The Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship identifies talented Fellows who possess a passion for art, a drive to excel in writing about art, and the desire to become active and engaged participants in the current contemporary art dialogue. The program provides education, mentorship, and support to writers and curators to help them realize their greater potential. It’s a yearlong program that was started back on August 11th, 2018 and will run through August 2019. Every two months, each fellow writes a curatorial essay about an exhibition of their choice, whether it’s a past exhibition or a current exhibit. Finally, four exhibition proposal projects selected will be on display at the Henry Zarrow Center for Art & Education gallery at the Tulsa Arts District downtown. These four exhibits are divided into four groups among the fellows. Each group has three fellow curators per exhibit. The first two curated exhibits will be featured together during the First Friday Art Crawl in July and the second in August.
In this Fellowship, I am able to speak with incredible artists and learn about their work from their own perspective. It was a delightful experience to interview Mark Lewis, a well-regarded TU art professor and local artist who has shown his paintings, drawings, and collage works in museums and galleries nationwide. As we walked through the 108 Contemporary gallery to view his work, he had this gentle demeanor while expressing the creative process of his work. To understand his creative process, Mark plans and collages perceptually on site in Tulsa. It is very process-oriented. He loves the presence of light in his work, not just the effect of light. What I found most entrancing about his work was how the physical scale of his collages allows you to connect your emotion with the content of the work.
To read the full article review, visit https://www.artreviewoklahoma.org/post/design-a-stunning-blog.
Museum Science and Management graduate student Marjorie Bontemps