“Moonscapes & Earthshine” + TAF First Friday Programming
September 1, 2023
TAF Studio 101 / Archer Studios
As someone who tends to lose hours of my one wild and precious life to anxiety about parking and crowds, I’ve often opted just to stay home on First Fridays and visit the galleries on some quiet weekday afternoon instead. But lately, the quality of First Friday art experiences has been so high that I’ve had to figure out a way to make the event work for my slightly wonky social battery. This month, I tried a hybrid approach. I took the new downtown shuttle (glory be to whoever decided to make this happen, because it’s a game-changer), and instead of hitting all the exhibits, I picked one place to visit and stayed there the whole evening. I missed a lot elsewhere — FOMO is inevitable in Tulsa these days — but going deep in one zone was an experience I’d highly recommend.
My goal this time was the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, specifically the one-night-only events at its Studio 101.
Different iterations of these events happen in this garage-doored studio space each First Friday under the curatorial direction of Marlon Hall, the fellowship’s Community Engagement Cultivator. That word “cultivator” is key — it harmonizes with TAF’s mission and the multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional effort Hall’s been leading here to reimagine Tulsa as “a garden, not a graveyard.” With Hall doing creative work in Africa right now, he’s opened Studio 101 (always a collaborative space) to the curatorial care of other artists in the community.
On this First Friday, Studio 101 presented an interactive installation by Black Moon, a pioneering Tulsa collective of Black artists, with Tulsa Artist Fellow Francheska Alcántara as curator. Titled “Moonscapes & Earthshine,” the installation used simple elements to create an energizing and reflective meditation. Pieces of mirror lined one wall, capturing glints of many faces in the crowd in addition to one’s own. Iridescent streamers flowed from a tub of glimmering water near the back of the space, with DJ noname delivering scintillating beats alongside it. Two wooden boxes stood in the middle of the space, filled with soil and flowers.
Attendees were invited to take a sheet of paper embedded with wildflower seeds and write a note to themselves on the prompt, “What does learning yourself mean to you?” Some people planted their notes in the flowerboxes to sprout up later; others took them home to sow in gardens of their own.
The space’s focal point: a massive moon, darker on one side, lighter on the other, bathed in ever-shifting beams of color, deeply textured, studded with artifacts brought in by the artists of Black Moon. This was the first group sculpture the collective has undertaken, and its founder Beth Henley said the process was a profound experience of “learning oneself” through working together as a team. That process is as important as the product: as Alcántara wrote in their curator’s note, “This reciprocal interplay between light and darkness is a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things — an interconnectedness that extends to the building and reframing of New Worlds for Black people to exist in.”
As the sun went down, the event shifted into a movement/music/community celebration, with curators The Underground Collective seamlessly turning the luminous intensity of the space into a realm of powerful dancing and tidal energy that spilled out the doors of Studio 101 and into the moonlit street.
Between meditation and celebration, I ventured into the TAF Archer Studios space to explore the many artist studios open there each First Friday.
I stood in wonder in front of Sarah Ahmad’s mesmerizing experiments with collage, photography, drawing, and painting; felt my jaw dropping further and further toward the floor with every piece on display in Flash Flood Print Studio’s Printer Jam Showcase; touched base with Karl Jones and friends in the Center for Queer Prairie Studies, which continues its vital work of preserving and carrying forward queer Oklahoma history; and laughed with joy as I gazed up at Rafael Corzo’s sculptural inventions.
In every space I walked through, just as in Studio 101, the feeling was the same. Something way different from FOMO, way deeper than hype. Something born from the spacious work of reflection, growth, and reciprocity. Something more like hope.
Next at Tulsa Artist Fellowship: Open House 2023, October 6 – 8
