Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..

Let’s study art history together.

Centennial Land Run Monument (Oklahoma City, OK)

The modern day state of Oklahoma has a strange, complicated, and confusing history. Due to various treaties, and the forced relocation to the state of indigenous tribes from the eastern U.S., good luck to anyone trying to sort out where the state’s authority ends, and Native American tribal authority begins. Even recently, state and tribal lawmakers are actively trying to iron out what the United States Supreme Court ruling in McGirt vs. Oklahoma means. And good luck to anyone from outside of the state trying to correctly pronounce the state’s city and town names, heavily influenced all over by various tribal languages.

Among the strange and controversial parts of the state’s history is the Land Run of 1889. It’s far more complicated than the following description, but essentially what happened is that a bunch of people from all over the country and world lined up in Oklahoma to race out and claim “unclaimed” land as their own. Tom Cruise even made a movie about it – though as it was directed by Oklahoma-born Ron Howard, the movie might have put an overly romantic spin of the tale while leaving out some of the unromantic and politically controversial elements:

A century later, I can attest, Oklahoma-born children in 1989 celebrated this part of their local heritage by riding around their elementary schools on stick horses to re-enact this great moment. It was kind of a public exhibition of how talented your mom was at making a realistic-looking stuffed horse head. Then obviously you needed the stick on which to attach it.

If one is trying to paint a visual image of what Oklahoma schools looked like on that day, I guess it was like Hogwarts, except that the front end of the stick had a decorative horse head and the back end lacked the floor-sweeping twigs. (Honestly, J.K. Rowling, you should consider stick horses for the Americans if you ever write a follow-up novel set in the states.)

Anyway. If you ever visit Oklahoma, that moment in our state history is widely considered a particularly important event. The University of Oklahoma’s athletic teams’ names are “Sooners” – which is a callback to this day. The people who left before the official start of the land run event were called Sooners. The people who waited until the race started with the booms of cannons were the Boomers. In the year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty-Five, Oklahomans will still yell until their voices crack the ancient Okie chant of “Boomer! Sooner!” in celebration of everyone involved on that day, themselves, their teams, and anything else worth celebrating. Support for Oklahoma athletics is something like the support you might expect from an especially devout and somewhat unhinged religious cult. As a result… it is difficult to imagine a day wherein the Land Run of 1889 is not a highly significant historical event to the Oklahoma locals.

And to commemorate the event, there was commissioned an absolutely epic, enormous public sculpture monument. It’s one of the largest free standing works of public art in the world and it took over two decades to construct, stretching father than a football field (300 feet) from front to back.

(more via wiki)

The Centennial Land Run Monument is an art installation by Paul Moore, located in the Oklahoma City Bricktown District, in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. It commemorates the Land Run of 1889 in the Unassigned Lands.

Sculpture

The sculpture was erected in 2019 and features either 45 or 47 bronze statues, each one being “one-and-a-half times life-size”. The work depicts “horsemen and wagons racing over the Oklahoma landscape”, with a total area slightly “larger than a football field“.

According to its commemorative plaque, it is meant to “[pay] tribute to the courageous settlers who on April 22, 1889” as well as “present day pioneers who, through their untiring dedication to this project, have immortalized a defining moment in [Oklahoma]’s epic creation”.

For a couple of videos that I hope provide some sense of scale about how massive this installation actually is, let me direct you to the following: