A Jellyfish Blurping Over Downtown Tulsa And Other Scenes From “Surreal-East”

ArtHouse Tulsa: "Surreal-East"
May 3, 2025
Elevate East / Hannah Hall

Hit 21st Street and head east, past the ghost of Sears, past Nathan Hale High School and Viet Huong, past Golden Corral and El Chico. Take a left just past the Cherokee Shopping Center and you’ll find yourself at Elevate East, a complex on the east side of Garnett that’s become a hub for all sorts of activity in what I’m prepared to argue is the coolest area of the city: East Tulsa.

Pulling up to the complex’s Hannah Hall last Saturday for ArtHouse Tulsa’s “Surreal-East” show, I spotted huge paintings by VNICE and other local artists standing in the grass, facing the traffic. Across the street, long-skirted ladies held “NEED PRAYER?” signs out at drivers from the other direction, as a preacher yelled into a mic from a makeshift stage. (This faith mission didn’t appear to be directed at the ArtHouse show or its attendees; it was just a thing that was happening on Garnett on a Saturday afternoon.) Spread out on the lawn outside the exhibit hall, kids and grown-ups relaxed around picnic tables and a DJ booth, with a MASA food truck stationed at the edge and muralists painting under the trees. 

Hannah Hall itself is a big room that looks exactly like what it is: a former banquet hall, like the ones set up next to many little churches for post-Sunday-service potlucks and bingo. Walking in past the bright yellow office door of El Centro New Sanctuary Empowerment Center, I passed a big group of Hmong Tulsans coming out of a Hmong fashion show practice in one of the other buildings. 

There was as much going on in “Surreal-East” as in the surrounding environment—including the killer pun of its title. As usual with ArtHouse Tulsa shows, it was a one-day-only affair, but the creative engines that generated it are going strong all year long. ArtHouse’s co-founder Rogelio Esparza is an award-winning photographer who has lived in East Tulsa for more than two decades; its other co-founder, Allison Ward, is a multidisciplinary artist and probably my favorite curator in Tulsa. Since 2019 they’ve produced many group shows together as ArtHouse Tulsa, most in literal homes across the city. Now they have a permanent home, their first ever, at Elevate East, and they’ve wasted no time in using it to the fullest. 

One of the boldest elements of ArtHouse Tulsa’s curation through the years has been their disregard for distinctions between well-known, career-established artists and less-known, emerging ones. Creative brilliance crosses all spectrums. A strong theme pulls many worlds together, and curatorial excellence lies in letting those worlds talk to each other freely. 

Supported by the Tulsa Global District, “Surreal-East” brought 18 artists into conversation around the uncanny, the off-kilter, and the unexpected, re-organizing reality in a way that brought out its dark and bright edges. Trauma was in the room with us; so was healing, humor, pleasure, dream-vibes, and not a few instances of blood-red rage. The show elevated the strangeness and beauty of what happens when we let go of preconceived boundaries—including those between artists, histories, and geographies.

I loved seeing three exquisite body-part-specific pieces by JP Morrison Lans hanging near a riff on Frida Kahlo’s “Memory, The Heart (Recuerdo)” by OKC-based two-spirit Caddo artist Kira Hayen, with two wonderfully weird clay sculptures and an oil painting—all featuring baby teeth—by dog portraitist Sara Anais closeby. Loosely linked ideas flowed between pieces, like Jolie Hossack’s cascade of stuffed hands (“Hard to Hold”) hanging next to “Her,” a self-portrait (with third eye) by young ceramicist Morgan Battoe. 

In fantastical landscapes, some figures stood alert and scanned, others reclined and drifted. In many works, “shape” lost all predictability as a concept, becoming fluid, fractured, radically exaggerated. Under a bowed ceiling tile, a sculptural paper piece by UCO Studio Art grad Brianna Lucas similarly bowed out from the wall. Her “What Lies Within,” an intricate and haunting paper altar, greeted viewers inside the hall’s front door, which had a cactus in a red plastic bucket (by Swan Shekinaa) sitting above it. Two visually and emotionally arresting short films by Chicanx OU art student Saray Suarez played on a TV alongside a video of jellyfish blurping over downtown Tulsa by Don Rush. 

Murals on Hannah Hall’s outside walls (coordinated by VNICE) explored the show’s theme from wildly different angles, like Cheech Marin surrounded by butterflies and a massive angel against multicolored stained glass. Dan Rocky delivered an exhilarating take (with a nod to Mvskoke folklore and Native artist Woody Crumbo) on two prompts—“dragon” and “rising”—she’d pulled out of a hat at a prep meeting for the show.  

ArtHouse Tulsa’s networks are broad and their invitations generous; no silos, no gatekeeping here. As the Emerging Curator for OVAC’s MOMENTUM show last year, Ward (alongside Lindsay Aveilhé) mentored a huge group of artists ages 18-30 from across the state, several of whom have now been introduced to Tulsa viewers through this show, along with many other new-to-me artists. My favorite discoveries from “Surreal-East”: Krystal Solis, a first-generation Mexican-American painter and muralist from Duncan, OK, and Carlos Gomez, a recent UCO grad. I mean, look at these: 

Tulsa is (only temporarily, we hope) losing Ward to graduate school in Chicago soon. ArtHouse Tulsa and its many contributors and collaborators shows no signs of letting up in her absence. With its Artist-to-Artist Grant Program, its partnership with VNICE through Studio 1801, and all the other mycelial networks it’s got growing through the community, this is an art collective that listens hard, stays sharp, and does not miss.