Happening Type: Exhibition

“There falls a final shadow on the glare, / A stillness on the dark, erratic air,” Oklahoma Centennial State Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday wrote in his poem Plainview: I. Concurrent with the light and place-focused Bright Golden Haze, this exhibition evokes Momaday’s words in its consideration of these themes in the landscapes of Oklahoma. The exhibition inaugurates Oklahoma Contemporary’s third-floor gallery which will be dedicated to Oklahoma’s art, with this exhibition concentrating on photography and film. Work by M.J. Alexander, Marjorie Bontemps, Sam Charboneau, Marcella Ernest, Keli Mashburn, Nosamyrag, Billy Palumbo, Ryan RedCorn, and Josh Tonsfeldt represents the diverse ways artists are engaging with the unique character of the local topography.

Whether roaring thunderstorms or cavernous blue skies, Oklahoma is a changing place of weather and light. Bringing together local, national, and international artists, this inaugural exhibition in the new Oklahoma Contemporary building—itself designed to visually morph with the altering conditions of the skies—surveys how artists have engaged with themes of light and space. Borrowing its name from the opening exaltation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma!, Bright Golden Haze spans traditional landscape painting and immersive installations. Olafur Eliasson’s Black Glass Eclipse uses gold light to cancel other colors, while Oklahoma artist Yatika Fields’ newly commissioned painting interprets landscapes in kaleidoscopic colors. The exhibition will evolve throughout its run, adding complementary pieces like a poetic sculptural installation by Robert Montgomery, and expand throughout Oklahoma City, where partners including the Myriad Botanical Gardens, Oklahoma City Ballet, and Scissortail Park will host responsive programming on the inspirational qualities of light.

The pastoral Clark Art Institute is debuting its first outdoor exhibition of commissioned works on its 140 acres of woods, lawns, and meadows. Curated by Molly Epstein and Abigail Ross Goodman, the yearlong Ground/work involves six international artists responding to the landscape. The site-specific installations include Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw transforming a split rail fence alongside roaming cattle into a dynamic intersection of lines. Jennie C. Jones’s These (Mournful) Shores, meanwhile, is a sixteen-foot-tall Aeolian harp extending off the architecture of the Clark, its somber song activated by the wind.

As this exhibition was scheduled to open in March, its contemplation around the places we inhabit became increasingly timely as many spent more of their lives than ever before in their homes. To access For a Dreamer of Houses from afar, the Dallas Museum of Art developed a rich virtual tour with a digital version of the gallery and videos on the processes behind large-scale installations such as Alex Da Corte’s neon house and Francisco Moreno’s kaleidoscopic Chapel with its hand-drawn mural mixing high and low culture. Even as visitors are welcomed back to the museum in the fall, these online experiences continue to bring works like Do Ho Suh’s ethereal replica of a passageway in his childhood home and Pipilotti Rist’s playful chandelier of underwear into whatever intimate space you have created for yourself.

A vacant lot in Minneapolis has been revitalized into a flourishing artwork that offers produce, pollution mitigation, and community. The urban farming project, led by Walker Art Center artist-in-residence Jordan Weber with the nonprofit Youth Farm, is made for local residents to harvest its fruits, vegetables, and herbs and use its gathering table as outdoor space. Laid out in lines reminiscent of a basketball court—with metal hoops at either end to catch rainwater—the garden addresses issues of food scarcity, environmental neglect, and a lack of resources in Black neighborhoods.

Six young artists from Oklahoma went west to pursue their creative passions and each made a name for themselves in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Patrick Blackwell, Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha, Paul Ruscha, and Mason Williams are featured in this first exhibition to reunite all six artists in their home state. OK/LA chronicles how their roots impacted the evolution of their art as well as how their relationships—formed through studying together or through collaborations—endured even as they set out on their own paths, whether music, art, or advertising. Virtual programming complements the exhibition on the campus of the University of Oklahoma, with a wry wit playing across their distinctive works.

Disney Magic at the Museum. European art history and American pop culture collide in Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts , opening on April 6, at the Wallace Collection in London. Exploring the influence of the continent’s visual arts legacy on Disney animated films, the traveling exhibition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art highlights references to Gothic Revival architecture, medieval aesthetics and the vibrant salons of rococo Paris in films like Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). Visitors will encounter sixty intricate works of decorative art and design, including Sèvres porcelain, Boulle clocks, furniture and tapestries. These objects will be displayed alongside 150 Disney production artworks, animation cels and drawings on paper from the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, Walt Disney Archives, Walt Disney Imagineering Collection and the Walt Disney Family Museum. Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Beauty and the Beast , the exhibition curated by British-German art historian Wolf Burchard will include selected film footage underscoring Walt Disney Studios’ evolving technology and artistry throughout the lifetime of its influential namesake. The show will be at the Wallace Collection through October, before traveling to the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena in November. Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts will be on view at the Wallace Collection in London, England, through October 2022. wallacecollection.org

Seeking to move beyond the traditional display options of a typical gallery space, the new works in Off the Wall occupy new angles and sight lines to challenge viewer perceptions of the art. In this group exhibition at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, every artist interprets universal human experiences, like tradition, chaos, and travel, through large-scale works in fiber, textiles, and mixed media. Each approach gives viewers a variety of ways to connect with the work, and invites them to consider the “interconnectedness of humanity.” —Kelly Rogers

Off the Wall, featuring artists Sarah Ahmad, romy owens, and Marium Rana, is on view through June 13, 2022.

Before his death in 2019, Okwui Enwezor envisioned this exhibition on Black grief. To honor the global curator and critic, Enwezor's friends and colleagues worked posthumously to realize his most political project yet: a timely recognition of the crisis and pain in the United States over systemic racism. The thirty-seven artists working across media in this exhibition represent some of the country's major contemporary voices, including Mark Bradford, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Hank Willis Thomas, Nari Ward, and Carrie Mae Weems, all grappling with the emotional and intergenerational toll of historic and contemporary oppression. January 27–June 13, 2021.

This first major Texas museum show for the Austin-based Deborah Roberts explores her portraits of Black children that incorporate collage and other media to consider identity, race, and beauty. Reminiscent of the art of Romare Bearden, the works use photographs and images from magazines and the internet, remixed with painting, to celebrate some of the country's most vulnerable young people. A large-scale mural on the exterior of the Jones Center has vinyl figures expressing a Black boy's joy while, as Roberts puts it, “he tries to make his way into adulthood without being targeted or criminalized.” January 23–August 15, 2021.

In the 1960s and 1970s, artists used geometric forms and motion to create surprising and disorienting effects. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art has a strong representation of op (optical) and kinetic art in its permanent collection and now unites those holdings with major loans to explore how these two art movements challenged perception through real and perceived motion. An accompanying catalogue further explores this work, like paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz (who employed contrasting intense colors for shimmering effects), the pioneering mobiles and kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder, and the hallucinatory optical illusions painted by Victor Vasarely. February 20–May 16, 2021.

With lockdowns and recent calls to action to support the postal service, mail art has experienced a resurgence in popularity. In an extensive exhibition, the Art Institute of Chicago is revisiting the career of “New York's most famous unknown artist,” as the late Ray Johnson was once declared. Through his 1960s New York Correspondence School he mailed artworks around the world, using collage and text, and frequently accompanied them with guidance for the recipients to add their own contributions and keep sending them along. Joined with his performative pieces and other work, the retrospective recognizes his influence on twentieth-century art and offers inspiration for novel ways to creatively connect at a distance. Dates will be announced.