Art

After relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a teaching position, American artist Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) stated he saw one too many over-romanticized and generalized depictions of Indigenous people “looking at the sunset.” With his Indian series, started in 1967, Scholder sought to replace the tourist-approved narratives perpetuated by white artists with the realities he witnessed every day. By combining realism and spirituality with vivid colors and expressive brushstrokes, Scholder created radical new imagery of modern-day Indigenous life. Fritz Scholder: Beyond Stereotypes features 10 prints and one painting from Scholder’s revolutionary Indian series.

Theseus and the Minotaur, Narcissus and Echo, the Judgment of Paris: these may be stories you know, or names you have heard. For millennia, Classical mythology has been a shared language through which artists can tells tales of heroism, love, vengeance, and more. From the frescoes of ancient Rome through the art of today, myths have served as an eternal source of inspiration.

Artists from around the world have long been captured by the enduring appeal of the Italian countryside. Its sweeping vistas, at times sprinkled with ancient ruins, make for an enticing subject for artists in a variety of mediums. American artists in particular traveled to Italy throughout the nineteenth century to study not only the great masterpieces of ancient and Renaissance art, but also to sketch and paint the campagna, or countryside, basked in a beautiful glow.

Featuring 99 paintings created between 1809 and the present by masters such as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design opened November 6, 2021 at OKCMOA and runs through January 30, 2022. These masterworks provide a unique history of American art as told by many of the best-known American artists.

OKCMOA at 75 traces the history of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art from its founding through the present day. Through more than 40 newspaper clippings, photographs, letters, publications and the scrapbooks kept by the Museum’s first director, Nan Sheets, the historical exhibition explores the Museum’s rich past. OKCMOA at 75 will be on view in the Museum’s lobby and is free to visit.

The Painters of Pompeii: Roman Frescoes from the National Archaeological Museum, Naples will see a number of collection highlights travel to North America for the first time. Opening June 26 and running through October 17, this historic presentation of the art of painting in ancient Rome will be presented exclusively at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art before returning to Europe.

Featuring photographs given in honor of the Museum’s 75th anniversary, Shared Lives, Distant Places highlights contemporary photographers who employ different photography styles—documentary, photojournalism, and street photography—to capture the global human experience, offering alternative ways of seeing and understanding the people, places, and events that shape the world in which we live. The exhibition provides a glimpse into the everyday lives of people, conflicts, and historical events around the world at various moments in time, and explores the working process of six contemporary photographers. The exhibition will feature works by renowned photographers Donna Ferrato, Peter Turnley, Kristin Capp, Alen MacWeeney, Gary Mark Smith, and Robert von Sternberg.

The Beaux Arts collection is an especially playful and eclectic body of work that includes everything from an idyllic summer landscape by a master Abstract Expressionist to a kitschy 1980s "altarpiece" featuring a pair of photorealistic Dalmatians. In honor of the 75th anniversary of the Museum’s original fundraiser, the Beaux Arts Ball, OKCMOA will begin to present the entirety of its Beaux Arts collection in a series of exhibitions and permanent collection installations highlighted by Beaux Arts at 75.

Art with a History delves into the provenance of a number of diverse works of art from the permanent collection. Featuring a range of artworks, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, this exhibition explores the unique ownership histories of each object and ...

In celebration of Oklahoma Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition, Bright Golden Haze, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art will present its own satellite exhibition, The Art of Light. Inspired by the exploration of light as a tool to create space, The Art of&...

Organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Moving Vision: Op and Kinetic Art from the Sixties and Seventies highlights one of the great strengths of the Museum’s permanent collection–OKCMOA’s extensive, high-quality holdings in Op (optical) and Kinetic (movement) art. This groundbreaking new exhibition, which also includes many historically significant loans from private collections, features movement, both real and perceived.  

Known for his linear and abstracted images of the human body, Ben Shahn became one of the leading American Social Realist artists in the 1930s. Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist of Jewish descent whose practice was deeply rooted in a commitment to social justice. Throughout his career, Shahn created ...

Beginning in June 2020, visitors to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art can enjoy more than 100 works on paper and sculptures by the biggest names in Pop Art in a new exhibition, POP Power from Warhol to Koons: Masterworks from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation. From ...

Renewing the American Spirit: The Art of the Great Depression explores the physical and social landscape of the United States during the Great Depression through paintings, prints, photographs, and other media. The original exhibition includes a selection of works from the Museum’s excellent collection of WPA art, a recently ...

Photographing the Street features the work of four American and Canadian artists who have chosen the street as their primary subject: Garry Winogrand, Mike Peters, Gary Mark Smith, and Ian Wallace. Each has a distinct approach and photographs the street for different purposes. These objectives range from capturing everyday American ...

Fireworks (Archives), 2014, is the first of a series of works by internationally renowned filmmaker and visual artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b.: 1970) to treat the politics of Thailand through the use of pyrotechnics.

The half-century or so following the end of World War II was one of the most fertile periods in the history of abstract painting. The works featured in Postwar Abstraction: Variations highlight a period of remarkable creativity, when ideas of abstraction and the nature and limits of artistic mediums were being hotly contested by artists. Associated with movements as diverse as Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Hard-Edge painting, Op Art, and Minimalism, artists continually sought to redefine what painting was and what it could be.

In the spring of 2019, we reopened our second-floor galleries with an exciting new presentation of our permanent collection. Headlining this reinstallation is the Museum’s latest acquisition, Kehinde Wiley’s monumental new portrait Jacob de Graeff (2018) from the artist’s Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis exhibition. Wiley’s extraordinary painting anchors a new portrait gallery that also features works by Anthony van Dyck, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and George Bellows.

*Members are always FREE! Memberships start at just $50, join today to enjoy free admission, discounts, access to special events and more.* In 1916, a fourteen year-old Ansel Adams (1902-1984) began to capture the beauty of the West. Adams' subsequent body of work – over 40,000 photographs – influenced the practice of ...

Off the Wall: One Hundred Years of Sculpture features more than twenty works of sculpture from the Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition highlights the “unconventional” in twentieth- and twenty-first century sculpture—a period in European and American art in which traditional ideas about sculpture and painting were being challenged. &...