The American Experience
A presentation of works by immigrant artists opens at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Thomas Moran (1837-1926) is, perhaps, best known for his paintings of the Yellowstone region which, in 1872, were influential in the decision by Congress to create the world’s first national park.
Earlier, in 1860, he painted Columbus Approaching San Salvador, a tropical scene with a group of people huddled together in the relative vastness of the landscape. They gaze out to sea where white sails are barely visible on the horizon.
Mark Dolph, curator of history at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explains, “I believe that Thomas Moran presents Columbus’ ‘Discovery’ of the Americas as one of those truly rare moments in history where the trajectory of the world changed in ways that no one—certainly not Columbus and his men aboard those three ships, nor the Native people pondering
what was coming into view out on the very edge of their world—could have possibly imagined that October day in 1492. Columbus Approaching San Salvador continues to ask us to reflect on all the triumphs and tragedies that scene foreshadows; to contemplate not just the triumphs, but the tragedies as well. I have to wonder, based on the early date of this work: Was Moran using this worldchanging event as a metaphor for his own experience as an immigrant, as someone coming into a new world, not knowing what was beyond the immediate horizon of his own life. Would it be a life of triumph…or tragedy?”
Moran had come to the United States from England as a small boy. His family settled in Philadelphia where he apprenticed briefly to an engraver. In 1871, geologist F.V. Hayden petitioned Congress for a scientific survey of the Yellowstone area and invited Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson to accompany him. Moran’s paintings inspired in the American public a pride in the wild grandeur of the West.
Columbus Approaching San Salvador is in the exhibition Americans All! at the Gilcrease. Historical paintings by immigrant artists from the museum’s permanent collection are augmented by a rotating selection of contemporary works by recent immigrants to the Tulsa area.
Dolph comments, “I’m hoping that our visitors will take away from their Americans All! experience an awareness of, and appreciation for, the countless contributions to American art and culture, and sense of national identity that immigrants have consistently bestowed as their gift to America; that these gifts are not frozen in the distant past; these are gifts continually given and renewed with each successive generation of immigrants who come to the United States, to call America their home. We don’t need to look far to discover these gifts; all that’s needed is to look around our own communities, like I did in Tulsa, and we’ll find immigrant artists, contributing their gifts, living all around us.”
Walter Ufer (1876-1936) was born in Germany and also came to the United States as a boy. In 1914 he visited Taos, New Mexico, moving there permanently in 1917. He was elected to the Taos Society of Artists and spent the rest of his life painting the Native people of the Southwest in a realistic manner. The National Academy of Design noted, “Unlike many of the Taos School painters, he did not represent the Natives of the Southwest as
picturesque elements of a colorful but timeless region. Ufer showed the Indians as individuals, and realistically as part of a contemporary world where they faced a bleak future.”
His powerful and moving painting, Hunger, is in the exhibition and depicts a blank wall with santos before which a man and two women are bowed in fervent prayer. Here, Ufer comments on the plight of Taos Indians and the Hispanic population facing the difficulties of assimilation. Dolph comments, “Hunger was Ufer’s comment on the devastating effects of the Great War and Spanish Influenza on Western civilization, and the resulting physical and mental hunger for deliverance to some new order.”
Some artists we think of as quintessentially “American.” John James Audubon (1785-1851) produced the literally voluminous Birds of America containing 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds. He was born in what is now Haiti and grew up in France. He came to the United States in 1803 at the age of 18 and continued his hobby of drawing birds. “In 1820,” Dolph notes, “Audubon launched the monumental project that consumed him for the greater part of his life: to describe and paint all the birds of his adopted country.”
In the exhibition is his oil painting The Wild Turkey. An interesting side note is Benjamin Franklin’s disparagement of the original depiction of the bald eagle as the nation’s symbol. He thought it looked like a turkey. Writing to his daughter, he expressed the opinion that the bald eagle was “a bird of bad moral character.” He found the turkey “a bird of courage [that] would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”
Mazen Abufadil was born in Lebanon in 1970 and fled the Lebanese Civil War with his family in 1978, eventually settling in Tulsa. In his art he combines the ancient technique of fresco with contemporary photography. He lives in a different America than Moran and Audubon.
He writes, “I look down and around a lot as I go about my day. My eyes zoom in to little items, or the volume of a space, or the play of light and shadows. I often stop to observe the minute details of those things in my path, and if I am able to carry off a memento of my experience, I often do so. This crushed can of Dr. Pepper was a beautiful find, a simple, lovely form.
“An image developed in my mind” he continues. ”An idea grew. And then came to me the Dr. Pepper advertising jingle, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be a pepper, too?’ suggesting, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be one of us?’
“I recall from my childhood, as a young immigrant, looking to find belonging and acceptance amidst so much misunderstanding. The idea and the image, pursuing me in my journey, had an exchange; Wouldn’t you like to be a pepper, too?”
Jave Yoshimoto says, “My work takes on the ephemerality of news and information and how the emotions we bring to each tragedy in the news cycle are swept away by the wave of information that floods the media. I address this social amnesia through my art with the work acting as a social memory for tragic events so quickly forgotten in our information age.”
Born in Japan to Chinese parents, he immigrated to California as a child. He was a Tulsa Artist Fellow for 2017-2018. His laser-cut wood sculpture Land of Freedom, Home of Courageous depicts a young boy arriving at the border, the wall colored to represent the stars and stripes. Through it he sees an armed soldier.
The museum describes Americans All! as “a place to reflect on what it means to be an American, and as a space to engage with newcomers who have made such valuable contributions to American life.”