Ever since I've moved to the States, I keep being surprised at the amount of art one can find here! Just when you think you've seen it all, there's a new art center, a rediscovered work or a whole collection waiting to be admired... Having read about the new Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, I decided that our next family trip HAD to be to Oklahoma City. Then I waited a year. And after just 3 hours in the car (which is a short road trip for Texas standards), we arrived at our hotel, the 21c Museum Hotel Oklahoma City on Friday night. Is there a better destination for an art aficionado? I don't think so.
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The lobby of 21c Museum Hotel OKC
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The museum / hotel does not only have a considerable permanent collection, but it also hosts temporary exhibitions, the current one being "Seeing Now" (plus two others). The art shown there as well as the permanent collection are - in my opinion - very good representations of today's art scene. The majority of the works are openly critical of political and social circumstances and are executed by artists from various cultural backgrounds. Internationality and its exploration and a shift away from the abstract back to the figurative are very obvious as well as the move from the personal, subjective to a more general, all-encompassing art. Having studied art history at the beginning of the 21st century I have to say - this is not the art I remember from when I was younger (the sound of this sentence!) and I admire my generation for pushing toward this direction.
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| Heliographies by Graciela Sacco, 2012 & 2015 |
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| Hank Wills, 'Raise Up', bronze, 2014 |
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| Peter Demetz, 'L'Incontro', Lime wood, 2012 |
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| Steve Mumford, 'Empire', oil on linen, 2010 |
On Saturday, we made our way to the Contemporary Arts Center, an extraordinary building:
The main exhibition right now is Ed Ruscha's 'OKLA', dedicated to - you guessed it - the place he grew up in. The multimedia pieces shown here mostly focus on Ruscha's view of the American identity and industry. His criticism of the societal decay is subtle, but present.
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| Our Flag, 2017 |
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| Chocolate Room, 1970 |
Oklahoma City has even more art to offer. The OKC Museum of Art, for example, that we will have to visit another time, and an abundance of amazing murals out of which we were able to explore just a fraction on Sunday, our last day:
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| Plaza District, home to a big variety of amazing murals |
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| at the back of the Factory Obscura building |
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Plaza Walls project
If you need to know more about all the murals, this is the best blog post I've found on this topic! |
Have you been to OKC yet? Do you want to?
Talk to you soon,
J.
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