Tulsa’s a place where, whether you know it or not, you’ve probably crossed paths with an artist recently. Casual proximity to creative workers is just the way it is here, one of the gifts of living in a city this size. The guy sitting one booth over at Family Thai? A musician, grabbing a bite before a gig. The woman behind me at the post office? A dancer, who just finished a run of performances at the TPAC. These artists usually aren’t celebrities (although that does happen). They’re our neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, and their work among us reflects and reimagines the city every day.
Case in point: a cyanotype photo that wraps the bag of coffee I've picked up at downtown’s Coracle Coffee. The image makes me pause for a second. It’s abstract but somehow familiar, a flicker of indigo and white like sun filtered through leaves, or maybe a room filled with fragrant smoke, an impression of a fleeting, indefinable moment made by light and time.
The beans inside this bag have made a long journey to the Cherokee-owned Coracle, where you can buy them, all the way from the Shone Coffee Farm on Ethiopia's Unchu Mountain, a 500-acre expanse of rain-fed native forest. It takes a year-round staff of 10 and 100 seasonal pickers to run this farm (which also includes a clinic and a school) and hand-harvest, sort, and dry the beans.
Midrib Coffee’s purveyor, Eyakem Gulilat, never set out to be a coffee importer. He’s an Oklahoma-based photographer, an urban planner, and a current Tulsa Artist Fellow whose culminating project involved performing the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony 200 times in living rooms, galleries, and churches across the U.S. That work, called Impermanent Presence, led him to return to Ethiopia, his home country and the place where coffee was first found, for the first time in 37 years. The journey culminated in the filming of a documentary called Sacred Grounds and the launch of Midrib Coffee. The name references the central vein on the back of a leaf, a vein that reminded Gulilat of the way his coffee ceremonies were creating conversation.
“The aroma of the roasted coffee changed the room that I was preparing the coffee in. The mood changes, people's attention changes,” he told me. “The Ethiopian coffee ceremony, even though it is very temporary, questions that built environment and makes it anew. Most people who have never had the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, when they enter into that space, they become completely new in that space, even though they've lived in America for so long, because of the way I'm interpreting that landscape within these Ethiopian placemaking methodologies. It becomes a totally different territory.”
Through a central vein, an authentic experience shared in common, many histories can meet and open to something that shifts perspectives and possibilities. Coffee beans from Ethiopia become something other than a colonial commodity. They link global and personal stories in the space of a cup, reimagining what it means to enter an Ethiopian space within the context of the American West. It’s the difference, Gulilat said, between the traditional clay jebena and the chuck wagon coffee pot on a frontier campfire, or between the “Ethiopian” label displayed in a fancy coffee shop and the experience of sharing a drink poured in a direct line through someone who is Ethiopian, Oklahoman, and human all at once.