I’m not here to be grumpy about First Fridays (not today, anyway). Open gallery doors, quality art, plenty of places to eat, special events at established spaces—delightful. But for a while now I’ve been wondering: where’s all the weird stuff that used to be part of these monthly deals? Where’s the next generation of messy buskers, mimes, performance art, and guerilla installations?
It pleases me to report that the fringe element is creeping back into the Arts District. This past First Friday, performance artist Shiloh Heart set up in the back of a U-Haul truck with a piece called “Apology”: people could come one at a time into the truck, where the artist knelt at their feet and offered them an apology, a flower, and a moment of spontaneous, genuine connection. Down the street, Trueson Daugherty came up with a “Creative Spirit” adoption event, offering little googly-eye-pipe-cleaner friends that came with plastic habitats, bedding, and care instructions. Street dance styles from across the region spilled across the Guthrie Green stage at the 2v2 dance battle. And Austin Gober and Val Esparza’s show at Living Arts, while not technically guerilla, delivered some very useful reflections on our distorted reality.
It’s not just in the Arts District, either. The next day was Cyberfest, which Henry Roanhorse Gray wrote about for The Pickup. The day after that, I saw Anna Puhl and Ben Morgan’s brilliantly original, bloody, moving, hilarious independently produced play called “The Dead Guy In The Pool” at Studio 308. One Aux, a bastion of outsider music since 2023, has new stickers that bring the request home: “more weird sounds please.”
Fringe events like these tend to be haphazardly funded, whether through drumming up donations and sponsorships, resource-sharing, bartering, or other such practices that have kept art growing between the cracks of bureaucratic spaces for centuries. And they’re often marked by an especially supportive, honest, and inclusive energy. Unlike some creative provocations Tulsa’s seen in the past, these current projects don’t tend to have a classically punk “let’s tear it all down” vibe, though that spirit’s in the room. The thrust is more like, “it’s all torn down already, so let’s get creative about how to live together in a broken world.”