From the 1969-71 Occupation of Alcatraz, which drew attention to the injustices against Native Americans, to the 2016 protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Indigenous activists have regularly used art to fight for social justice. This exhibition, featuring objects related to this history of creative action, is the culmination of WAR CLUB, a project started in 2017 through a Tulsa Artist Fellowship by the mother-son duo Anita and Yatika Fields.

From 1988 to 1991, photographer Dawoud Bey brought his large-format tripod-mounted camera to cities across the country to photograph the Black Americans he met in these urban communities. This solo show of thirty-six of those portraits considers how these years influenced the direction of Bey’s art, from street photography to increasingly formal compositions. This slower photographic process and more time spent with each subject led to a more intimate connection with the viewer in each black- and-white frame.

Artist José Parlá spent four months in a medically induced coma in 2021 after contracting Covid-19, an experience that reshaped his life. His return to painting is at the heart of this show, alongside his return to his hometown of Miami. A recreation of his studio and examples of his post-illness work will be joined by the artist himself painting a site-specific mural. Visitors will get to witness his distinctive layering of paint, ink, and found ephemera into frenetic abstract forms.

The students and teachers at the Bauhaus School, founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, explored the potential of technology to create a new kind of art and design where form follows function. Although the school ended in 1933 with the rise of the Nazis, its impact has endured into the present, particularly in typography and graphic design. Organized with the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, this show marks a century of this legacy with books, magazines, ephemera, and other objects by Bauhaus figures including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer, who fled Germany for the United States in 1938.

More than just objects of warmth and comfort, quilts carry with them the stories of their makers. The Mississippi Museum of Art’s already expansive quilt collection was bolstered in 2022 when it added several acquired over the years by the late photographer Roland L. Freeman while he traveled the American South. Of Salt and Spirit spotlights more than fifty handmade and machine-stitched examples at the museum, contextualizing them with new research on how quilting reflects both community resilience and women’s empowerment.

It’s hard to find a household in Oklahoma without a piece of Frankoma pottery on the shelf, and this show of more than 200 pieces highlights how the state’s first commercial pottery manufacturer made such an impact. Taking its name from a Frankoma slogan—“For those who like nice things”—the exhibition draws on a recent major donation to chronicle the company from its early days, when it was founded at the University of Oklahoma in 1933 by John Frank, then a ceramics teacher at the school, to the use of local clay.