UPCOMING EXHIBITION
SPATIAL POEMS
Umico Niwa, Daphne Adorned Series: Bird Watcher, 2024, foraged organic matter, Britannia Pewter. Courtesy of artist.
JUNE 6 - AUGUST 9, 2025
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
112 N. Boston Ave, Tulsa, OK 74103
First Fridays | June 6 + August 1 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Thursday - Saturday | 12:00 - 6:00 PM
“Select an image of an environment. Concentrate on this image, discovering all the circles, squares or triangles in it, until either the original scene is obliterated or an entirely new landscape emerges, or until your mind can no longer hold all the information.”
Spatial Poems re-inscribes what it means and feels like to occupy space and experience a temporality that actively reconnects the body with itself and its surroundings. The works on view provide tools for perceiving, challenging, and subverting geographic language and, in doing so, create new landscapes, both real and imagined.
Through paintings, photography, sculpture, performance, and time-based media, the artists in Spatial Poems, including Mitchell Algus, Julia Calabrese, Shane Darwent, Olivier Mosset, Umico Niwa, and Peter Young, explore how space is used to create bodily meaning and experience through joyous, minute, and monolithic means. The works in Spatial Poems situate the viewer directly in their own experience, providing access to new modes of perception.
Olivier Mosset, Untitled (Yellow Tondos), 2019, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of artist.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Cassidy Petrazzi is an art historian, writer, and curator. Born and raised in New York, she now lives and works in Tulsa, OK. Petrazzi’s research interests are focused on Fluxus and include theories of temporality and the corporeal experience of performance and time-based works. Before arriving in Oklahoma in 2016, Petrazzi worked in contemporary fine art galleries in New York City including Derek Eller Gallery and Pace/MacGill. She served as associate producer on George: The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus, (2019) a documentary portrait of Fluxus impresario George Maciunas which premiered at MoMA’s 17th annual Doc Fortnight festival. Her arts writing has been published in Art Focus, The Pickup, and Luxerie Magazine. She is the former Gallery Director of the Gardiner Art Gallery at Oklahoma State University. Exhibitions which she has curated and served as curatorial assistant include Sun Patterns, Dark Canyon: the Aquatints and Paintings of Doel Reed (1894-1985), Zoe Friedman: A Place in Time, Benjamin Harjo Jr.: We Are a Landscape of All We Know, and 1107 Manhattan Avenue, among others. Cassidy Petrazzi is the curator of Spatial Poems.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mitchell Algus is affectionately known as “New York’s most beloved, least successful art dealer.” Having received his PhD in physical geography from McGill University in Montreal, doing his field research in the Canadian Arctic, Algus worked as over thirty years as a high school science teacher in Queens. But throughout that period, he has consistently made his own work and championed many others, known primarily as the dealer responsible for resuscitating the careers of great artists such as Barkley Hendricks, Lee Lozano, Joan Semmel, Betty Tompkins, and Harold Stevenson. Now retired from teaching, Algus is spends undivided time committed to his gallery, Mitchell Algus Gallery which has been run in various forms for over thirty years, mounting exhibitions of artists including Agustin Fernandez, Charles Henri Ford, and Magalie Comeau.
Julia Calabrese is a multidisciplinary artist who uses the tools of video and performance to create her visual language. Calabrese combines elements of performance art, dance, set design, theater, and community engagement to make site-specific artworks. She inhabits natural landscapes or constructs immersive environments to explore themes of human frailty, failure, and the absurd. Calabrese’s work focuses on themes surrounding the human body and imaginative possibilities held within existing or constructed environments, unexpected settings, and unfamiliar situations. Calabrese grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University in 2007. She lives and works in Portland OR.
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 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). Darwent’s work is included in the recent publication, 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, by Thames & Hudson (2019). Recent exhibitions include This Will Get Us Somewhere, Maple St. Constructs, Omaha, NE (2021); Plaza Park, Boise State University (2019); Flat End Dome, Spencer Brownstone, New York City (2018); and Suburban Psalm, Spring Break Art Show, NYC (2018). A former artist-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Darwent lives and works in Tulsa, OK.
Olivier Mosset provocative approach to painting has kept him at the cutting-edge of contemporary art since the late 1960’s. Then in Paris, he gained recognition as a member of BMPT alongside Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. This short-lived group of conceptually driven painters reduced the level of skill required to create their work as a means of making art more accessible and to emphasize the importance of the art object over its authorship. After relocating to New York in 1978, Mosset’s body of monochrome paintings were a key influence on the generation of Neo-Geo painters who were to emerge in the 80’s. Keeping always within painting’s particular limitations and concerns and with a deep understanding of the sensuality and physicality of color, Mosset’s work engages acutely with the network of institutional relations that underlie our encounter with art.
Umico Niwa combines organic and synthetic materials to create hybrid creatures that resist normative classification systems. Working within the porous membrane that appears to separate animal/vegetable/ mineral; human/machine; male/female into rigid binaries, Niwa dissolves illusory divisions that contribute to bodily and spiritual dysphoria. Her sculptures speak to a palpable longing for transcendence - a desire for self-actualization that is not contingent on language, body, logic, rationality, sexuality or time. Rejecting the Western obsession with quantification that reduces personhood to analytics, they ask: is it even possible to be queer within a hyper-digital, capitalist system - let alone human? Recent solo exhibitions include, The Harbinger of Luck: Made of Kisses and Clovers x+x+, Museum of Fine Aarts Houston, TX, My Life Inside A Shoe (the phantom cricket), Fig Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, and The Quantified Elf (and how it came to love itself), Someday Gallery, New York, NY
Peter Young grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Pomona College for two years before moving to New York in 1960. Young's paintings have continuously defied categorization since his early New York years showing with Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy. He has been described variously as the first post-modernist painter, as well as a minimalist and an abstract surrealist. From the beginning, his paintings have addressed the rigid formal criteria of minimal art that prevailed in the 1960's. In Young's work, seemingly playful constellations of circles and dots replace restrictive geometric formalism, while colorfulness and pictorial density give way to surprising sensuality and poetic momentum.
VISITOR EXPERIENCE
Tulsa Artist Fellowship strives to provide a welcoming and accessible experience. Our public programming is free, documented, and archived.
Public hours for Flagship (112 N. Boston Ave. Tulsa, OK 74103) are Thursday-Saturday from 12-6 pm. Flagship accommodates wheelchairs and strollers. Variable seating is provided in addition to the areas for distanced standing and wheelchairs. Family-scale private washrooms are available to support visitors with disabilities and caregivers who need access to increased square footage and changing tables. Street-side parking is available using the Park Mobile App and is free after 5 pm and all-day Saturday-Sunday.
Established in 2015, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship was created as a place-based initiative by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) to address pressing challenges faced by contemporary artists and arts workers living in and joining Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa Artist Fellowship believes the arts are critical to advancing cultural citizenship and supports community-invested practitioners who intentionally engage with our city.
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