LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Summer is just too much. As I write this, not long before the 4th of July holiday weekend, tomorrow’s high temperature is projected to be 104 degrees. Tempers are running high, and a lot of us have not been exactly at our best: denial runs rampant, even after audiotape surfaced of an ex-president serving up classified war documents like canapés to party guests, and the soulless howl of laughter from online cynics, rejoicing at several people killed by an imploded submarine, has only recently died down.

And that was just this past week. There will surely be more inspiring moments to come. Luckily, summer is a lot of everything: so much light, long days, and for many of us, it’s festival season, a time of parties, excitement, excess, plenitude. That’s true of our art season as well. With so many Oklahoma artists working today, emphasizing group shows made sense for this issue of Art Focus Oklahoma Contemporary’s ArtNow (p. 14), the touring show Collective Wisdom at Red Earth (p. 6), even the state Capitol’s expanded art displays (p. 10) mark the season’s high tide in bringing so many undersung legacies into the light. From a different angle, the symbol-rich, spiritual density of Taylor Young’s mythic, sensual figures at the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition (p. 18) celebrates summer’s apogee, as does the exuberance of Virginia Jaramillo’s abstract experimentalism (p. 22) in its expressive joy.

In that spirit, I’m excited to unveil a new section of Art Focus, one that picks up from Liz Blood’s stellar “Ekphrasis” feature that ran for almost nine (!) years, that explores other interdisciplinary hot zones. Since art and poetry vibe so interestingly together, why not expand this wider sense of poesis to realms of art-making that straddle visual art and other media? With a nod to one of my heroes, Dick Higgins, I hope that “Intermedia” offers a welcome engagement with hybrid forms that overrun their generic boundaries.

Also, please reach out to me about the upcoming art happenings you’re excited about near where you live. We want to support artmakers, art spaces, and art enthusiasts all over the state, and we’ll need your help to do that, so I hope you’ll join the party.

—John Selvidge