From Bust to Boom Support for the artistic community a quarter century ago was as flat as the Oklahoma landscape. A single idea and a group of determined individuals forged a path for the benefit of artists then and now. by Susan Grossman
(left) Guy and Maxine Warren and Sue Clancy, OVAC volunteers who helped begin the Artist Survival Kit program providing business skills to artists. (right) John McNeese, Laura Warriner and Julia Kirt at the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition: A Decade of Excellence exhibition at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, 2000.
When the cover story of a local magazine features a variety of creative, forward thinkers, when art walks and gallery talks take place on any given Friday night around the state, and when the inbox is full of invitations to shows, exhibitions, and calls for artistic proposals, it’s hard to imagine the climate a mere 25 years ago for Oklahoma’s visual art community. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was under fire, the Contemporary Arts Foundation in Oklahoma City was closed, and juried museum shows were pretty much a thing of the past. Resources for artists, both financial and social, were few and far between. Individual Artists of Oklahoma had been around for a few years as an alternative arts organization. Three art museums served the central part of the state: the Oklahoma Museum of Art in the toney Nichols Hills neighborhood, the Oklahoma Art Center housed on the fairgrounds of State Fair Park (these two museums later merged to become the Oklahoma City Art Museum), and the Fred Jones Jr. Memorial Art Center in Norman (later designated as the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art). In Oklahoma City, the best “artsy experience” in 1988, according to Oklahoma Gazette readers, was the Festival of the Arts and John Kirkpatrick, founder of the Kirkpatrick Foundation, was voted best arts patron. Ron Norick was mayor when
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then-City Councilman I.G. Purser declared, “Downtown is dead, and we helped kill it.” The oil boom had busted going on five years and the landscape was as blank as an unpainted canvas. NBA superstar Kevin Durant was a newborn, the Oklahoma River was a dirty ditch and the intersection of Interstates 35 and 40 was truly to facilitate travelers passing through. There was not even a whiff of the revitalization that was to come. It was in this environment that John McNeese owned and operated the John Porter Gallery in Oklahoma City where he enjoyed working with the artists he represented. Yet he was bothered by a nagging little problem – they had very little outside financial support to pursue their work. “The gallery, which was called the John Porter Gallery, is the way I got attached to the artists in the area and started talking with them,” he said from his home in Ponca City. “I learned there was very little NEA money coming to Oklahoma primarily because we were in the same region as Texas and they were getting all the money. So I came up with the idea for our own fellowship awards. And it gradually went from there.” “It” is Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC), the brainchild of McNeese and
Laura Warriner, the founder of [Artspace] at Untitled in Oklahoma City. He served as secretary/treasurer of the newly formed OVAC and Warriner was vice president. “When OVAC started it was about the time that U.S. Senator Jesse Helms led his attack on the NEA,” McNeese said. “In Oklahoma City there was a lot of art being pulled because it offended somebody. That was the environment at the time. We did a lot of advocacy on behalf of artists, held a symposium on censorship and advocated for artists fees, which were not being paid at the time.” McNeese closed his gallery after three years but by 1989 OVAC had become a 501(c)3 organization and he as its first executive director was actively raising money with plans to begin making financial awards to help support artists. The first, an artist excellence award, was $1,000 and given that same year to visual artist James Seitz of Seminole. Soon OVAC was invited by the Oklahoma Arts Council to assume responsibility for the VisionMakers exhibition in 1990 and McNeese said the organization really took off from there. He stayed with OVAC for eight and a half years before deciding that OVAC was as far as it was going to go under his leadership. “I am a good idea person and once I get