Divas, Girls & Not Much Else

Lauren Henson: “DIVA” & Faith Green: “The Tales Of A Girl Rabbit”

Living Arts of Tulsa

December 21, 2024

I went to a lot of art shows in Tulsa in 2024. And I noticed something: the clearer a gallery is about what it’s doing, the stronger its exhibits tend to be. Vision matters, and even more than vision—specificity. Point of view. Guts. Looking at Living Arts’ 2025 schedule, I’m happy to see several exhibits coming up that look more robust, more pointed, more “contemporary” than ”DIVA” by Lauren Henson and “The Tales Of A Girl Rabbit” by Faith Green, the two shows the gallery selected to close out its year in December.

Programming an exhibit of fun ladies’-empowerment art right before the holidays makes a certain kind of sense. The pieces in these shows would have made amazing Christmas presents for, say, a young woman getting her first apartment, or an aunt celebrating her retirement, or maybe just a huge Madonna fan. And they might have hit differently if, say, Kamala Harris had won the election. 

As it was, in the aftermath of a majority of white women voting for Trump, I was underwhelmed by the invitation to reflect on the ways in which famous ladies like Queen Elizabeth II, Jane Austen, Lucille Ball, Frida Kahlo, the Statue of Liberty, and Jackie Kennedy—much less a woman cavorting around Oklahoma with a rabbit mask on—were “a testament to” something or other.   

Henson is a gifted pop-art stylist with some real art-business savvy who has her art up in the online Saatchi Gallery and has done commissions for the BOK Center. The massive body of work in “DIVA” featured her giant portraits of iconic women along with tiny, more accessibly priced portraits of others like Chappell Roan, Marie Curie, Maya Angelou, Billie Jean King, and Barbie. Skateboards painted with depictions of Cleopatra took up one wall; huge Warhol-inspired Veuve Clicquot bottles lined another. 

Some of this work was hand-painted, some screen-printed. Some had text (like “try just a little bit harder” over an image of Janis Joplin). Wall descriptions bore heartfelt appreciations of the accomplishments of these women as various kinds of groundbreakers. A mirror behind the Cleopatra decks invited one to position oneself in the diva lineage (text: “‘A diva is a female version of a hustler’ —Beyoncé”). 

Far and away the most interesting pieces in Henson’s part of the show were four deconstructed screen-print panels: pitted with exposed staples, painter’s tape piled up at the corners, the color on the images reversed, the ghostly bodies split into blocks yet holding together as recognizable icons. There was far more going on in these four “remnants” than in all the show’s paeans to women “ignoring the barriers” and “fighting for their right to share their sparkle (aka genius) with the world.” 

Henson has experience in interior design and started making art in 2021 as part of an elementary school fundraiser (Warhol-inspired); her series “The Good Girl Liberation Association” features paintings of imagined honky tonk queens, former debutantes, and other such “rebellious” women. I hope she sells a ton of the work that came out of that beginning—so she can, if she chooses, do more experimenting in this rougher, more vulnerable direction. 

Green is a real estate home stager whose own design chops inform her photographs of her character “Girl Rabbit,” seen in situations both recognizable and fantastical. We see Girl Rabbit lounging in a vintage car. Sashaying down a meadow path and a downtown street. Standing on a moonscape. Dressing up as Marie Antoinette. Playing tennis. “Who is she? Where is she going? Where has she been?” asks the wall text. “She gives you the first pages of the story and only you can finish it. She is on a journey of her mysterious life. You can fill in the blanks of what she is trying to tell you, the viewer, what she is waiting for. Let her take you places in your heart.” 

As a woman who regularly (with a licensed therapist, even) asks where I’m going, where I’ve been and who I am, and also wonders that about almost everyone I see, I got nothing from these risk-free story prompts. I did not see a mysterious life, could not muster curiosity about the journey. I saw one whimsical photoshoot after another. 

Green does have a sense for color, spatial dynamics, contrast, decoration—for drawing the eye to a focal point in an environment that’s harmoniously composed. Again, as in Henson’s case, there is an artist in here, one who comes out in several photographs that play with blur and lighting effects. Letting go of some of the cutesy, faceless-woman-on-a-very-mild-adventure business and leaning further into the retro-surrealism of her idea might help Green move into questions and answers that have more weight. 

I hope Henson and Green keep making whatever art they want to make. I’m here for looking towards inspiration, liberation, play. I’m here for a gallery that gives emerging local artists as much opportunity as Living Arts has these past few years. And I'm here to implore us all to go beyond "celebrating women." This art probably did make some people talk, per the Living Arts tagline, but about what? The Barbie movie? Beyoncé? The British Monarchy? (For contrast, see “Waking the Witch: Ruminations on Feminine Rage”—this gallery's excellent current show—or pretty much any exhibit at Carson House or at Positive Space Tulsa, whose laser-focused mission allows for incredibly rich conversations in this field.) 

Even at the strongest galleries, of course, not every show is going to be a winner. And I grant you, truly revolutionary feminist art is not necessarily going to be “accessible,” nor will patrons necessarily want to purchase it to hang in their homes. But in a time when almost every intersectional justice issue runs disproportionately through the bodies of women, most of this last exhibit of 2024 felt toothless, performative, and not even that empowering or original. In 2025, I want to see art—and art spaces—with teeth.