Elemental Visions will open February 2027
OKLAHOMA CITY (August 28, 2026) — The Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) announced today its spring 2027 exhibition, Elemental Visions: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and the Moving Image, which will open to the public on Saturday, February 27.
Organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in collaboration with the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, the exhibition will feature a number of works on loan from the Foundation. Drawing on ideas from classical film theory and ancient philosophy, this exhibition explores how artists and filmmakers have used fire, water, earth, and air to reveal the expressive possibilities of moving-image and light-based art across more than a century. Elemental Visions is structured in four visually and thematically distinct sections:
- Fire: Illumination, Transformation, Spectacle
- Water: Immersion, Duration, Flow
- Earth: Landscape, Labor, Materiality
- Air: Atmosphere, Altitude, Algorithm
“This immersive exhibition will bring historic and contemporary works into conversation,” said exhibition curator and Director of Film Programming Lisa Broad, PhD. “OKCMOA is uniquely positioned to present Elemental Visions, and we’re committed to offering visitors a fresh perspective on both the history of film and the possibilities of moving-image art today.”
Visitors will encounter works by early cinema pioneers, alongside those by groundbreaking contemporary film and video artists such as Judy Chicago, Bill Viola, Miguel Ángel Ríos, and others. Exhibition visitors will also recognize pop culture iconography in Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds and will experience recent digital art, such as DRIFT’s Coded Nature 1.3-3, that responds to visitor movement. The featured works range from short films lasting only a few minutes to endlessly generating digital installations.
Additional programming and details about the exhibition will be announced in the coming months. Elemental Visions will be on view on the third floor and will run through May 23, 2027. Members and children 17 and under receive free admission to all exhibitions. For more information, please visit okcmoa.com/membership.
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Ragnar Kjartansson, Burning House (still), 2015, single-channel video (color, sound), 92 minutes, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, © 2026 Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
ABOUT THE CARL & MARILYNN THOMA FOUNDATION
The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation was founded to enhance lives and communities through access to the arts and education. The Foundation makes art collection-related grants to institutions and individuals and lends and exhibits its collection to museums and galleries worldwide. The public can also experience works from the Foundation’s collection firsthand at its Dallas headquarters and exhibition space, as well as at Thoma Collection, its public art space in Santa Fe. For more information, visit thomafoundation.org.
