DAPHNE’S CLOSET: SCULPTURE WORKSHOP & BRUNCH WITH UMICO NIWA

SUNDAY, JULY 13, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
112 N. Boston Ave, Tulsa, OK 74103

FREE WITH RSVP | Menu by Prism Cafe

Join Japan-based artist Umico Niwa, exhibiting artist in Spatial Poems on view at Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship, and a current Core Fellow at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for an intimate workshop session inspired by adornment, embodiment, and transformation. Niwa’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, and wearable forms, centering themes of gender, metamorphosis, and the animate lives of objects.

Together, we’ll create Daphne sculptures—tender hybrids of plant, person, and myth. Participants are invited to learn this hands-on process with materials provided and independently gathered. Any organic matter lying around ready for reinvention, such as carrots, leaves, a wilting bouquet, acorns, potatoes, berries, seeds, roots, and stems.

Spatial Poems curator Cassidy Petrazzi will provide a special introduction about their collaborative process. To learn more, visit tulsaartistfellowship.org/exhibitions.

*Spatial Poems* installation view featuring work by Umico Niwa. Photograph by Dan Farnum. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

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 Arts 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. Niwa received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, in 2020.

Cassidy Petrazzi is a curator, art historian, and writer whose work explores performance, temporality, and embodied experience in contemporary and postwar art. Born and raised in New York, she now lives and works in Tulsa, OK. Her research centers on Fluxus and other postwar avant-garde movements, particularly in performative scores, chance operations, and the politics of presence. She investigates how conceptual frameworks intersect with perception, site, and time-based media. Originally from New York, Petrazzi has held positions at leading contemporary galleries 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 the Fluxus impresario that premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. Her writing has appeared in Art Focus, The Pickup, and Luxerie Magazine, among others. She is the former Gallery Director of the Gardiner Art Gallery at Oklahoma State University. Petrazzi has curated and contributed to a range of exhibitions, including Sun Patterns, Dark Canyon: The Aquatints and Paintings of Doel Reed (1894–1985) and Benjamin Harjo Jr.: We Are a Landscape of All We Know at the OSU Museum of Art; Rafael Corzo: The Color of Dreams and Artifacts at the Start of a Decade: A Group Exhibition of Artists’ Books at the Gardiner Gallery of Art; and 1107 Manhattan Avenue at Spencer Brownstone Gallery.

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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