Projection is a rotating public art series conceived, curated, and directed by Tulsa Artist Fellow Tatyana Fazlalizadeh on the exterior façade of Tulsa Artist Fellowship Studios in downtown Tulsa.

Featuring temporary wheat-paste installations by Tulsa Artist Fellows and invited artists, Projection transforms the Studios’ façade into an evolving platform for artistic experimentation, public engagement, and contemporary image-making in public space.

Drawing on more than a decade of experience creating socially engaged public art, Fazlalizadeh curates artists whose practices and images can translate dynamically into public space.

CURRENT INSTALLATION

Adam Davis | Brothers in Life & the Arena | October 1–December 30, 2026

The second installation of Projection is by Tulsa Artist Fellow Adam Davis, whose photographic practice centers Black portraiture, with a particular interest in Black rodeo and Western culture. Davis creates portraits grounded in sustained relationships with his subjects and the communities and places he documents.

In Brothers in Life & the Arena, twin brothers Trevor and Trenton Whayne stand with their arms locked, a taxidermied goat behind them, gazing directly into the lens. Wearing cowboy hats, ropes, and belt buckles, they meet the viewer with confidence and ease. An ornamental frame surrounding the image further emphasizes the tintype’s sense of timelessness.

Davis presents the portrait as part of his larger Black Magic legacy photography project, an ongoing effort to create the largest contemporary archive of African American and global diasporic tintype portraits. During his tenure at Tulsa Artist Fellowship, he has documented the Black rodeo community while exploring mutual aid, multigenerational cultural knowledge, land stewardship, and religious practices.

The selection of Davis’ work reflects Projection’s broader interest in what we choose to make visible through art in public space. His portrait expands representations of Black Western life, presenting Trevor and Trenton through a lens of family, tradition, skill, and tenderness while bringing the history and culture of Black rodeo into Tulsa’s public landscape.

The installation also extends Projection’s experimentation with scale and medium. Davis’ first large-scale outdoor installation translates the intimate qualities of the tintype into a monumental image, asking what becomes possible when images of Black life, culture, and possibility are given space to be seen.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adam Davis is a photographer and filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Tulsa as a Tulsa Artist Fellow. His practice centers photography as a means of building community, preserving histories, and expanding representations of Black life.

Davis began Black Magic while living in Los Angeles, developing an ambitious tintype portrait project documenting Black Americans and the global African diaspora. Since relocating to Oklahoma, his work has increasingly engaged the histories and contemporary communities of the American West, with particular attention to Black riders, rodeo families, and Western culture.

Tulsa Artist Fellowship presents Wilderness of Mirrors, a solo exhibition by Shane Brown, marking the culmination of his 2024–2026 Fellowship. 

In Wilderness of Mirrors, Brown turns his camera toward landscapes, animals, celestial events, and other encounters across the American West, transforming his photographs through repetition, rotation, and digital composition. Individual images multiply into intricate, kaleidoscopic structures—patterns that evoke mandalas while complicating the distinction between documentation and abstraction.

The exhibition extends Brown’s longstanding investigation of the contemporary West and the ways photography shapes our understanding of place, history, and time. An Oklahoma-born photographer, cinematographer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Brown has spent more than two decades documenting a region in which inherited histories, cultural mythologies, and present-day life remain inseparable. Earlier bodies of work, including In the Territories, Life Out There, and Great Plains Schema, examine Oklahoma, the Great Plains, and the American West as places continually shaped—and reshaped—by the stories projected onto them.

Here, Brown moves beyond the conventions of the singular photographic frame. A raven in flight becomes a rhythmic field; the silhouette of a pronghorn radiates outward; the phases of an eclipse form an electric circular geometry. Photographs of Tsé Bit' a'i (Rock with Wings, also known as Shiprock), Fajada Butte, Monument Valley, waterfowl, and the supermoon undergo similar transformations. Across the exhibition, recognizable subjects recur until they begin to function simultaneously as image and pattern, observation and construction.

The resulting works foreground a tension that has long animated Brown’s practice: photography’s capacity to record the world and its equal capacity to alter how that world is perceived. Repetition disrupts straightforward representation, stretching a single captured moment into something cyclical and spatial. Landscapes cease to behave as fixed views; animals become constellations of movement; time appears to fold back upon itself.

Wilderness of Mirrors marks the culmination of Brown’s three-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship, bringing his documentary instincts into conversation with an increasingly experimental approach to photographic time, motion, and image-making.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Shane Brown is a photographer and cinematographer documenting the present-day cultural landscapes of the American West while experimenting with representations of time, motion, and time-based media. Oklahoma-born and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Brown was raised primarily within the Cherokee and Osage Nations and is a 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee.

Over more than two decades, Brown has worked across documentary, fine-art photography, and cinematography. His photography clients include FX Networks, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and First Americans Museum. He has contributed as cinematographer and director of photography to films by Sterlin Harjo, including Mekko and This May Be the Last Time, and served as set photographer for the critically acclaimed FX series Reservation Dogs from 2020–2023.

Brown’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, First Americans Museum, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, Oklahoma State Art Collection, and Great Plains Art Museum.