The 250-seat Noble Theater
In 1993, the Oklahoma City Art Museum was located on the State Fairgrounds and began a four-week thematic summer film series. The Logic of Dreams: Four Films in the Surrealist Tradition was curated by Rea Baldridge. The films were exhibited on 16mm film in one of the galleries. The following summer, Harbour Winn curated a four-week series called Regional Imprints: The American Experience.
In 1995, philanthropist Jeanne Hoffman Smith established the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Film Endowment at the Oklahoma City Art Museum in honor of her mother and father, Grace Thatcher and Roy Hoffman Jr., to provide long-term financial support for the nascent film program. That summer, Brian Hearn was hired to exhibit the summer film series A Feast for the Eyes: Art and Food and to develop future programming.
From 1996 to 2001, the Oklahoma City Art Museum presented several thematic film series, each season on 16mm and video. The Thursday night film series were four to six weeks in length and were exhibited in the Museum’s Open Gallery with seating for 96 people.
In 2002, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art opened its new location at 415 Couch Drive in downtown Oklahoma City on the site of what was formerly Oklahoma City’s last downtown movie palace, the Centre Theater, built in 1947. With funding from the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, the Museum inaugurated the state-of-the-art Noble Theater on April 12, 2002 with legendary film actress Janet Leigh and the Library of Congress Film Preservation Tour.
Since then, the Museum’s film program has offered thousands of screenings of the finest in independent, foreign language, and classic films for Oklahoma City audiences. Currently the 250-seat Noble Theater screens every weekend, Thursday through Sunday, year-round, on 35mm, 16mm, and high definition digital video.
The mission of the Museum’s film program is to foster appreciation and enjoyment of the moving image arts through exhibition, education, and events.