Tales from the crypt
Photographer, composer take Oklahoma-based works to London.
Editor’s note: This is photographer M.J. Alexander’s first-person account on how a the London exhibit of her work, showcasing Oklahoma, came together at The Crypt of St Pancras.
The eight women with faces of stone have stood guard in central London for two centuries. Fashioned as pillars in the Greek Revival style popular in the early 1800s, their heads carry the weight of the roof sheltering The Crypt of St Pancras.
Beneath their stoic gaze, the catacombs became the final resting place for 557 souls until the city ended crypt burials in 1854. Afterward, The Crypt focused on serving the living, serving as an air-raid shelter and soldiers’ canteen during both World Wars.
Its underground labyrinth of rooms and tunnels — located in the heart of the city near the bustling train stations of Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras — was reimagined in 2002 as a performance space and art gallery. Its mission: create a place “where the imagination, thoughts and emotions of 21st century artists are shared with visitors from around the world.”
The gallery’s director, the fabulously named Anne Noble Partridge, embraced a proposal to feature my photographs of the faces and places of Oklahoma, created over two decades. To take advantage of The Crypt’s acoustics, the works would be accompanied by a series of overlapping sound worlds created by Edward Knight, Oklahoma City University’s composer-in-residence.
The Jan. 11-13 installation — which received funding from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and Oklahoma City University — marked one of the few times the gallery showcased American-based artists.
The exhibition’s title was simple: Oklahoma. Its goal, however, was ambitious: to create a world apart beneath the streets of London, a sanctuary where people could wander in and contemplate a foreign land 5,000 miles to the west.
Partridge entrusted us with the foot-long skeleton key to the vault’s massive blood-red iron doors, offering a single sentence of advice: “Work with the space, not against it.”
And so we did. For three days, hundreds of souls descended from London’s busy streets to descend well-worn stone steps to enter the ancient crypt.
As visitors’ eyes adjusted to the darkness, their ears were enveloped by the sounds of Oklahoma: pulsating waves of buzzing cicadas, ethereal prairie birdsong, rising and falling winds. Flickering candles and the long plaintive note of a lone cello beckoned from within the catacombs.
Six-foot-tall canvas portraits and diaphanous scrims with larger-than-life images of centenarians were suspended from the ceiling, standing sentry in the arches surrounding the perimeter.
Aluminum prints — each measuring 2 feet by 3 feet — marched down the 50-footlong brick entry corridor, offering windows of uninterrupted horizon beneath a kaleidoscope of skies.
Facing the landscapes were a series of images and quotes from children and their families, ranging from 100-hourold Brenna Faire McDonnell, silhouetted against the Del City sky, to 17-year-old Shyloh Powers, bare-chested and barelegged in camo shorts and cowboy boots, trophy catfish draped around his neck at the Pauls Valley Noodling Festival.
In the candlelit alcoves, tribal dancers were frozen in mid-step. A nook set along a long passage heading to the east housed an image of a faded warrior on horseback, fading on a mural in Hominy, here seemingly fusing into the bricks of the crypt.
The labyrinth led visitors to a domed bricked room with additional centenarian portraits and quotes.
Across the hallway, in what came to be called the Red Cloud Room, audio of an approaching Oklahoma rainstorm rolled across a single wooden chair that faced a panorama of a Cimarron County thunderhead, made crimson by the setting sun.
Around the corner, metallic prints of stained glass window designs — aglow with the outlines of bison, storm clouds, Osage chiefs, oil rigs and prairie schooners — glowed against a black backdrop. Visitors lingered on the eastern wall, which showcased dozens of children and their thoughts for the future.
Visitors’ reactions ran the gamut.
More than one asked, initially, if the exhibit was about the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Some were amazed at the existence of landscapes they’d imagined existed only in “the screen saver from Windows XP.” Many were fascinated by the Native American dancers and their regalia, and moved by efforts of tribal elders to preserve tradition. They marveled at teenage bronc busters and the rattlesnake queen and pondered the story of the town of Picher, abandoned and bulldozed after being declared a SuperFund site. They chuckled at the quote by the mom of 19-month-old Ricky Laster, of Erick, who advised “I want him to work smart. Not work hard.” They wanted to know more about Roy Giles, the 103-year-old born in Cherokee Nation who remarked: “I enjoy life. I love kids. I I ever get married again, I’m going to have a whole houseful.’
As visitors continued to wander the atmospheric corridors, alcoves, rooms and passageways — sometimes doubling and tripling back to contemplate a weathered face or a moving quote — wisps and fragments of chamber works and nature recordings overlapped with the bells of St Pancras, which chimed every quarter-hour. A clarinet would sound, the wind would gust, and the cicadas sang their siren song as candles threw shadows on the wall.
Heading back to the entryway and mounting the wellworn stone stairs beneath The Crypt’s unblinking guardians, the city’s horns and sirens again grew louder as visitors left Oklahoma behind.
“It was a true collaboration, to combine and refine both of our visions and present work that is Oklahoma-based in a completely new environment,” Knight said afterward. “It was a huge challenge but, I think, also a huge success. Some of the people were dumbstruck by what they experienced, and just didn’t really want to leave. They had stumbled upon this oasis beneath one of the busiest interactions of London and described it as taking them to a new world. It was magical.”
M.J. Alexander documents people and places of the American West. Her portrayals of Oklahoma and Oklahomans have been published by The New York Times and Time magazine, and featured in more than 20 solo exhibitions. She is author and illustrator of two fineart books: “Salt of the Red Earth,” a collection of portraits of and interviews with 100 centenarians, and “Portrait of a Generation: Sons and Daughters of the Red Earth,” winner of an Oklahoma Book Award and the Independent Publishers Awards Gold Medal for regional nonfiction.