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Lydia Cheshewalla
Artist Website

Lydia Cheshewalla (she/her/we) is a transdisciplinary artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the ecological landscape of North American prairielands. As an Osage woman, her work primarily focuses on community, emotional awareness, environmental justice, ephemerality, relationship, and art as remediation. She is currently working on becoming.







 Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is a multimedia artist, activist/organizer, critic, and educator. A Tulsa Artist Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, his work appears in 23 nations in the Américas, Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Pacific, including recent exhibitions at Flux Factory in Queens and Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.





Rachel Rose Dazey
Artist Website

Rachel Rose Dazey is a goldsmith, sculpture and photographer. She creates jewelry pieces as sculptural objects in dialogue with larger bodies of work and directs community projects. Her work is thematically unwritten with a reverence for the natural world and our human connections. In 2015 she founded the jewelry design brand Dillon Rose. She is currently working on an ongoing project thematically expressed as the Complexity of Presence; a multi-disciplinary project exploring complex expressions of gender and her relationship as a settler to the land of Oklahoma and all of North America, which is Indigenous land.





Bradley Dry
Artist Interview





Yatika Fields
Artist Website

Yatika Starr Fields is an Artist with emphasis on studio paintings and large-scale Murals. He is from Oklahoma and a member of the Osage, Cherokee and Muscogee Creek Nations and currently living and working in Tulsa as a fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Yatika’s artistic endeavors has taken him around the world, working with institutions and Museums in a continuous dialogue to help broaden the views of Contemporary Native art today. His influences vary with range- often he takes his memories as a frequent source to expand upon. After graduating High School in Stillwater, OK he attended the Art Institute of Boston and then NYC for a decade on the East Coast- the urban environments quickly became an open source of visual and energetic inspirations that continue to influence his works today.
In recent years his work has taken a shift to represent the contemporary politics we live in today tied together with historical and traditional context through explorations in Landscapes, representational motifs of culture and heritage mixed with the pop references of earlier works. His compositions are colorful and dynamic, leaving the viewer to move the eye and find relating elements to their own journey, an orchestrated landscape of unbounded possibilities is revealed.







Leah Grant
Artist Website

Leah Grant lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she is currently an MFA candidate in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. She graduated with her BFA from Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Leah incorporates collage techniques and images from a personal archive to recontextualize her experiences with revealing and concealing the vulnerable parts of her identity. Her background is in printmaking but she also utilizes photography, writing, audio, and video in her art practice.








Anthony Kascak
Artist Website

Anthony Kascak (b. 1993, he/him) received his MFA in Studio Art at the University of Arkansas School of Art, and a BFA in Art Practices as well as a BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has attended residencies and exhibited in the United States and abroad, in locations such as Germany, China, and South Korea. His work explores the experience and perception of his interpersonal relationships, as well as the role that touch and introspection has in his visual arts practice and everyday life. He is interested in pairing the act of looking with the sensation of touching through installations and arrangements of intimate photographs, ceramic fragments and frames, and manual or digitally fabricated surfaces. The negotiation of these installations direct the viewer to consider the extent in which distance, intimacy, and vulnerability fluctuate within psychological spaces.








Minah Kim
Artist Website

Minah is a trans-national artist and multilingual from South Korea. Her pieces have been shown internationally and nationally including Asia Contemporary Art Show in Hangzhou, China, The Clay Studio, PA, District Clay Gallery in Washington D.C., Clay Houston, Texas, Frankfurt Herbstmesse, Germany, theiiplatform, UK, Seoul Art Center, Gimhae Clayarch Museum, and many others. She completed residencies at Anderson Ranch Art Center and Gimhae Clayarch museum. Minah is a current M.F.A. 2021 candidate and awardee of numerous fellowships including Artist 360 grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and  Multicultural Fellowship from NCECA (National Council on Education for The Ceramic Arts). She was one of the panelists at NWSA (National Women's Study Association).
My work enters into the beauty of a decolonial reaction to the psychological, physical, and linguistic oppression on socio-political identification through the nuance of quietness. Quietness is not silence, it is a constant sound. It is embodied throughout the arrangement and action within the time and space of the installation. The work internalizes the sense of boundary and the limitation of the memory. Clay and sound are the tactile and visceral medium I use for activating intimacy, vulnerability, accumulation of labor, and further, the emotive connection. This particular work is the oblique way to walk around the border of Art and labor, and face the strong sensibility of the communication speaking in quietness, unheard, unspoken.







 Matt Magerkurth
Artist Website

Matt Magerkurth (b. 1995) is a composer and cellist currently based in Fayetteville, AR. Magerkurth's music has been performed in many parts of the US by ensembles such as Loadbang, Exit 128 Chamber Orchestra, the American Creators Ensemble, the Milna Ensemble, The University of Tulsa String Quartet, the University of Tulsa Symphony Orchestra, members of the Beo Quartet, and Ascending Duo. He has been a fellow of music seminars, including the Oregon Bach Festival, the Milna Ensemble of the upBeat International Summer School in Music. and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chamber Music Institute. His work has been recorded in the UK on RMN Music. At the Gilcrease Museum of American Art he recently organized the Landscapes and Soundscapes Installation of Composers, featuring a walk-through installation of pieces written by composers in response to works at the museum. Other performances have taken place through the University of Missouri Columbia's Creative Improvisation Ensemble, The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Tulsa's Music at the Mansion series, and at Tulsa Living Arts.
As an avid performer, Magerkurth performs in a diverse number of genres, including new chamber music, film scores, bluegrass, and Jazz. He often joins the Ascending Duo to form a new music piano trio, having performed in venues like NYC's Firehouse Space and Grove Haus in Indianapolis. He has also premiered numerous pieces with Matthew Gold, Steven Beck, and members of Mivos Quartet at the Walden School, with the American Creators Ensemble at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium, and in Croatia with the Milna Ensemble. As a solo cellist, he has been a featured performer at the OK Electric festival and the Bowling Green New Music Festival, and he is in process on a full-length solo album to be released in 2021.







Zora J Murff
Artist Website

Zora J Murff is an artist and educator living in Northwest Arkansas. He is Black, therefore he is.







Nic Norman
Artist Website

Nic Norman is a photographer, writer, and MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. Obsessed with water and the internet, their work flows into physical and digital spaces alike, addressing themes of queerness and transformation through written and photographic storytelling.







Amber Perrodin
Artist Website

Inspired by the Ozark region she was born in, Amber Perrodin is a community organizer, artist, curator, mother, and wife. A mixed media artist living in Springdale, Arkansas Perrodin received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from the University of Arkansas in 2010.
For Perrodin, art and nature go hand in hand. Without time well spent in the wild, her artwork suffers. Often found foraging for wild mushrooms, swimming in creeks, and searching for tumbled creek glass, Amber brings the essence of these quiet moments into her artwork.
Although abstract, her artwork is often described as peaceful, subdued, and reminiscent of elements found in nature. Perrodin explains her artwork as “a form of visual poetry that expresses [her] fascination with the mysterious and spiritual relationship [she] has with the Ozarks.”
Perrodin currently works from her studio (126 N. Shiloh Street) in downtown Springdale, Arkansas with her husband, artist Jonathan Perrodin, and two talented daughters, Raine and Ezmah.







Ziba Rijabi
Artist Website

Ziba Rajabi (b.1988, Tehran, Iran) received her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and her BFA from the Sooreh University, Tehran. She is the recipient of the student artist grant for the Artist 360 Grant, a program sponsored by Mid-America Arts Alliance. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions, nationally and internationally, such as Masur Museum, LA; CICA Museum, South Korea; Aran Gallery, Iran; The II Platform, UK; Pensacola Museum, Florida; Site:Brooklyn, NY; Amos Eno Gallery, NY; Tops Gallery, TN, among many Others. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center.
As an Iranian female artist based in Arkansas, my work revolves around the desire to reconcile my relationship with two distinctive spaces: Tehran (my native land) and Arkansas (where I reside now). In my paintings and installations, I re-create intimate moments culled from my home and neighborhood in Iran. Due to a situation where I am far away from my homeland, I can feel my memories of home fading away. By utilizing memories from my past, I take aspects of images that are no longer recognizable and, therefore, are abstracted into shapes that allude to elements found in my homeland. Consequently, aspects of everyday life such as architecture, furniture, gardens, or a specific time of a day become the basis for my work. My desire is to create a situation where the viewer looks at abstract paintings or installations and feels a familiarity, but can’t quite place what it is or why they sense a kinship. By creating this kind of scenario, I can show that regardless of nationality, religion, or gender there are commonalities for all individuals.
Mackenzie Turner
Artist Website

MacKenzie Turner has a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Arkansas. They currently live and work in Northwest Arkansas and have shown work in Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. MacKenzie is a 2021-22 ArtistYear Fellow and will be serving in Philadelphia, PA.

 My work is a tangible result of memory, emotion, and experience. Until I was fifteen I relocated to eight small towns with my family and faced difficulty making and keeping friends. Books, movies, and internet communities were the things that provided the most consistency in my life, and I believe this caused my lifelong fascination with storytelling, which remains to be my central method of making and maintaining connection with others. My work often alludes to a longing for verbal, physical, and emotional connectedness through symbolic imagery or reference to the ways we navigate communication within our bodies.







Blake Walinder
Artist Website

My work begins with looking at my subject matter. I respond with a goal, a method of seeing, a formal technique to make sense of the space I am observing. Successful drawing or painting is dependent on this type of investigation. When a painting is not working, I re-assess methods to find new perspective. Challenges are important in my work, forcing me to learn and unlearn. I purposefully engage with visually foreign or challenging unfamiliar subject matter, and then apply what I learn in discovering its form into everything that I observe. When I apply this discovery approach, I can address any subject matter with the same sense of exploration. When I am drawing, I am not drawing a named thing, but I am drawing a series of visual relationships. These have endless variations. I think of myself as an active painter. Painting for me is a constant searching and finding the perfect relationship of colors, tones, lines, or shapes that represent the feeling or weight of something. Art is a truth, an impression, an understanding of space, and historically a universal language. I work to move beyond representing and object or a space, to concentrate on understanding form and composition.







May Yang
Artist Website

May Yang is a Tulsa based artist, printer and designer. She works with printmaking and mixed media techniques to produce work that processes the information overload common in our digital age.
May graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. While there, she interned for Dolphin Press & Print, the school's print workshop, where she assisted in printing editions for Jon Rappleye, Jane Kent and Faith Ringgold. Continuing her interest in collaborative printmaking, May attended the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico and earned her Professional Printer Certificate. In 2010, May was a Momentum Tulsa Spotlight artist and worked with curators Shannon Fitzgerald and Sarah Jesse to produce a body of work about her cultural heritage. May has participated in a number of juried and invitational group shows including IPCNY New Prints, OVAC’s 24 Works on Paper, and Mainsite Norman’s Emerging Artists show.
Currently, May co-owns Flash Flood Print Studios, a screen printing business in Tulsa that focuses on high-quality printing on both flat stock and textiles.
My work explores methods of image manipulation, commonly using typography and photography.
Typographic collage serves as a compositional foundation in many of my pieces. Individual characters are magnified, cut up and reassembled; sometimes marrying a piece of a serif with the curve of a script typeface. These new letterform constructions remain vaguely recognizable, yet their original intentions are lost in their repurposing. Alongside the letterforms are photographic images which are similarly processed. Methods such as photocopy transfer, gel medium transfer and halftone screen printing often lead to imperfect or partial renditions of the original image. Again, the manipulation obscures the original representation. These techniques are an intersection of my background in both graphic design and printmaking and show a juxtaposition of those two worlds.
In an increasingly digital age, we are constantly exposed to a stream of information. The image manipulation that occurs in my work is a method of processing the information overload commonly encountered in our lives today. Borrowing themes from the remix culture that is so prevalent in popular music, I “sample” bits and pieces of pre-existing images, transform them through my methods of manipulation and reassemble them into new works. These finished compositions represent both old and new, personal and global, design and fine art.







Brody Parrish-Craig
Artist Website

Originally from Louisiana, Brody Parrish Craig is a creator & educator based in Arkansas. Their chapbook Boyish won the 2019 Omnidawn Chapbook Contest & is forthcoming in April 2021 from Omnidawn Press. BPC is the editor of TWANG Anthology, a collection of creative arts from transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folks throughout the South & Midwest US. Find more on the project at twanganthology.org.





Wednesday | April 7 | 5pm
 Leah Grant
“Dear Friend” reading and conversation
Live in Gallery or Participate on Zoom

Thursday | April 8 | 5pm
Matt Magerkurth
solo performance and conversation
Live in Gallery or Participate on Zoom

Friday | April 9 | 7pm
 Lydia Cheshewalla
artist interview and q&a
Participate on Zoom
Wednesday | April 14 | 4pm
Gallery walk-through with Kalyn and artists
Instagram live: @kalynbarnoski

Thursday, April 15 | 6pm
Nicole Norman
artist interview and q&a
Live in Gallery or Participate on Zoom

Friday | April 16 | 6-8pm
Closing Reception 
Brody Parrish-Craig, reading
Cynthia Post Hunt, performance
Kalyn Fay and Matt Magerkurth, music
Live in Gallery




























We are all searching for ways to locate ourselves as we move through the world. In the search for self, we point to places that ushered us into new knowledge. We point to moments and experiences that gave us deeper understanding. We point to the people who carved pathways for us to be where we are now. Finding the ways in which we locate self helps build our unique understanding of the world.

The basis of this exhibit is reciprocity in the relationships we have to the people and knowledge that help us self-locate through platforming their work. Every artist participating in this exhibit has played an important role in my life within the last ten years that has allowed me to better understand myself and my relationship to community.

By bringing together this group of artists who helped me learn, not only am I creating a way for you to better understand me, personally, but I am also creating a new moment of location for us to point to, collectively. The work comes together to be in relation with each other and with you in this specific place, at this specific time, and creates a new point of location we can use to understand ourselves and each other, manifested in the form of It Was Always Us!

Though the artists come from across the globe, I met each of them while living between Oklahoma and Arkansas. They come from expansive understandings of the world that is reflected in the work you can find in this exhibit. In search of myself, I found these visual artists, performance artists, musicians, writers, jewelers, and chefs. In search of myself, I found that it was always us.

Thank you for being here and supporting.

Wado nigadv,
Kalyn Fay Barnoski


































































 






Below, click the buttons to explore more of the group exhibit, It Was Always Us!