OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) has announced an upcoming exhibition in celebration of the Museum’s eighty-year history. From the Vault: The 80th Anniversary Exhibition will be one of the largest displays of the Museum’s permanent collection to date. This original exhibition will open Feb. 8 and run through April 27, 2025.
The event will showcase more than 150 works that have either never been displayed or have not been on view in the past five years, according to the press release.
“This exhibition will highlight the various paths that our collection has followed the past eighty years,” said President and CEO Michael Anderson, PhD. “We hope the community feels a sense of ownership in the Museum, a sense of belonging, and that we all consider what we’ll leave behind as our collective legacy for the next eighty years.”
From the Vault will include recent, never-before-displayed acquisitions by Preston Singletary and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as rarely seen works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Alfred Stieglitz, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, and Carlos Mérida.
Opening Dec. 20, Land Use: Humanity’s Interaction with Nature is an original single-gallery installation that will feature modern and contemporary photographs, video art, digital art, and paintings. Photo provided.
Visitors and social media followers will have an opportunity to experience the exhibition before it opens in February.
“We’re inviting the community to join our 80th anniversary celebration and help us choose three of the works that will be on view in the exhibition,” said Curator of Exhibitions Jessica Provencher. “Selections will be made between two O’Keeffe prints, two Donna Ferrato photographs, and two paintings by Oklahoma-based artist Oscar Brousse Jacobson.”
Voting will take place online at okcmoa.com. Additional programming for the full anniversary year will be announced in the coming months, the release stated.
Also opening Dec. 20 in the third-floor galleries is Postwar Abstraction, which will highlight the various ways that artists approached abstraction during the postwar period. Photo provided.
Before From the Vault opens on the third floor, visitors will have the opportunity to see two new installations taken primarily from the permanent collection.
Opening Dec. 20, Land Use: Humanity’s Interaction with Nature is an original single-gallery installation that will feature modern and contemporary photographs, video art, digital art, and paintings—including a work by Ed Ruscha—that relate to humanity’s use of and interaction with the environment.
Also opening Dec. 20 in the third-floor galleries is Postwar Abstraction, which will highlight the various ways that artists, especially those in the United States, approached abstraction during the postwar period.
The Museum extends a reminder that Chihuly Then and Now: The Collection at Twenty will close on Jan. 5, 2025, when works on loan from Chihuly Studio and the Seattle Art Museum will go off view. The first-floor Chihuly galleries will re-open in March when currently off-view works from the permanent collection will be incorporated into the current design.
Chihuly Then and Now: The Collection at Twenty will close on Jan. 5, 2025. Facebook photo.
The Oklahoma City Museum of Art features art from North America, Europe and Asia, with particular strengths in American art and postwar abstraction. The permanent collection includes photography by Brett Weston and works by the Washington Color painter Paul Reed. The Museum’s Samuel Roberts Noble Theater screens international, independent, documentary and classic films.
The Oklahoma City Museum of Art serves over 125,000 visitors annually from all fifty states and thirty foreign countries.
Members and children 17 and under see these and all other exhibitions for free. For more information on memberships and to purchase tickets, visit okcmoa.com.
