitzer Prizes, Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys—a big deal in a state that always seems to be cutting arts education budgets for public schools. Tour de Quartz is a traveling exhibit of art from the previous summer’s session, showcasing works by students in the drawing, painting, and photography fields.
The work in the show is evocative and impressive—and it’s easy to qualify this statement by adding “especially for high school students,” but that isn’t really fair. Paintings like Moon Road by Edmond’s Mimi Fitzpatrick, Mortality by Clinton’s Maia Stewart, and Whale Fall by Edmond’s Evelyn Tham, among others, demonstrate an advanced commitment to form and nuance. They invite the eye and provide space for reflection, seeming to ask what’s missing in addition to what’s there.