Earthbound: A Dark Sky Exhibit

Earthbound: A Dark Sky Exhibit. (foreground): Tyler Thrasher “Moonbeam Flora Garden” (2024) at Tulsa Artist Fellowship-Flagship

By BYRON ARMSTRONG November 18, 2024

*All images Courtesy of Melissa Lukenbaugh

According to the U.S.Census Bureau, there are 413,066 people living in Tulsa, the 48th most populous city in the U.S. You could fit the entire population of Tulsa in Chicago six times over, and might be forgiven for believing there’s not much more to the place than this. However, like the hotel, Tulsa is bringing an intriguing exchange of materials and histories together, in ways planned and organic, to build something worthy of a floor to ceiling view. A few blocks from the Historic Greenwood District, where a new generation of Black businesses have retaken what was once Black Wall Street, is Tulsa’s lively Arts District. This is the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (TAF) annual Open House Weekend, which features panels with Fellowship alum within community-focused artistic workspaces, exhibitions, and workshops. It also coincides with TAF’s regular First Fridays event, a monthly invitation to experience everything the local arts community has to offer by welcoming the public into open studios, galleries, and other private and public spaces in the city. Collaborations with local businesses allow for food and drink to become part of the equation, and the Arts District quickly becomes ground zero for a colossal weekend street party.

This is both organic and intentional. The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, launched in 2015 by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), is a charitable organization founded by billionaire philanthropist George B. Kaiser in 1999. From the TAFs inception, its mandate of supporting the arts in Tulsa has created an infrastructure for the arts through housing, subsidized studio spaces, funding for studio assistance, health care stipends, and a $150,000 award for 10 new fellows every year. Artist educator and the first Executive Director of TAF, Carolyn Sickles, relocated her family from Brooklyn, NYC to take on the role. Headed into her seventh year as director, she has spent a lot of time learning what the Tulsa arts community needed in terms of support. Her initial time was spent meeting partners, stakeholders and artists involved with the foundation to unveil a plan for the organization. Long considered an epicentre for the arts in America, you have to wonder what gets a New Yorker to decamp for Tulsa. “I’ve made an investment here,” she explains. “I've brought my family here and created a new family here. Unfortunately, there’s a dying breed of people who really feel that commitment to place.” Sickles even credits the forced slow down of the pandemic as a benefit to her understanding of Tulsa’s arts scene. “My leadership journey with the fellowship just feels like time has been a unique part of my being here, and the additional chapter of kind of relearning what the artist community needed here in Tulsa, through that time, was an opportunity for us to keep doing that work and not make any quick changes.” Building a framework for the fellowship, integrating the local community into the art scene through open houses and the TAF weekend, has been most of her mandate. However, she points to the biggest shift being the participation of the artists themselves. “A framework is actually very good for the artists and arts workers who do the fellowship,” she adds. “It allows for things like goal setting, for people to actualize a project, to create stability. We create an ecosystem where people are able to thoughtfully plan for what's next in a way that is often unavailable for many creative workers.”

This sense of community building with an ecosystem for the arts is demonstrated consistently over the weekend of Tulsa Artist Fellowship Open House. Kicking off the weekend is the opening night exhibition “Earthbound: A Dark Sky Exhibit” at TAFs Flagship public project space. While it’s being used for the exhibition tonight, it also operates as a communal space for uses as varied as literary readings, performances, sound installations, screenings, discussions, talks and interviews, workshops and more. The exhibition is in partnership with Space For Us, an organization dedicated to making STEAM resources and careers in space sciences more visible and accessible to underserved communities, while promoting dark sky protection and advocacy. The group features work by the Creative Community Manager at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and show curator, Cheyenne Smith, and additional works by artist and UX Engineer Mattaniah Aytenfsu, geologist Tyler Thrasher, chemist Marlena Myles, and astronaut

Dr. Sian Proctor, the first African-American woman to pilot a spaceship for the first all-civilian orbital mission to space. Science as a vehicle for art and vice-versa is hardly new, and this exhibition billed as “an invitation to reclaim the night sky, rediscover the tranquility and wonder it provides, and acknowledge its profound impact on our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it” lives up to its stated goals. Even though this art exhibition takes place mainly in the dark.

Sian Proctor “Artemis” series. Laser print wood on wooden panel, spray paint, 40 in x 30 in (2024)

While an experienced scientist and astronaut, Dr. Proctor is an emerging artist in the art world, beginning her career in 2020 first as a collage artist, before crossing disciplines with painting and woodworking. She brings all these disciplines together in her “Artemis” series, a tribute to humanity’s Earthbound connection to the Moon and our quest to go into the dark sky. An afrofuturist rendering of imagined characters called “xnauts” — specifically, Afrobotica and Afroboticus — are brought to life on canvas and wood. The wood surfaces are spray painted with metallic lunar regolith simulant and resin to mimic minerals found on the moon, mars, and asteroids. This gives them a shimmering effect under a small amount of light provided above each work. Laser cutters are used to cut out and engrave characters and geometric lines into her canvases, the cutting out allowing for the integration of her layered collage practice.

Cheyenne Smith’s “Cheyenne’s Nightstand” is an adult recreation of her childhood nightstand. A television mounted atop VHS tapes with titles by Paul Sagan, Bill Nye The Science Guy, and reruns of “Cosmos” are joined by books by Carl Sagan and others in the realm of astrophysics and the cosmos revealed through an acrylic display case. The television presents staticy images on screen and are a way for the aspiring astrophysicist to bridge the gap between art and science in a way that speaks to people without heavy jargon that meets people where they are at.

Cheyenne Smith “Cheyenne’s Nightstand” VHS tapes, VCR, Books, Acrylic display, telescope (2024)

Mattaniah Aytenfsu merges her knowledge as a creative technologist to design new media art installations like “Between Today and Tomorrow”, large-scale projections of representations of the cosmos — nebulae and constellations — onto several layered screens made of woven materials. It welcomes viewers to experience the convergence of light and motion in a simulation of our place in the universe. The diffusion of light is meant to mimic the impact of light pollution caused by our urban reliance on artificial light, which also hides natural starlight from our view. Aytenfsu wishes to remind us of our connection to the sky by remembering our existence on this floating space rock makes a mockery of divisions created through man made concepts like borders, race or culture. Watching the profiles of attendees captured within the installation, a sense of transcendence was felt, made more noticeable by the relative dark of the room.

Mattaniah Aytenfsu, “Between Today and Tomorrow” Generative software, TouchDesigner, layered scrim (2024)

Tyler Thrasher is a chemist and author whose installation “Moon Beam Flora Garden” takes dried plant life and twice coats them with phosphorescent mineral powder which causes a garden planted inside a large box in the gallery to glow. The Moon Beam Flora Garden is ‘charged’ by UV, sunlight, artificial light, or heat, and I in fact witnessed an assistant periodically shining a UV flashlight on the garden to keep it glowing. It recycles invasive plant species that would otherwise destroy native plants by turning them into literally brilliant art installations. He repeats this concept with smaller, circular “Moonbeam Portals” placed along the walls of the gallery, also making use of recycled materials and phosphorescent mineral powder.

Tyler Thrasher, “Moonbeam Portals” recycled materials, phosphorescent mineral powder (2024)

Marlena Myles is an Indigenous (Spirit Lake Dakota/Mohegan/Muscogee) digital artist who incorporates elements of Dakota/Lakota cultural stories into “Under the Guidance of Hanwi”, a work of Augmented Reality designed in Adobe Illustrator and printed on metal. A sign prompts attendees to scan a QR code on the outer building. This activates the VR artwork centering Hanwi, the goddess of motherhood and Dakota moon spirit represents different phases of the moon; she forms the nucleus of a circle in which 13 lunar months are represented as symbols that orbit her. The VR allows for viewers to ‘tap’ on the symbols to learn what they represent, with the all important circle representing Čháŋhdéška Wakháŋ or the “sacred hoop” that connects humanity to the natural world. Myles borrows from the Kapémni or mirroring concept — a belief that cosmic events mirror what happens on Earth — and this Dakota interpretation of ‘as above, so below’ animates symbols and constellations so they too orbit around Hanwi. This is another call to reflect on our connection to the night sky by remembering the ways in which we revered the moon and stars, not just for their physical light, but for the light of knowledge they imparted to us for everything from harvest time to women’s menstrual cycles.

Marlena Myles, “Under the Guidance of Hanwi” Augmented Reality Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Aero (2024)

The Exhibition ended with a land acknowledgment and traditional drumming and songs performed by Kiowa District Legislator, educator, and actor Warren Queton (Kiowa). His Cauigu name P’aw Ah means “the moon is coming” and was perhaps a fitting tribute to the dark sky of which this show is themed. Respect for and connection to land, place, nature, and humanity’s place in it is worth exploring in art and in life, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship made a good call launching their open house weekend with this well attended reminder. 

*Sources: United States Census Bureau, based on the 2020 Decennial Census. WM