Cityscape: Norman, Oklahoma
April Richon Jacobs
The art scene here might well be called "burgeoning" if that overused term didn’t already imply so much hyperbole. Clustered around the University of Oklahoma–the largest university in the state with an enrollment of over 30,000 students–a small group of talented artists has emerged that has reawakened the arts community in this small college town.
Nearly one-third of Norman’s residents are college students–drawn from some of the smallest cities in the state to across the country–making it one of the more diverse communities in this notoriously conservative "red state." In the past five years, interest in the arts has increased here. In 2000, the University art museum, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, received "The Weitzenhoffer Collection," the single most important collection of French Impressionist art ever donated to a public university. The gift prompted a redesign and expansion of the museum that was completed in 2005 based on plans by architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen of Washington, D.C.
The town’s most significant art gallery is Mainsite Gallery, located off-campus in the downtown historic district, which was established about ten years ago by owner Gary Clinton. It recently debuted the work of several talented newcomers, many of them graduates of the University of Oklahoma, in its "Emergent Artists" show earlier this year.
One of the best of the bunch, Ruth Borum, was born and raised in Oklahoma and received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Oklahoma. Over the past four years she has developed a body of work that addresses issues of femininity and excess, creating mythical figures like mermaids and monsters in a style that simultaneously combines elements of realism and the grotesque. One series, called "Mermaid Concoctions," consists of a group of pudgy, aged ‘maids, with wrinkled, wormlike necks, sagging breasts and pronounced bellies but sparkly-scaled tails and long, flowing hair. Her work shares obvious affinities with that of painter John Currin, but her characters are much less eroticized and much more introspective and strange, almost maudlin in tone.
In her "Sweeteaters" series, Borum creates an array of monsters with wide, whale-like heads and exaggerated, balloon-like bodies, the corpulence of which is the series’ most striking feature. The bodies are luminescent and shimmery, each one rendered in pastel tones reminiscent of Easter eggs or ice cream sherbet. Borum is indeed interested in the dual nature of food–sugar especially–as both palliative and destructive, describing it as both "friend and enemy." Another painted series consists of sweet treats, such as cupcakes, set against similarly saccharine backgrounds, calling to mind the overindulgence of childhood birthday parties or other celebrations in which sugary treats play a central role. In all of Borum’s works, there is a preoccupation with fundamental feminist issues, such as the societal importance of beauty, the obsession with preserving and augmenting the body and, of course, the prescribed notion of femininity as "sugar and spice and everything nice."
Borum’s work can be seen on her website, monstercoop.com, which she shares with another female artist living and working in Norman, Oklahoma, Christian Pitt. Pitt received her BFA in Drawing from the University of Oklahoma, and is currently preoccupied with a series of small-scale sculptures that she crafts out of wool and "sculpey," a clay-like substance widely available in most craft or hobby stores. She arranges these sculptures–which are essentially little puppets, tenderly executed but nonetheless freakish–in tiny "sets" that she creates by using pages from old Time/Life books, which she then photographs.
In Pitt’s imagined scenarios, the puppets, which she describes as monsters, often commit dangerous acts against their two-dimensional Time/Life counterparts. In the "Monsters on the Town" series, a strange, bug-eyed, white-haired creature steals a baby from a mime who performs in a Parisian café. And in another, two similarly bug-eyed, orange-haired monsters stand alone in the middle of a grassy field; the sky is grey and ominous and one of them wields a knife.
The implied narrative of Pitt’s creations is what makes them so captivating. There is a sense of dire urgency that stands in marked contrast to the overwhelming absurdity of the situation. The fact that she creates these sculptures by hand, using low-tech, craft-store materials like wool, thread and sculpey, with a more respectable, high-tech medium like photography, further accentuates their absurdity and also links her to a tradition of craft that is still a viable part of Oklahoman, and Midwestern, culture. Oklahoma’s extreme weather also influences, in a way, her preoccupation with creating absurd yet dire situations: "I think that some of it comes from a knowledge that in the blink of an eye your whole life could be wiped away by the wind. [In Oklahoma] it blows all the time. You hear of chickens being sucked into a mason jar and cars perched in 50 foot trees after tornadoes blow through."
Pitt’s husband is Shawn Downey, a filmmaker whose work also combines low-tech materials in a high-tech format, merging 2-D with 3-D. For The Sinking Ship, a short film that can be viewed on the artist’s website, csdowney.com, Downey combines characters and backdrop that he draws on paper and then manipulates in Photoshop and animates in Flash. The resulting work has a hand-crafted, old-fashioned quality, the imagery of which seems influenced by Expressionist cinema. In the wake of big-budget computer-animation studios, like Pixar, Downey’s work can seem like a revelation.
After receiving his BFA from the University of Oklahoma, printmaker and activist Garrison Buxton moved to New York in 2000, where he later earned his MFA from Pratt. In 2004 he founded PMP–Peripheral Media Projects, Inc.–a collective of designers, printers, street artists and activists, who also produce a clothing line called "Plan D Clothing," manufactured in America in sweatshop-free environments (the group donates 10% of its profits to humanitarian, environmental, independent media and anti-corporate causes). Buxton’s other enterprise, Antimart, addresses the often uncomfortable relationship between art and commerce. Antimart serves a commercial role as a gallery space but it also hosts lectures, film screenings, plays, parties and concerts. In Manhattan, where space is at a premium, Buxton’s collaboratives re-establish some of the closeness of community that was part of his Oklahoma upbringing. He comments, "Surviving anywhere in the United States (which, as a country, does not value artists’ roles in society) solely on one’s artwork is a difficult endeavor, especially when one’s art is outside of the norm. Norman has a great community aspect; there are many amazing, talented artists, musicians, writers, architects, etc. When I am in Norman, my friends and I would always say our slogan about life there is, ‘Norman, easy livin’!"
Small communities like Norman, Oklahoma are quickly becoming viable options for young artists who don’t necessarily have the motivation or the funding to make the move to larger, more cosmopolitan cities. When asked about her decision to live and work in Norman, Ruth Borum commented, "You no longer need to make the pilgrimage to the art centers such as New York, LA and San Francisco to gain exposure, and with digital submissions, sending the art is so much cheaper than getting slides. Right now is a great time to be an artist anywhere."
Christian Pitt goes on to describe the "rubber-band effect" that comes from being raised in such a tight-knit community, where real estate is affordable and the cost of living low: "The major benefit for us [Pitt and filmmaker-husband Shawn Downey] to live in Oklahoma is that we are close to our families and our friends’ families here. We are all a part of a huge support system because of it. Folks move away but always seem to make it back here. It is like a big rubber band."
