Art Now 2013

Art Exhibition and Event featuring 25 Oklahoma artists!

Art Now is the contemporary art exhibition for Oklahoma, showcasing work by the state’s top artists.  City Arts Center’s premier fundraising event, Art Now has impressed audiences for more than two decades. At the gala event, guests will have the opportunity to interact with Oklahoma’s most respected artists and purchase their newest works.  Far from a typical fundraising event, Art Now will feature live music by Oklahoma recording artists, food by celebrated local restaurants and an open bar.  This is a 21 and over event.  Attire: Shades of White.

Artwork will be available for sale to the public when the doors open the night of the 25th – 6pm for the VIP reception and 7pm for the main event, with approximate prices ranging from $100 to $4,000. Art sales are on a first come, first served basis and 50% of revenue generated by art sales will be donated to City Arts Center.

On the night of the Gala event, guest will have the opportunity of indulging in cuisine from The Catering Connection, Iguana Café, Iguana Grill, Lorrie’s Candies, Rococo and Sara Sara. ArtNow currently has 35 total sponsors of Art Now, 9 of which are new to supporting the event. Margaret Creighton, Development Director, is excited to welcome them to the City Arts family and hope they enjoy the event!

Artists are chosen by our guest curator, Louise Siddons. Here is what she has to say about her curatorial journey:

Art Now 2013 is not a survey of all the diversity of contemporary art across Oklahoma. Instead, it is an intimate invitation to explore the work of a group of artists whose practice has moved me—as a curator, art lover, and relatively new Oklahoman. Newness, indeed, is at the heart of this gathering. As I traveled around the state this fall, meeting new people and seeing new work, I was repeatedly drawn in by experiences that created a paradoxical sense of belonging and alienation, of strangeness and seduction, of the familiar transformed into something uncanny.

As a curator of contemporary art, my challenge is to find artists who balance novelty—newness for its own sake—with innovation. Novelty wears off: we quickly tire of art whose only advantage is that it was, at first, unexpected. Innovative art is more complex; it increases our understanding of, and access to, the world around us. It often begins with something familiar—a place, a medium, or an object—and, through exploration (which often takes the form of extended contemplation), transforms our notions of the familiar into something more profound.

Each artist in this show creates work that captivates its viewer, holding us in place and to attention. The simplicity of their imagery is countered by the skill they bring to their craft, both conceptually and in terms of handwork. The result is seductive tactility: the work invites us in (sometimes literally). We feel our own presence more profoundly when we are in the presence of these works, and, if we pay attention, we learn something from that.

About Curator Louise Siddons:

Louise Siddons is an art historian specializing in American art and the visual culture of modernity. She teaches courses in American, Native American, Modern and Contemporary art history at OSU. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University in 2005, completing a dissertation entitled “The Future of the American Race: Reproducing the Radicalized Nation in Print Media, 1925-1940.” She joined the OSU faculty in 2009.

Before coming to Oklahoma State, Siddons was a visiting assistant professor and adjunct curator at Michigan State University and the Kresge Art Museum for two years. Prior to that, she was an assistant curator of works on paper at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for several years. Siddons continues to have a museological role at OSU, where she is curator of an art collection that has particular strengths in twentieth-century and contemporary American art. She is currently involved in the planning process for a new museum of art at the university.

Siddons’ research interests focus on the history of printmaking and photography, particularly in relation to representations of race, radicalization, sexuality and the family. Current projects include preparation of a book manuscript based on her dissertation research as well as articles on Bertha Lum’s printmaking in Japan and China, John Winkler’s WWI images of San Francisco Chinatown, and the studio work of Harlem photographer James VanDerZee. Her research and teaching are centered in the early twentieth century, but her theoretical interests in phenomenology, gender and sexuality, medium-specificity and memory have led her to consider the broader genealogies of printmaking and photography. For example, she is currently working on a study of the ideological connections between mezzotint and maternal power in eighteenth-century Britain; and her next book-length project will examine the work of contemporary photographers who work in historic photographic media.

Siddons has been the recipient of research and writing support from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Council, the Newberry Library, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others.

WeHeartOKC would like to thank Margaret Creighton, Development Director at City Arts Center, for providing us with this information. For more details about this event or others, please visit City Arts Center’s website at: www.cityartscenter.org.