From a glass ceiling to imaginary doors, 5 highlights of the OKCMOA
For the second straight year, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is celebrating spring break with a full week of special activities and offers for families with children.
Through March 19, the museum is supplying daily art-making activities, special screenings of New York International Children’s Film Festival Kid Flicks and story times with the Metropolitan Library System for Sonic Family Discovery Week.
Admission for children 17 and younger is always free at the downtown museum, but the highlight of Sonic Family Discovery Week is the chance for the whole family to get in for free.
To get free admission, visitors must pick up passes while supplies last at any Metro Library location or reserve tickets online, which are also limited, with the promo code FDWMAR23. For more information, go to https://www.okcmoa.com.
Here are five highlights to look for if you visit the Oklahoma City Museum of Art this spring:
1. Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Doors Without Keys’
Through April 9, the museum is exhibiting “Abbas Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame,” a multimedia survey of works by the late Iranian filmmaker, photographer and visual artist Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016 at the age of 76.
Along with several intriguing film and video works, the exhibit includes two series of Kiarostami’s photographs: “Regardez-moi,” featuring photos of museum visitors across the United States and Europe looking at paintings by famed artists, and “Doors Without Keys,” a selection of 20 life-size images of doors he photographed in Iran, Italy, France and Morocco.
“What’s interesting about these is that they’re virtually all — if not all — composite. So, those locks, for instance, didn’t originate on those doors; he added those later. He added a lot of the stickers that you seen on the doors ... in the editing process,” said museum President and CEO Michael Anderson.
“So, ‘Doors Without Keys’ is almost a joke in that these are doors that he shot and then he added these locks, so they don’t actually have these locks in the real world.”
2. ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ by David C. Driskell
David C. Driskell’s 1972 acrylic on canvas painting “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is a colorful and evocative highlight of the traveling exhibit “Art and Activism at Tougaloo College.”
Through May 14, the exhibit showcases at the OKC museum artworks from the collection of the historically Black Mississippi college, which played a central role in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and the fight for racial equality.
An artist, professor and scholar of African American art, Driskell was a key figure in shaping Tougaloo College’s art collection, and his painting captures the spirit of the hopeful hymn for which its named.
A popular spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is rooted in Oklahoma history: A Choctaw freedman in Indian Territory by the name of Wallace Willis, who went by Uncle Wallace, composed the enduring song as he worked on a cotton plantation in southeastern Oklahoma sometime before 1862.
3. William H. Johnson’s ‘Harriet Tubman’
Also on view through May 14, the traveling exhibit “Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice” showcases the 20th-century Black artist’s 1940s series of figurative paintings of Black activists, scientists, teachers and performers.
A South Carolina native, Johnson (1901-1970) died in obscurity but has gained prominence in recent years, with the Smithsonian American Art Museum organizing the “Fighters for Freedom” exhibit.
Rendered in a colorful folk art style, the exhibit’s 28 paintings pay tribute to African American icons like George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson and Crispus Attucks while also depicting the racism, oppression and violence they were forced to overcome.
Arguably, none are quite as inspiring
Johnson’s portrait of famed Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman, who is depicted wearing a striped Civil War-era dress that resembles an American flag while holding a shotgun at her side.
4. Kehinde Wiley’s ‘Jacob de Graeff’
Since the OKC museum debuted celebrated African American portraitist Kehinde Wiley’s large-scale work “Jacob de Graeff” in 2019, it has become a favorite piece of its permanent collection.
Wiley is best known for recreating paintings by renowned masters but replacing the European aristocrats, saints and generals with people of color, especially young African American men, attired not in ancient finery but in contemporary fashions like puffy jackets, hoodies and sneakers.
For “Jacob de Graeff,” Wiley used his signature “streetcasting” technique of recruiting real people and inserting them into his revamped versions of historical paintings. His 2018 painting depicts Missouri rapper Brincel Kape’li Wiggins Jr. and is modeled on 17th-century Dutch artist Gerard ter Borch’s portrait of Jacob de Graeff.
“The person in the original was actually the son of the head of the Dutch East India Trading Company, so it was actually a major company in the 17th century that made a lot of their money on the basis of slave labor. So, there’s all kinds of dimensions to the work,” Anderson told The Oklahoman in 2019.
5. Dale Chihuly’s ‘Oklahoma Persian Ceiling’
A trip to the OKC Museum of Art would hardly be complete without checking out its signature attraction: one of the largest public collections of Dale Chihuly’s glass art in the world.
In honor of its 20th anniversary in its downtown home, the museum debuted last year the redesigned exhibit “Chihuly Then and Now: The Collection at Twenty.” The exhibit features popular pieces from the OKC museum’s collection displayed in new ways, plus several artworks on loan from Chihuly Studio in Seattle.
Completely reconfigured and reinstalled in a wider space, the “Oklahoma Persian Ceiling” remains a kaleidoscopic showpiece, enticing visitors of all ages to bask in its soft glow and search for the cheeky cherubs, or putti, hiding among the flower-like forms.