Fifty years ago, a group of Oklahoma artists headed west on Route 66 to the City of Angels to make their mark on the art world. Untitled [ArtSpace] reunited the work of these world-class Oklahoma-reared artists in the most exciting contemporary art exhibit of the year, Roots & Ties. These paintings, prints, and photographs were on display at Untitled [ArtSpace] November 9 through December 29. Roots & Ties was the last in a series of six Oklahoma-related exhibitions that Untitled [ArtSpace] presented in honor of Oklahoma’s state centennial. The downtown nonprofit arts organization spent the year raising the visibility of Oklahoma artists and Roots & Ties will conclude this series with works by artists whose talents have brought notoriety and recognition to the state.
Five of the artists whose work was included in the exhibition—Robert Bonaparte, Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha, and Mason Williams—currently reside on the West coast. In addition, the work of the late Lee Mullican, a Chickasha native who lived in Los Angeles for much of his life, was also part of the exhibition. This historical selection of art was the beginning of a three-year project by Untitled [ArtSpace] that will recognize the creativity and achievements of Oklahoma artists who grew up in the state and found their niche in another part of the U.S. The six artists whose work commenced this series have been making art for more than 30 years and their works are now featured in public and private collections around the world and in international exhibitions. Roots and Ties featured new and past original prints, paintings, and photographs. The original lithographs and etchings by Bonaparte, Goode, McMillan, Mullican, and Ruscha were provided by Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles and Hamilton Press in Venice, California. The prints from Hamilton Press were displayed in the Oklahoma State Capitol for the month of March following the exhibition at Untitled [ArtSpace].
The art of Roots & Ties represented the major movements of contemporary art, with conceptual art, pop art, and abstraction interpreted in the works. Lingering in these diverse styles is the influence of Oklahoma, whether it’s the image of a twister in a Goode lithograph, the linear representation of a gas station in a serigraph by Ruscha and Williams, or the subtle Native American influences in a Mullican painting. The works were united by a use of new approaches to understanding ordinary or traditional themes. Goode, for example, is known for his adaptations of household objects that evoke his upbringing in Oklahoma. “Joe would laugh at the nobleness of a fried-egg sandwich, or even a telephone, and then, sometime in the future, would find himself painting pictures of these very things,” said childhood friend Ruscha. “Even the abstract paintings contain a nagging tie to his past.”
Roots & Ties was made possible in part by support from the Oklahoma Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Oklahoma Centennial Commission, and Joanna Champlin.
Oklahoma Boys
Exhibit introduction by Dave Hickey, Las Vegas, 2007
Something happened on the plains of Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas in the years that followed the carnage of World War II and the drudgery of the Great Depression. An elaborately hedged, carefully guarded, low-grade optimism began to flourish among the young, where it never had before. This tiny point of light, this flicker, created two generations of artists, writers, musicians and actors for which the local culture, at that time, had no use at all, or any idea of what do with them. In Oklahoma, Edward Ruscha, Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Robert Bonaparte and Mason Williams were growing up. (Lee Mullican had already grown up and gone.) Up in Kansas, Dennis Hopper was already planning his escape into the world of the theater. In Texas, artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Terry Allen were coming of age. Musicians like Ornette Coleman and King Curtis were learning their chops. Writers like Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry and Grover Lewis were beginning their careers with the materials at hand.
I count myself among this group so I remember what it was like. The materials at hand were amazing and absolutely fresh. They were also perilously bleak, and, in truth, we were not really welcome to them. At that time, the plains of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas constituted a cautious, secret country, populated by quiet, private people. The residue of reserve left behind by the Depression and the War, the presumption that if anyone knew anything about you, it would probably be sad and only add to their own personal grief, was still much in evidence. It was a world in which people lived and died but no one ever seemed to get sick, because if they did get sick, they kept it to themselves. And then they died. There was always the prospect of telling people or showing people things they didn’t want to hear or see. As a result, a young artist or writer, having done something with the materials that his or her homeland made available, had nothing much to do with what he or she had done. The situation had less to do with the Philistinism of the culture than with the fact that, on the plains of America, the artists come first. They invariably precede the means of dissemination and reception.
So we left, and most of us, I think, would credit Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for that permission—that, and the good sense to seek out the sources of reception and dissemination for our work. Mostly, though, it was “The Road,” which in the 1950s became a place unto itself, four lanes wide and as long as you wanted it to be. So, we left, but we took it all with us. We took a way of seeing in which those things one might possibly look at only got in the way, in which one saw the space of the sky, its positive emptiness. The rest, the fences, frame houses and grain elevators, were just clutter, just got in the way of seeing absolutely. We also took the lonely obsession with travel, the road and the vehicles that might take us away, like Ed Ruscha’s Ford or Mason Williams’ bus. We took with us a love of everything that was banal and ordinary, that sense of provisional coziness, and a hatred of everything that was average. (Ruscha reminds us to regard the “Mean as Hell.”) We also carried with us the dark inheritance of people who live by the weather and the land, the obsessive sense of order one throws up against the absolute certainty that, eventually, it will all blow away. From that promise of banality and apocalypse, we took an intimation of the beauty in the prospect of desolation and disaster, like the elegant curves of Joe Goode’s tornadoes or Jerry McMillan’s Explosion in the Art Cosmos #2.
There is every reason, then, to return the works of these Oklahoma artists to their point of origin. It’s not exactly like returning the Elgin marble to Athens, of course, but it does afford the citizens of Oklahoma a chance to experience what New Yorkers do when they look at Willem de Kooning’s Gotham News, or Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, or Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. New Yorkers look at this work and see their own city reflected and projected through the sensibility of extraordinary artists. Thanks to this exhibition, Oklahomans now have the opportunity to experience that same odd and disconcerting moment when you look at something you do not recognize, in which everything you recognize and love is somehow encapsulated. There is also, in this exhibition, the possibility that the next time the neighborhood of Oklahoma, thanks to the accidents of fashion and genetics, throws up a handful of wonderful artists, like fire-crackers into the empty sky, the citizens of that neighborhood will know what to do with them and how to keep them home to enrich the atmosphere.
Watch a video of highlights from Roots & Ties
Back to 2007 past exhibits
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