The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is sponsored by Brut Hotel.
Back in 2020, just weeks after George Floyd was murdered, with protests surging around the nation, Donald Trump descended on Tulsa during Juneteenth weekend for his ill-fated COVID-spreader rally. It was the height of the pandemic, and artists, like everyone else, were at a boiling point. On the day of Trump’s rally, local protestors and artists took to the streets, parading through downtown with giant figures straight out of the lineage of Bread & Puppet.
Yatika Fields remembers the puppet-making workshop he and other Tulsa artists organized before that weekend as an event that “allowed space to create, talk and express feelings and work through these questions, anger, and grief.”
“The workshop helped bring people together, create and use their hands through a time of questions and anxiety, but also talk with one another,” Fields told me. “It was difficult because of COVID-19 protocols, but in safety, we carried on and were able to use the objects and puppets made to demonstrate the power of collectivity in the face of fear and danger.”
That same weekend, local activists draped the Black Wall Street Memorial with a tarp—an undeniably creative action intended to prevent visiting Republican politicians from getting a photo op with it.1 Citizens painted “Black Lives Matter” on Greenwood Avenue, only to see the street later “resurfaced” by the City of Tulsa. The next year, initiatives like the Greenwood Art Project, Fire in Little Africa, and the Woody Guthrie Center’s exhibit “Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom” activated the community during the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. ArtHouse Tulsa continued infiltrating Tulsa with game-changing DIY house shows. Joseph Rushmore’s "Commentary on the Apocalypse” smoldered at the Center for Public Secrets in the aftermath of January 6, 2021. This furious spurt of creative action was galvanizing, cathartic, and clarifying—a much-needed infusion of powerful images and voices into Tulsa’s often cautious culture.
In the fall of 2025, Bread & Puppet itself came through Oklahoma City. The legendary radical theatre troupe, founded in 1963 and based in Vermont, put on a politically outspoken (and also beautiful) show that reminded me how long it had been since I’d seen its like around here. Where were the explicitly political performances, the guerilla installations about the Heritage Foundation or anti-trans legislation, the anti-ICE resistance murals in Tulsa?