FEATURED COLLECTION OKLAHOMA ART IN PUBLIC PLACES

Because we are focussing on Oklahoma City, we selected four works from the State of Oklahoma Public Art Collection in the city to showcase. Circle of Life by Enoch Kelly Haney can is a provocative sculpture. Most artists have day jobs to supplement what can often be erratic paychecks. But usually they are more humdrum than his. Mr. Haney was the first full-blood American Indian to serve in the Oklahoma State Legislature where he served from 1980-2002. He also has the distinction of winning the blind commission for the sculpture atop the State Capitol in 2002 which is a 17' high Indian Guardian. In an interesting twist, there are several shorter 7' versions of the sculpture that are placed around the city at eye level.

Thomas Sayre's Disk refers to an evolving Oklahoma. The concrete discs look to the rich past of Oklahoma’s relationship to the earth: of farming, the Land Run. The intricate, shiny, stainless disk to the north speaks of new Oklahoma: of technology, craft and ingenuity of the unknown future. Gary Lee Price's Einstein sits on a bench in front of the science high school. Our fourth local artist David Phelps's piece Invisible Royalty is about the writings of Ralph Ellison.

MEMORIAL: OKLAHOMA CITY NATIONAL MEMORIAL

On April 19, 1995 the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. The devastation wrought was extraordinary including 168 people, many of them children. Part of the lengthy healing process included the design of a memorial. An international competition was held. It was won by two young Texan architects who were living in Germany, Hans and Torrey Butzer with Sven Berg. As Maya Lin and Michael Arad will attest, winning an international competition is life changing. They relocated to Oklahoma City to construct the memorial whose iconic feature is the outdoor field of empty chairs.

FEATURED ARTIST: JOHN POWELL

WJohn Powell's career as an artist whose medium is light has paralleled the technical advances in the field. He began by working at the MIT Media Lab on holography and spatial imaging. The first proposals he made to light the bridges connecting Boston to Cambridge happened in the 90's when people were beginning to experiment with lighting bridges with colored lights. They were very temporary because of the expense and the logistics. Since then, the technology has exploded. LEDs have been developed. Mr. Powell has had the good fortune to be involved in lighting almost all the bridges criss-crossing Boston's waterways most recently the Evelyn Moakley Bridge and the North Washington St. Bridge.

Another aspect of his work is using words often for works commissioned for academic institutions. Harvard's Innovation Lab , aka the I-Lab for instance is meant to mimic an incubator. It is supposed to do a lot of things, to inspire the university schools to collaborate with each other, to create creative new products based on cutting edge technology. The building itself is really a repurposed generic office space that perhaps is not quite ad innovative as its mission. What John Powell tries to do, is to use the words on the outside as both a sign and a way to inspire. Similarly Text Walk on the scaffolding outside of Emerson College uses projectors to illuminate fragments of poetry and text from Emerson graduates onto banners.