OK Day 2- Folk Music, Fine Art, and Frozen Custard
Today started out with a trip to a really cozy coffee shop called Coffee House on a Cherry Street. What they lacked in creative naming, they made up for in some damn fine coffee and pastries. I know I usually say that just about every coffee I have is at least pretty good, but I really have to stress that this was exceptionally good coffee. They even had one of my favorite kinds of pastries that I don't see too often, a no-bake cookie. This is just a bunch of nuts and granola drenched in melted chocolate and then solidified into the shape of a cookie. It wasn't the healthiest breakfast in the world, but I couldn't have been happier.
My first stop post-coffee was a cool museum dedicated to probably the most famous Oklahoman of them all, Woody Guthrie. I was excited to see the Woody Guthrie Center because, having grown up surrounded by folk music, Woody was a pretty inescapable figure and for good reason. His simple honest songwriting has influenced just about every facet of popular music, and he essentially created (or at least popularized) the idea of the singer-songwriter. Moreover, he did it all with a deep sense of empathy and social activism, calling out injustice everywhere he saw it, promoting the positive aspects of people and places most Americans had never heard of, and actually offering ways in which to make things better.
Unsurprisingly the museum began with a few choice photos, paintings, and quotes of Woody that really showed off his wit and personality. My personal favorite of these was an interactive cartoon map of the United State with key places and moments of Woody's life highlighted with fun animations.
Also in the main lobby was one of the newer museum acquisitions, a painting by John Mellencamp. This is the second museum I've been to so far that featured some of Mellencamp's artwork, and I have to say I think I like him a lot more as a painter than a musician. There's something much darker and more surreal about this piece this I ever would have expected from the guy that wrote R.O.C.K in the USA.
The first full exhibit in the museum was all about the Dust Bowl, a tragic but formative period for Woody, the country, and arts in general. Woody was just entering his 20s when droughts and dust storms started making Oklahoma essentially uninhabitable, so he and his family joined the hundreds of "Okies" who migrated west toward California. The experiences he had and the cruel treatment he saw towards migrants inspired his seminal 1940 album Dust Bowl Blues. The album featured 13 songs with more literary storytelling (even a few inspired by the Grapes of Wrath) and cynical targeted criticism of the actions of the government and the police than was common in American Pop music at the time, and it became a huge and influential success. It is also considered one of if not the very first concept albums ever made. The exhibit featured artwork and artifacts from Woody's childhood and early migrant years, including hand-written lyrics from some of the songs that go on to be on Dust Bowl Blues. As well as the Woody-centric pieces, the exhibit also contained Dust Bowl era photographs that were really unbelievable. The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books so I had some familiarity with the time period, but I'd never seen actual photographs of the dust clouds. I always thought it had to be hyperbolic when they said the dust actually blacked out the sun, but good god there it is on film. It truly looks like a biblical plague really happened to these poor farmers. Images of people wearing gas masks to just walk to the store were beyond eerie.
The next big collection was of musical instruments that had belonged to Woody (and one Banjo that belonged to Pete Seeger but which had an engraving on it inspired by Woody's famous "This machine kills fascists" guitar). My favorite of Woody's many instruments was the mandolin he took with him to WWII, where he served as a merchant marine . He had engraved on it "Drunk Once Sunk Twice" which beyond being a fun of turn of phrase does refer to two times he was on ships that were sunk by Germans. Not only did he survive, but both times he managed to save his guitars (plural), mandolin, and fiddle. There's a man with his priorities straight.
For me as someone more familiar with Woody's musical children (metaphorically and literally when you count Arlo), the biggest treat in terms of instruments was a display of Joe Strummer's and Billy Bragg's guitars showing Woody's influence on British punk. Both the guitars were also donated by their musician's respective charities focused on music and arts education around the world, showing that Woody's activism as well as his music continued on in the people he inspired.
The next display was on his second wife, Marjorie Guthrie (nee Mazzia). While Woody and Marjorie did get divorced, she came back into his life in his final years and she was with him until the end. She was also a very talented artist and activist in her own right, and I was glad the museum showcased some of that instead of just focusing on her as his wife. She was the daughter of Aliza Greenblatt, a celebrated Yiddish poet, and she was a dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company when she met Woody. She continued to be a celebrated dancer and opened up her own dance academy while they were married. After her experiences caring for Woody while he was deteriorating from the effects of Huntington's Disease, she became instrumental in spreading awareness of the then little known disease lecturing at medical schools and joining forces with the National Committee for Research in Neurologic and Communicative Disorders. The display featured several photographs of her dancing and they were just stunning. The picture in the center of her dancing with Woody behind her playing guitar has a real folksy Beauty and the Beast vibe to it.
The next gallery featured collections of Woody's artwork from throughout his life. This really blew me away not just in it's quality but also it's quantity as the displays were practically floor to ceiling. I only knew of Woody's music, but not only was he a songwriter, but also a novelist, a short story author, a painter, and as illustrated here a prodigious doodler. The art was really good too, encompassing a variety of styles from humorous cartoons to portraits to flirtations with whatever was popular in the art world at the time. It was like there was no creative avenue he couldn't excel at it. The depth and breadth of his creativity was really astounding to me. Definitely not a great place to go if you're suffering from an artistic inferiority complex.
The last gallery focused on the real meat and potatoes of Woody's career though, his writings. They had original pressings of his albums, hand written lyrics, and essays and letters he sent to friends. The thing I was most surprised to see which seemed oddly prescient for today's political climate were several anti-Trump poems and protest songs. Of course Woody wasn't referring to the Donald, but rather Donny's dad and Woody's one-time land lord Fred Trump. Woody and Marjorie briefly lived at Trump's Beach Haven Apartment in Brooklyn, and he hated it, viewing the apartments and Trump as the epitome of racial bigotry and discriminatory housing practices. The pieces are too long to totally write out here, but I suggest reading them to get an idea of the kind of man who reared our president (this is also a good time to point out that if you click on these smaller photographs they get bigger, because I've had some people ask me about that). The saddest piece in this exhibit was a letter Woody wrote Marjorie on a napkin in his hospital bed. You can see already the effects of Huntington's affecting his motor skills as his neat handwriting gets more and more wild and sprawling.
The crown piece of this exhibit though was a reproduction of the original handwritten lyric's to Woody's masterpiece, This Land is Your Land, probably one of the most simply beautiful bits of subversive writing ever to enter the national consciousness.
The last exhibit was a traveling exhibit from the country music hall of fame. Highlights include Roger McGuinn's guitar he played with the Byrds, a truly ridiculous "Nudie Suit" that belonged to Merle Travis, Suits and iconic glasses from Roy Orbison, suits and guitars from Johnny Cash, and a handful of classy photos of country legends.
After all that folking around, I was feeling a might peckish so I went to the irresistibly named Fat Guy's Burger Bar. Their goal appears to be getting each of their customers to resemble their mascot by the end of the meal as their signature Fat and Juicy Burger consists of two patties with butter and cheese in the middle sealed up and cooked so that the molten butter and cheese gets inside the patties. I didn't have the cajones or the arteries to try that, but I got a double bacon cheeseburger with mushrooms, lettuce, and tomato so it wasn't exactly like I was eating light. I also got their ballpark fries with garlic parmesan dipping sauce that was absolutely fantastic. The burger was amazing, and the value was unbeatable with the whole meal clocking in at just under $10. The patties were all fresh beef perfectly cooked, and I don't know exactly how they toasted their bun that made it so much better than the average burger bun but they sure did it well. I think if you're ever in the mood to get fat in Tulsa, it's gotta be the place to go.
After lunch, I somehow rolled myself to the Gilcrease Museum. The Gilcrease museum was founded by another Oklahoma oil magnate (this will be a theme this week), Thomas Gilcrease, and is home to one of the largest and most acclaimed collections of art of the American West in the world. Gilcrease was an interesting figure. His mother was a member of the Creek Nation and Thomas grew up on tribal grounds. He had a lifelong dedication to advocating for Native American tribes, and when he acquired his wealth he was one of the earliest champions of contemporary Native American art that was largely being ignored by the art world at large. He also helped fund anthropological exhibitions in North, South, and Central American to learn more about the histories and culture of different Native peoples. He always made his collection available to the public even when he was going through difficult personal finances, and he felt that the best way to preserve and showcase the culture of the Native Americans and the American West more broadly was through art. The first gallery in the museum was just a small introduction to its namesake with a photo of a young Gilcrease with his family on a reservation and the first painting ever purchased, a piece called Rural Courtship by Daniel Ridgway Knight. They also had a quote of his displayed that I really liked: "Every man leaves a track and it might as well be a good one"
The next gallery was entitled Hidden in Plain Sight: Unexpected Views of Gilcrease Museum, and it featured photographs by 14 local Tulsa artists from around the Museum gardens. The goal given to each artist was to take familiar scenery and capture new and unexpected images. The end results were pretty breathtaking.
At the end of the hallway with those photographs was an event space, which while largely empty did give a pretty spectacular view out over the grounds.
The next exhibit continued the trend of spectacular nature photographs, showcasing the masterful photography of David Halpern. This particular collection highlights photos from his trips across America's national parks so he had some pretty incredible scenery to work with though his eye and technical ability elevate each piece beyond just the natural beauty into perfectly captured little moments in time. If these don't make you want to go out and see more parks, I don't know what will.
The next gallery was smaller but still very impressive, and focused on modernist Mexican paintings, highlighting that the history of the American West is not limited to US. The majority of these paintings were from the 40s and have a really cool blend of traditional Mexican art with more avant-garde European stylistic touches from that period. My favorites from this collection were: a really stirring painting of a lone woman amidst a bleak backdrop called Desolacion by Raul Anguiano; a surrealist representation of Aztec mythology called Annunciation of the Nahuatl by Jose Chavez Morado; and a plucky cowboy scene by Juan Serrano, not dissimilar to common American cowboy art minus the sombreros. It does make you think how sort of odd it is that cowboys have become such a traditional American symbol, when the role of a cowboy exists in some sense in every community that has cows which is much of the world.
Up next was the largest special exhibition, and it was a doozy indeed. It was all about Norman Rockwell's artistic practice of staging really elaborate reference photographs so that he could capture fleeting expressions and more natural poses that he could recreate in his paintings. The exhibit brought together several of Rockwell's paintings and commercial prints alongside his reference photos which were pretty impressive works of art in their own right, so it was almost like getting two amazing exhibits for the price of one. Seeing the finished products next to the references was really uncanny, and there were audible gasps from some museum visitors upon seeing just how much Rockwell nailed his details. I don't know if it was just because this was such a fun exhibit in general, but there was actually a lot of audience reactions which were almost as enjoyable for me as the art itself. A lot of art is intentionally (and unintentionally) humorous, but I'm almost always the only person audibly laughing at all these art museums I go to, like just because you're in a museum you have to be so serious all the time. Not here though, as most visitors were giggling at the, to be fair very funny faces, Rockwell was able to get models to make. It made, at least for me, for a really warm museum going experience. Besides just being fun, it was also really legitimately interesting to learn about Rockwell's process. Sometimes he set up whole scenes in one photo, but more often he took multiple photos and manipulated them collage style to create the perfect image he had in his mind from the disparate pieces he liked best in each composite. He also moved away from hiring models instead casting friends, family members, and literally people off the street so that he could capture more natural body types, distinct facial features, and authentic reactions. Not all of his photoshoots were totally naturalistic though as sometimes getting the exact expression he wanted took a lot of staging, such as when he wanted to capture a girl eating breakfast on the run so he had to have people holding her pigtails to create the illusion of movement within a still frame.
My personal favorite pieces from this exhibit were his large scale story grids from the Saturday Evening Post covers entitled a A Day in the Life of a Boy, A Day in the Life of a Girl, and the Gossips. I love the side by sides of these with their reference photos because he had to get so many different scenes of children and old people being silly and it's all so funny in both set up and execution. On a more serious note, the other highlights for me were actually very contentious pieces for Rockwell at the time as they were some of his most political. These pieces, the now iconic The Problems We All Live With and the New Kids in the Neighborhood, focus on themes of racial injustice and a need for tolerance, and the Saturday Evening Post wouldn't have had anything to do with them. The Post in fact had very strict guidelines that non-white characters could never be the protagonist of a scene but rather could only be observers, parts of group scenes, or in servile roles. This led to Rockwell leaving his longtime home, and making these particular images for Look magazine instead. It was definitely the Post's loss as they're some of the best and most powerful images the then 73 year old artist ever made.
After the special exhibit, I went to look at the Museum's extensive collection of Native American art. This was one of the best collections of Native Art, I've ever seen. It was hugely expansive, but they had little tablets you could carry with you that would identify what item you were looking at, what tribe it came from, and what it's use and/or cultural significance was. It's amazing how frequently even in really major museums, all native Art is lumped together or at best regionally divided, which doesn't really come close to fully capturing the complex tribal networks and civilizations that actually existed. I like seeing well-curated exhibits like this because it's really great opportunity to fill gaps in my own knowledge, and it was definitely humbling to realize how much I either didn't know about different Native American groups or how much I was flat out wrong about. If you go by just pop cultural representations (which is roughly 90% of my knowledge base), you're gonna be dealing with a lot of misinformation. All that being said, I definitely didn't utilize all this educational material as much as I really should have because there was just so much textual info available I knew I wouldn't be able to get through all of it if I still wanted to see the rest of the museum and make it to my open mic in Oklahoma City on time. These feel like lame excuses in hindsight, but more incentive to go back which is nice.
The largest collection of in this exhibit was comprised of artwork and artifacts from Southwester tribes, which makes sense as that would have been where Thomas Gilcrease began his own collection. The range of items was really impressive including clothing, jewelry, hunting and domestic tools, childhood toys and games, baskets, and lots of ceramics from many different tribal traditions. One of the facts I did learn and retain included was that anthropologists believe that ceramic traditions began a few hundred years BC with the Puebloa tribes and soon spread outward throughout the other southwestern tribes. These were probably my favorite pieces of the collection, especially the effigy figurines and pots because I don't know how they were able to create such impressive likenesses of different animals and people with clay so early. It was really incredibly. The other major highlight of this collection for me was the Navajo silver and turquoise jewelry, because I hadn't really seen much like it before. I guess the initial concept of silverworking was introduced to the Navajo by the Spanish, but once they had the concept they really took it and ran with it in some really fascinating ways that added their own cultural flourishes to this pre-existing art form.
Some other major highlights of this collection at I very well would have overlooked if another guest hadn't excitedly pointed them out to me were the works of an acclaimed ceramics artist named Maria Martinez. who helped rediscover and popularize a form of traditional San Ildefonso Pueblo pottery that was characterized by black on black painted patterns. I'll be honest when I first looked at the pieces quickly I flat out missed the patterns, and just thought that they were pure black, but I saw an older woman fawning over them so I got curious and went back for a second look and I was very glad I did. The style is so sleek and modern looking it's hard to believe that a lot of her work was made around the turn of the 20th century!
I was very excited by the next chunk of the collection because it was focused on Inuit and Northwestern tribes, and I really don't think I'd ever seen artifacts from these groups in person before. I love how lots of similar practices emerged in these groups independent of other tribes, but became adapted to their own unique living circumstances. For example they had to develop blades that were uniquely well suited to cutting through blubbery animals, not an important problem to solve in New Mexico. I'm also a big fan of scrimshaw art from having grown up near Northeastern whaling towns, so I loved all the art made from whale bones and walrus tusks. The ivory in walrus tusks in particular is such a weird looking and beautiful substance. In general walruses are goofy and ridiculous animals, so it was really interesting to see how they factored into the daily lives of the people who grew up around them.
Last but not least we had an extensive collection of arrowheads from many different tribes all over the country and more intricate tableau scenes of ceramic figures from around the southwest. I never quite understood the fascination with arrowheads, but seeing all the varieties all laid out in one place was pretty impressive.
The next exhibit was on the art of George Catlin, the first white artist to travel to tribal lands in the West and document Plains Indians as they actually lived. Some of the pieces were from Catlin's personal collection but the majority were actually his own original works. I love the way they blended highly realistic backdrops with slightly more cartoonish figures to record the tones of the often warm and humorous scenes he was capturing not just their content. His paintings of hunting mishaps and of big goofy buffalo were real stand outs for me, but it was nice to see a white artist attempt to actually document Native People without relying entirely on caricatures and stereotypes.
The next exhibit was entitled To Endure in Bronze, and featured sculptures of Western Scenes captured in Bronze. I loved these. There's something so impressive to me about capturing motion through sculptures, because its not like they can have people or animals sustain those poses and yet they capture the flexing muscles so realistically. I can't wrap my head around, but I love seeing it. My favorites from this exhibit were a statue of a young Indian brave hunting buffalo, a (literally) monumental eagle statue called the Eagle Rock Monument by Kent Ullberg, and a really beautiful sculpture of an older Indian man teaching a young boy how to shoot a bow an arrow by Herman Atkins Macneil.
Up next was a small but whimsical gallery of Meso-American masks. I love whenever unusual creatures are represented in art, so the mythological lizard people were extremely up my alley.
Last but not least was the museum's permanent collection (did I mention, it's a pretty big museum?). The first section of the permanent collection focused on modern and contemporary works by Native American artists. Unfortunately, some of these works did not allow photography so some artists I really enjoyed are not represented below, but I strongly encourage readers to check out Dolona Roberts, Fred Beaver, Bill Rabbit, and Leah Qumaluk. Luckily, the works that were there able to be photographed were pretty darn impressive as well.
My favorite pieces from this wing of the permanent collection were the works of Shan Goshorn and W. Richard West. Goshorn's pieces were really powerful and beautifully woven baskets made from archival prints of photographs from the Indian Conversion Schools that tried to Americanize native children by destroying their own cultures. A very sweet touch was that photos were woven together with handwritten notes and blessings to those children that so hope and love were literally interwoven with moments of pain and suffering. West's art was much more lighthearted but nonetheless impressive and meaningful. His paintings recreated tribal myths as comics book styled action scenes. This was intended to both celebrate the more fantastical aspects of his own culture and also lightly critique the comic book industry for leaving out native voices.
The next wing of the permanent collection was focused on American landscapes and seascapes, and featured some pretty big names including: Thomas Moran, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and of course the mac daddy of American landscapes, Albert Bierstadt. I used to just kind of gloss over landscape paintings in museums but now that I've actually been to more of these place I've been having more and more emotional and nostalgic reactions to these works beyond just thinking they're really lovely.
The next wing was all different Western scenes ranging from very abstract representations to more straightforward approaches. My favorites from this collection were the really stylized action scenes by amazing artists who also did do a lot of illustration work for cowboy stories like Frederic Remington, N.C. Wyeth, and Frank Tenney Johnson. Remington was my personal MVP because he was both an incredible painter and sculptor. Between him and Woody Guthrie, I am getting tired of all these people being so multitalented when I barely even have one talent.
The last wing of the permanent collection featured some really impressive works and the most pieces that were not American West related. These included some New England Seascapes by Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase, a lush pastoral scene by George Inness Sr., an incredible surreal Enchanted Forest scene by Ernest Blumenschein, a burial procession by Bert G. Phillips, and an incredibly grand painting by Howard Chandler Christy of the Signing of the Constitution.
As I was leaving the museum there was also one last little gallery of art by local children, and this one in particular of a hand (possibly of God) tipping a street performer really blew me away. I think it really shows that the kid that made it either doesn't quite understand perspective yet or is a genius or possibly both.
After the museum, I got one last coffee in Tulsa at Doubleshot Coffee. What I knew about Doubleshot before I got there was that they had posted rules for ordering that had inspired a Portlandia sketch, so I was expecting them to be hipstery and pretentious but with very good coffee. They were hipstery and they did have coffee, but they were not at all pretentious and the barista was really into joking around with me which was really nice.
The open mic I was going to was actually just outside of Oklahoma City in a town called Norman, but in a mind blowing twist of events the open mic wasn't happening because the pizza place it was hosted in had been struck by lightning recently and BURNED TO THE GROUND (not during business hours thank goodness, nobody was hurt). When I got there there were literally just a pile of ashes. The thing that really flummoxed me about all that though is, and maybe I'm asking too much here, you would think your business burning to the ground maybe might be worth mentioning on your website. It was not.
Since I figured i wouldn't be able to make any open mics i figured I would just enjoy downtown Norman, which seemed like a very pleasant college town. I ended up getting dinner at a hip little brewpub called The Garage. I was still very much full from my fat burger, so I thought I would order something small and just got an appetizer of chicken tamales. They were very good, with a really nice salsa verde but decidedly more food than I had bargained for. To wash it all down, I got a very excellent imperial stout (8.5% ABV!) from Anthem Brewing called Uroboros. It was robust , malty, and chocolatey making it really drinkable despite it's high alcohol content which would be pretty dangerous if someone put a six pack in front of me but was just right with a single 10 oz pour.
Since I was a little bummed out about the mic, and I had already committed to pigging out today anyway, after dinner I stopped at Rusty's Custard Factory because I had parked right across the street from them and found the name very enticing. I got a specialty of theres called the cherry bomb which had vanilla custard blended with cherries and heath bar. Because of my years at Dairy Queen, I've always been fiercely loyal to real ice cream over frozen custards but even I have to admit this was pretty amazing. I would never have guessed that cherries and heath bar went so well together and as it turns out I would have been a damn fool.
Favorite Random Sightings: Elephant in the Room Men's Grooming Lounge; signs on the highway saying "Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates" (terrifying); A very specific seeming restaurant chain Jimmy's Egg.
Regional Observations: The opening song in Oklahoma wasn't kidding. The winds do come a-sweeping down the plains and the highways in Oklahoma are some of the windiest I've ever encountered
Albums Listened To: A Poet's Life by Tim Armstrong (just Wake Up); Poetry of the Deed by Frank Turner; The Point! by Harry Nilsson (an amazing children's story with some pretty great songs to boot. A really sweet message); Poison Season by Destroyer (a weird one that I really like); Pokemon 2.B.A. Master by various artists (just the classic Pokerap); The Police (disc 1) by the Police
People's Favorite Jokes:
I forgot where I left my boomerang but it came back to me.
Do you know about atheist churches? They're non-prophet organizations
Songs of the Day:
Very odd video, great song
They are just babies!
