Tour de Quartz
101 Archer
January 3, 2025 – February 28, 2025
Growing up in small-town Oklahoma, I knew what Quartz Mountain was—not the actual state park in the southwestern part of the state, but the esteemed Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute (OSAI) that’s held there each summer. I don’t remember anyone from my high school ever getting accepted to OSAI, though who knows if any of us ever auditioned. It was too intimidating, an inaccessible world at a school that, like a lot of schools across Oklahoma, focused more on football than art or academics.
For the students who do attend, the program is often a game-changer. OSAI is a two-week residential academy for Oklahoma high school students that provides space for them to explore visual, literary, or performing arts. Over 230 students from across the state attend each summer, and classes are taught by artists who’ve won Pulitzer Prizes, Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys—a big deal in a state that always seems to be cutting arts education budgets for public schools. Tour de Quartz is a traveling exhibit of art from the previous summer’s session, showcasing works by students in the drawing, painting, and photography fields.
The work in the show is evocative and impressive—and it’s easy to qualify this statement by adding “especially for high school students,” but that isn’t really fair. Paintings like Moon Road by Edmond’s Mimi Fitzpatrick, Mortality by Clinton’s Maia Stewart, and Whale Fall by Edmond’s Evelyn Tham, among others, demonstrate an advanced commitment to form and nuance. They invite the eye and provide space for reflection, seeming to ask what’s missing in addition to what’s there.
Moon Road by Mimi Fitzpatrick, Mortality by Maia Stewart, and Whale Fall by Evelyn Tham. Photos by Meredith Boe.
If the artists’ youth can be attributed to anything that stands out, it’s the pure freedom of exploration. They’re not simply regurgitating works they’ve studied in class, but in some cases going all the way into fantasy and dream worlds—appropriate, given that the theme of the students' final project was “utopia.” In wall text that helped the works feel unified, OSAI drawing and painting instructor Daphne Arthur shared that the students were invited to examine “themes of duality, transformation, cycles, and aspirations for balance and equanimity by integrating various forms to create cohesive, multidimensional works.”
Black-and-white gelatin silver prints by Oklahoma City's Danzel Chen and Moore’s Abigail Foster are standouts in the photography section, both experimenting with multi-image overlays in interesting ways, even with everyday subjects like a friend in the woods or a person lying in the grass. The photography students studied under Janelle Lynch, Kellyann Petry, Ben Long, Jenna Dooling, and Konrad Eek, who assigned Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Slow Seeing” and Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” as artistic guidance, both of which touch on the process of seeing and discovering. The resulting prints are whimsical yet grounded in the familiar.
Gelatin silver prints by Abigail Foster (L) and Danzel Chen (R). Photos by Meredith Boe.
On the exhibit’s opening night at 101 Archer, there was a surprising lack of wayfinding about the show, except for the gallery’s open doors and a makeshift bar off to the side. Attendees meandered and listened to a young musician with a guitar playing Beatles and Chris Isaak covers. I wondered why, instead of greeting people at the entrance with information about the exhibit, the small podium bearing a few paragraphs about the tour was tucked off to the side, and the panels announcing the show faced the inside of the gallery.
Regardless, Tour de Quartz is a strong and compact celebration of art and learning, and showcases these high schoolers’ commitment to both craft and ideation. It’s heartening to see a taste of what the future holds for artmaking in Oklahoma and beyond.
