CURRENT
October 6, 2023 – December 1, 2023
Experience the latest exhibition on view at Flagship. “Current” features the work of Tulsa Artist Fellowship awardees Shane Darwent, Natani Notah (Navajo), and Elspeth Schulze. This group installation brings together three interdisciplinary artists repurposing, transforming, and liberating materials that define our present. “Current” was organized by Tulsa Artist Fellowship Executive and Artistic Director, Carolyn Sickles.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shane Darwent is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mines the commercial vernacular that lines American roadways to inform experimental photographic works, large-scale sculpture, and site-responsive installations. Within a landscape designed to overwhelm, Darwent’s practice seeks out a redacted formalism in order to meditate on the transitional nature of these spaces and the shape-shifting economic constructs of which they are a part. Exhibiting internationally, Darwent has been an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ragdale, the Ucross Foundation, and the Jentel Artist Residency Program, as well as a Core Fellow at Penland School of Crafts. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan (2017) and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2005). He is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow and is an artist-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Natani Notah (Navajo) is an interdisciplinary artist and a proud member of the Navajo Nation. Her current art practice explores contemporary Native American existence through the lens of Diné womanhood. Notah has exhibited her work at institutions, such as Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Marin MOCA), Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Tucson Desert Art Museum, Longmont Museum, Mana Contemporary Chicago, apexart NYC, / (slash) art space and elsewhere. Notah has received awards from Art Matters, the International Sculpture Center, and the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Forbes, and Sculpture Magazine and she has completed artist residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Kala Art Institute. Notah holds a BFA with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University and an MFA from Stanford University. Currently, she is a 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Elspeth Schulze (b. 1985, Grand Coteau, LA) is a visual artist from Southern Louisiana, a place where land and water meet. Recent work explores the idea of a porous place, a passage between one thing and another. Schulze holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder, a BA in Literature from Loyola University New Orleans, and an AAS in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Recent exhibition venues include Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, OK; Wasserman Projects in Detroit, MI; Abigail Ogilvy in Boston, MA; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York and LA. She is currently an artist in residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
ABOUT FLAGSHIP
Tulsa Artist Fellowship inaugurated its Flagship public project space located at 112 N Boston Ave E, Tulsa, OK 74103 in Tulsa’s historic downtown district. The 2,421 square-foot building was designed as an integrated and dynamic platform for arts-centered community exchange.
Flagship programming includes screenings, panel/roundtable discussions, lectures, artist talks and interviews, literary resources, workshops, symposiums, as well as performances and public artworks, sound installations, and more.