The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is celebrating a major milestone in 2025.
This year marks the arts institution’s 80th year, and to commemorate the occasion, they’re throwing wide the doors to their “vault” and filling their galleries with hundreds of works from their permanent collection.
“From the Vault: The 80th Anniversary Exhibition” – opening Saturday, February 8th – showcases more than 150 artworks from across countless styles, media, and decades, all selected from the museum’s staggering multi-thousand piece collection.
Featuring works by major names right alongside lesser known artists and grouped together according to when OKCMOA acquired them rather than by the works’ own styles or years, “From the Vault” puts the emphasis squarely on the museum itself and its own now-storied history.
“These are all rarely exhibited works from the museum collection,” OKCMOA curator Jessica Provencher said during a media preview event for the new exhibition. “All of these artworks have either never been exhibited or they haven’t been out in the last five years.”
Through the decades
The gallery spaces in “From the Vault” are organized by decade, but not by the decade in which the pieces on display were created. Rather, the collection is presented according to the decades in which OKCMOA acquired each piece.
But more than just spotlighting the acquisitions themselves, the decade designations allow the exhibition to tell the full story of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and how it grew together throughout its near-century from multiple different institutions and interests to become the OKC arts leader it is today.
Gallery text helps to walk visitors through the institution’s history, from the earliest origins in post-war federal works programs and arts preservations to various moves and mergers and eventually into the museum’s current downtown home, where it’s become an anchor of the OKC arts and culture community.
“It just made sense to do it by decade that way,” Provencher said. “And then you can kind of see the key points and the trends of those times, like you can see when the museum was acquiring more sculpture or when we were really ramping up our photography works. So it’s a nice way to share our history in a way that people don’t always get to see.”
Salon style
With over 150 pieces showcased in “From the Vault,” OKCMOA designers turned to a “salon style” presentation, grouping works closely and collectively in bunches across the gallery walls rather than spacing them out more individually.
It’s a rare and striking design choice for the museum, not only allowing them to fit the exhibition’s mammoth selection of pieces into the available space, but also serving to showcase the full scope of works and styles that the OKCMOA collection can boast.
Each square foot of “From the Vault” is bursting with various different approaches and artistic sensibilities, with bold, expressionistic works placed just inches from more traditionalist landscapes or hung to frame the groundbreaking conceptual and sculptural pieces on display.
With the works grouped in such close proximity, there’s no room for the museum’s usual caption cards beside the pieces. Instead, guests can grab one of the available books that indentify the works numerically and provide full credits for each piece in both English and Spanish.
The approach presents a refreshingly even playing field for the artworks on display, placing pieces by lauded American masters like George Bellows and Georgia O’Keeffe in among the fray of lesser known artists and works and keeping the focus on the museum’s own story.
“Especially once you get into the 2010s, you can see how a lot of the pieces here relate to shows that the museum has done,” said Provencher. “Like the sculptures by Jill Downen and Jonathon Hils or the glass pieces by Preston Singletary, we’ve done shows of all their works in recent years and those acquisitions came from those shows.”
Paper works
Throughout “From the Vault,” guests can see a shocking number of works on paper, including sketches, lithographs, prints, and photographs, all making up a large percentage of the show’s displayed works.
That’s actually in line with the unique makeup of the museum’s permanent collection.
“Over 60% of our collection is actually photography and works on paper,” Provencher explained. “We’re not always able to get a lot of that out because of limited space, but also because they just can’t be out for long because of how light can damage paper works.”
To better showcase the museum’s remarkable collection of paper works, a gallery space has been newly designated for a rotating showcase space for works on paper, beginning with a show dedicated to Chicano artist Luis Jimenez that opens alongside “From the Vault” on February 8th.
“We have several lithographs from him in our collection, and most of them haven’t been out for awhile either,” Provencher said. “So that dedicated gallery will allow us to do deeper dives on some of the artists that we have multiple works by and to talk more about the artists and go over their processes and really highlight some key works.”
Permanent waves
Though “From the Vault” is definitely the clearest and most direct celebration of OKCMOA’s permanent collection for the 80th anniversary, curators have organized the majority of the galleries into showcases of the museum’s acquisitions.
Alongside “From the Vault” and the Jimenez showcase, there is also a new exhibition displaying pieces from the Rose Family Glass Collection as well as “Land Use,” a selection of permanent collection pieces (bolstered by just a couple loans) that explore the human connections to the land of Oklahoma itself.
It’s all in service of reflecting the incalculable work of OKCMOA and its formative institutions in collecting, preserving, and championing the arts in all its forms for the past eight decades.
“We just knew that we wanted to celebrate the depth and strength of this collection,” Provencher said. “We wanted to tell our story and celebrate the museum and to just get as much of our collection out as we could.”
“From the Vault: The 80th Anniversary Exhibition” opens at OKCMOA on Saturday, February 8th.
For museum admissions and more information, visit okcmoa.com.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
