Artist Talk: Stephen Towns
University of Tulsa
November 5, 2025
Stephen Towns, the inaugural Gillies Artist-in-Residence at Gilcrease Museum, opened his recent talk at the museum’s Annual Eddie Faye Gates Program with a quip about modern politics: “My president would tell you I’m DEI,” he said. The crowd, a few dozen art lovers in their 50s and older, erupted in laughter. Towns knew his audience.
His quip carried a different weight once he started to share about the foundations of his work. Now based in Baltimore, Towns is a visual artist from a town near Charleston, South Carolina—a region that, he reminded us, received 40% of all enslaved people between the years 1670 and 1808, more than any other port on the American mainland. He paints portraits of enslaved people, using real photographs as references to imbue the portraits with humanity. His job as an artist, he said, is to remind the viewer that these are not just historical figures, but real people with dreams, hopes, and fears.
In one series of paintings, Towns depicts enslaved children backed by gold leaf, their heads engulfed in a kind of halo, stars twinkling in their hair. He explained that the stars represent dreams as escapism, the only tool these children had to escape the reality of slavery. They couldn’t revolt, couldn’t fight back—but they could dream.
Revolts and uprisings are a recurring inspiration for Towns. After teaching himself to quilt from YouTube tutorials, he embarked on a series of quilts telling the story of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, an infamous insurrection of enslaved people led by the preacher Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. The rebellion resulted in the deaths of over 50 white people, making it the deadliest slave revolt in American history. In this series, Towns tells this story from the beginning, quilting Nat Turner as a young boy learning to read, performing baptisms as a young man, standing under a solar eclipse and taking it as a sign from God that he was meant to be free. The quilts use color blocking to frame Nat Turner as a saint, projecting fluid movement through textiles.
During his residency at Gilcrease, Towns started work on a new series of quilts about Paradise Park, an all-Black swimming park in Silver Springs, Florida, popular between 1949 and 1969. Towns walked us through the history of the park, clicking through photos that radiated joy. Beauty contests, baptisms, Boy Scout trips: Paradise Park was truly a paradise, a place where Black people could escape the dangers of Jim Crow Florida. The quilts in progress are colorful, joyful, and incredibly beautiful.
In a video shared by Gilcrease, Towns noted that being in Tulsa was “profound” for him, and that he’s planning a new body of work centered around Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the history of America. The Gillies Artist-in-Residence has access to the Eddie Faye Gates Tulsa Race Massacre Collection, including Gates’ recorded oral history interviews with survivors and descendants of the 1921 Massacre. It’s fitting that Towns was chosen as the first artist to be honored with this residency, not simply because he too tells Black histories, but because his artistic practice emphasizes the humanity of his subjects. Like Gates, Towns urges us to remember, to confront what history would rather us forget. Every statistic, every gravestone, was once a person with a dream, a heart, a life.
