It’s not not possible to make great art with no money. Hell, Tulsa artists do it all the time, putting on shows and buying supplies out of personal pockets lined with tips from serving jobs or funds from seasonal teaching gigs. But it sure is nice when a fat check arrives to support an artist’s work: it means that they can take more risks, which leads to more adventurous and powerful art—that they can do the thing they’ve been thinking about for years without skimping on its dimensions or diluting its impact.
So much of the work the Artists Creative Fund has supported since 2023 has been like that. A project of GKFF in partnership with Cache Creates, ACF has lifted up a huge range of Tulsa voices. Think of Oklahoma Fashion Alliance’s 2024 show, the enchanting “Sonic Hum,” No Parking Studios’ neon homage to Black presence on Route 66, Amy Sanders de Melo’s “Invisible Voices,” “The Song of the Council Oak,” Rogelio Esparza’s portrait photography, the Pärlā Citywide Creative Festival, that trippy “Silver Seed” pod in Guthrie Green, and Loren Waters’ documentary Tiger, which won big at Sundance this summer.
ACF announced its new cohort of grantees this week and it’s a list that promises a lot of really rich times ahead for local art—everything from a children’s musical about ADHD, to a documentary about Black firefighters in Tulsa, to albums, workshops, and site-specific performances. Many of these artists (some of whom are also Pickup contributors; here’s to the multitalents out there!) have been putting in the work in Tulsa for years. Grants like this—$10,000 to each artist—are the sort of launchpad that can really make a difference in their lives and careers, and in the larger community that’s going to benefit from their visions.
Tulsa Artist Fellows Get National Recognition; ArtNow Biennial Opens In Oklahoma City
Speaking of the great work and giant career leaps that can come about with strong funding, current and former Tulsa Artist Fellows are making big moves on the national scene. Right now, Colleen Thurston (whose film Drowned Land was awarded Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Circle Cinema Film Festival) and Tali Weinberg are part of a group show at Omaha’s groundbreaking Bemis Center; Elisa Harkins has work in “Exploding Native Inevitable” at Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Utah; Anita Fields is featured in a show at California’s American Museum of Ceramic Art; and Addoley Dzegede’s installation “Passages” is up through next spring at Washington University’s Weil Hall.
These artists are giving Tulsa a real presence in the larger art world, with practices incubated right here in the city. Same goes for the many exceptional locals represented in Oklahoma Contemporary's 2025 ArtNow Biennial, well worth a visit in OKC. The previous ArtNow exhibit, the acclaimed "The Soul Is A Wanderer," was curated by current TAF Fellow Lindsay Aveilhé, who along with Ashanti Chaplin wowed us earlier this year with Drift///Hold. In short: Tulsa-based arts people are going hard not just here but out there too.
It’s Basically Meow Wolf In Enid
With so much arts funding imperiled thanks to the Trump administration’s preference for art that valorizes its version of America, it’s good to see that Oklahoma weirdos are pushing forward.
You might not expect Enid to be a hotbed for immersive art initiatives, but apparently it is. Back in 2022, the city’s Romy Owens launched “Sugar High” as a way to bring people together around art that was accessible, whimsical, conversation-starting—a sort of Meow Wolf experience for a place with no pretensions to being cool. (Tulsa had its own version of such an experience, called “The Experience,” at AHHA before that org went belly up.)
One of the Enid artists involved in “Sugar High,” Ben Ezzell, is keeping the idea going with his company Itinerant Immersive. They've just landed “The Cicada”—a 70-foot-long, 16-foot-wide mobile home converted into an abandoned spaceship by a team of nearly 20 artists—in Oklahoma City, with plans to keep it traveling to towns across the state.
As state government starves rural Oklahoma of internet access, healthcare, education, and water, at least there’ll be food for the imagination close at hand. Even if the image evoked is a creature that goes dormant underground for years at a time, then emerges literally screaming. I don’t know, it sounds like fun to me.
Ike’s Chili Deserves Bomb Ass Signage
Route 66-boosting projects sometimes get the side-eye here at The Pickup HQ. We’re more of the Portlyn Houghton-Harjo persuasion when it comes to the Mother Road: it’s complicated, not necessarily in a bad way, and not necessarily in a way that deserves the relentless hype machine that’s gearing up to attract tourist dollars in advance of the Route 66 Centennial next year.
But we unequivocally love to see Ike’s Chili (which opened in 1908 and has operated on 11th Street since 2014) get its flowers—namely, a $50,000 “Backing Historic Small Restaurants” grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express. One of three Oklahoma spots to receive this grant, this century-old Tulsa institution plans to snag some neon signage and “dress up the front of the building, and try to restore it to how it looked when it was built in the 1920s.”
Fortunately, Ike’s resides on a part of Route 66 that’s not absolutely jacked up right now thanks to seemingly endless road construction, so hopefully we’ll still be able to grab a bowl for lunch even once renovations start. In the meantime, we’ll be revisiting this epic Mark Brown story from This Land about Ike’s place in Tulsa’s surprisingly combative chili history.
