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Tulsa Artist Fellowship Champions Social Practice and Community

Tulsa Artist Fellowship Champions Social Practice and Community

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A group of pink lights on display AI-generated content may be incorrect.
A group of pink lights on displayAI-generated content may be incorrect.
Installation Image of “Earthbound.” Photographed by Dan Farnum. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Since its establishment through the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2015, Tulsa Artist Fellowship has been a place of community-building and socially engaged reflection, championing mid-career artists seeking to deepen their research-driven practices in the regional context of the South Central states. Situated outside major art metropolitans such as Los Angeles and New York and in dialogues with local histories, practices, and communities in Oklahoma and beyond, Tulsa Artist Fellowship celebrates unsung stories and uplifts sidelined voices within contemporary art. Particularly, the organization’s core program, three-year-long on-site fellowships that come with generous stipend for production support, subsidized studio, and living expense, has been a coveted residency many artists aspire to be part of.

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2024 Open House. Photography by Dylan Johnson. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship. 

One of the Fellowship’s current residents, multidisciplinary artist and poet Le’Andra LeSeur, is developing new bodies of works concerned with her complex feelings about the social architecture of anti-black racism in the South and its concomitant psychical and material effects on black embodiment. For example, during the first year of her residency, LeSeur’s research into the erasure of black histories at sites such as the Confederate Memorial Carving (a relief sculpture of three Confederate leaders) at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, a vacation destination she and her family enjoyed visiting growing up, generated her poetically pensive solo exhibition Monument Eternal, which debuted at Pioneer Works in New York last year and will travel to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust soon. Tulsa’s geographical proximity to the state of Georgia where her mother and other black communities reside and other Southern states where black histories of resistance and perseverance offers a much-needed grounding for LeSeur’s research-intensive practice. The open space of northeastern Oklahoma allows for more expansive and liberatory explorations of site-specific performances, a core tenet of the artist’s practice, as well. Slowing down and zooming in on her explorations of black queer joy, grief, and resistance and respond to the troublesome racist history of Tulsa, LeSeur has become more intentional with thinking about the poetry of space and placemaking that feels more monumental. In the meantime, she will keep visiting museums, archives and libraries in Tulsa and Oklahoma through Tulsa Artist Fellowship’s institutional collaboration and partnerships, investigating the erase of black life from public and private archives. Ultimately, Tulsa Artist Fellowship is where LeSeur tests ground for future healing and reconciliation under regimes of racial violence. How does one remember violence and its aftermath? LeSuer will push the potential the potential of sound and body to its affective limit during her residency.

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2024 Open House. Photography by Dylan Johnson. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship. 

The Fellowship’s leadership team members are superbly attentive to artists’ needs and exceptionally apt at identifying innovative resources support for artists committed to community outreach and social engagement. Executive Director Carolyn Sickles, previously a Director of Visual Arts & Engagement at Abrons Arts Center in New York, brings extensive experiences in fostering programs that allow for conversations on accessibility and promote social practices and public-facing education. A practicing artist herself, Sickles is no stranger to the Fellowship’s philosophy of supporting artists who creatively respond a geography’s turbulent history and current social dynamics, for her sculptural objects are often site responsive or site-specific to culturally loaded American landscapes. Sickles is also a collaborator, interested in building more meaningful relationships with the public through informal and formal partnerships with organizations that do not fall under the traditional definition of contemporary art organizations. For example, working closely with Cheyenne Smith, the Fellowship’s Creative Community Manager and founder of Space For Us, a non-profit that aims to bridge science and art and increases BIPOC representation in the field of astronomy. Together they presented recently the immersive exhibition Earthbound, which sits at the intersection of contemporary art, science education, and music and performance, highlighting the necessity of combating night sky pollution and reigniting the sense of wonder we used to have at the sight of stars.

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2024 Open House. Photography by Dylan Johnson. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Image of Tulsa Artist Fellowship 2024 Open House, photography by Dylan Johnson.

Kalup Linzy, a performance and video artist who had a storied career in New York, producing satirical and high camp works that expose, challenge, negotiate exclusionary criteria of race, gender, and sexuality in the art world, permanently moved to Tulsa after completing his fellowship. Moving on from familial loss and regrouping after living the demanding schedule of being a full-time artist in New York City, Linzy has found Tulsa to be a generative city for both his own practice and his larger aspiration of community-centered engagements. The city’s noise and punk music community and graffiti scene prove to be expansive inspirations for Linzy in rethinking the role of an artist in facilitating healing and rest. Now an alum-in-residence, Linzy maintains a diverse range of programming and curatorial relations with Tulsa Artist Fellowship and its community. In fact, with grant support from the Fellowship, Linzy was able to purchase a house in the city’s historic Kendall Whittier neighborhood and convert it to the Queen Rose Art House, a performance- and music-centered community art space that regularly hosts workshops and gatherings for the underserved artgoing public in Tulsa. Working together with the Fellowship and other arts organizations and community partners in the area, Queen Rose Art House also mentor and uplift emerging artists in greater Tulsa, expanding access to cutting-edge practices and knowledge in contemporary art for those interested in pursuing professional careers as artists, an opportunity previously thought to be far out of reach.

The Tulsa Artist Fellowship is a three-year funded program with competitive benefits.  

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