Q&A with OK Contemporary’s Jeremiah Davis: A childhood dream realized

You can read more about Jeremiah Davis and his background from a 2020 VeloCityOKC feature here.

VeloCityOKC: Growing up you never imagined a professional future in Oklahoma in the creative arts. How does it feel to be in your home state, working as a creative arts professional and living out your passion?

Jeremiah Davis: Well, it's an honor to be able to contribute to the culture of the place where I'm from and where many generations of my father's side of the family are from, and to be able to make positive contributions, not only to creativity and to art and culture, but hopefully to society and to quality of life as well. It's cool to be working so close to where I grew up. The more I contemplate my present, my recent past in Oklahoma with Oklahoma Contemporary and the future, I'm really confirmed in the work that I'm doing here and in the perception that I had really since leaving New York but continues today, that big cities and places like New York, London, Lagos, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires, those are all amazing cultural capitals, but they just simply don't need me. A place like Oklahoma City really can benefit from what I have to offer. People who are in positions like mine can make an outsized impact. That’s further inflated and augmented by the overwhelming sense of collaboration and partnership that pervades Oklahoma City, all levels of city government, county government, private sector, nonprofit, and arts community, really all those different sectors and industries in those sectors are happy to have conversations to collaborate and work together. That's something special and unique to Oklahoma City. I think it's an example of what we call the ‘Oklahoma Standard.’

"There is almost nothing better caregivers, guardians, parents can do to contribute to their kids’ extracurricular lives than to get them involved in any kind of creative pursuit."

Absolutely. What is your vision for Oklahoma Contemporary as you begin your role as its new director? What do you hope to accomplish in the short term? Long term?

You know, the interesting thing about transitioning into this role is I know all the players. I've been collaborating with my colleagues, with our board of trustees, with our committee members and community volunteers since I took the job of artistic director in 2016. In that role, I was charged with working with those stakeholders to shape the vision for the arts center and its future. So, in that capacity, what you'll see coming from Oklahoma Contemporary will be an extension and an evolution of the work that we've been doing. Earnestly building the institution from its small and community centered roots at the fairgrounds to the much more dynamic and robust and chock full of programming center that we have in downtown today. For the short term, I think you can expect a few tweaks here and there with our visitor experience as you're walking through the galleries. We've been fine tuning our programming and adding some additional wayfinding, some of those elements that really contribute positively to a visitor's experience as they walk through our various spaces.

You'll continue to see some great partnerships that we've had going back many years and baked into the roots of the organization. We've got some exciting projects on tap with some great community partners. We've recently worked with RACE Dance Collective, Oklahoma City Artists for Justice, SPARK! Creative Lab, and several other groups. And we're going to continue that work. We've been in dialogue with our friends at Oklahoma City Ballet, Painted Sky Opera, and of course we're partnering in a major way with our friends at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater to present with them their second full season back after multiple years of a hiatus. That kind of involvement in the community and partnering with other great organizations will be something that we continue to do in an immediate and robust way.

On the long term, we'll continue to double down on our commitment to transdisciplinarity. Welcoming all creative disciplines, all forms of art and creative expression to call this place at 11th and Broadway their home. This really is the city's arts center, the county's arts center and the state’s arts center. This is a place where people from not only Oklahoma, but from all over the world can come to ignite their own creative potential, explore the culture of our contemporary moment and experience art they might not be able to find in many other places. That's something we'll continue to build on. If we look into the far future, expansion is probably on the horizon. We may continue to build additional institutions on our campus. They might not be Oklahoma Contemporary focused, but there may be in the long-term future. There may be additional sites that get activated here and other nonprofits and community groups may join us into adding to the cultural flourishing of this sector of downtown.

That's incredible. It's a whole new ecosystem in our downtown and that's really exciting.

Absolutely. We see ourselves as one branch in a larger group of really amazing trees that have sprouted up over the 130-year plus history of Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma Contemporary had to delay the opening of your current facility due to the pandemic and you pivoted to online programming to reach our community, and beyond, while we were stuck at home. How has that shaped your approach to programming going forward as we move forward out of the pandemic?

It’s certainly made us nimbler and more creative in our thinking. I have a lot of friends who in April of 2020 and into May, were saying, “Oh, I'm just in my house all the time. I don't have much to do and work is just allowing me to hang out a little bit. It's been so easy. I've been drinking every day!” We were nose to the grindstone from the beginning. We were gearing up for a major launch. We had people from all over the world who were set to travel to celebrate the inaugural opening on March 12, 2020, in that weekend. We were already just in full lather in preparation for that experience. We took that energy and we used it to shift our focus in a new direction and went really heavily into online and digital programming. Into digital residencies for local artists, into online classes and online exercises for how to get creative at home, both for adults and for kids.

"We say it in all earnestness that this is your arts center. It belongs to this community, and there's no barrier to entry here."

We did a tie-in with national poetry month with a crowdsourced poem. Later that year, we presented a six-day livestream reading of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey featuring local educators, artists, elected officials, like Mayor Holt and Councilwoman Nikki Nice, but also artists, musicians, and educators from around the world. We had Leslie Feist, the musician from Canada, and Octavio Abúndez, the conceptual contemporary artist from Guadalajara, Mexico. We had Bebe Neuwirth, the famous actor from New York, and people from coast to coast. That really consumed a lot of our energy, but as we got out of 2020 and into 2021, we started to add in-person programming again. At this point though, we continue to have a sliding scale in terms of how we address our public health protocols to ensure that we're making the best possible conditions for staff and for our community.

We're fully operational now. We have almost 700 kids, which is near capacity, who have come through camp or will come through camp by the end of the summer. We're looking at about 250 students each session of Studio School, if not more, and we had about 270 in the spring. Every month we're seeing an uptick in attendance. We're continuing to spread the word, doing important work and outreach and community engagement like volunteering at the kid zone for Juneteenth last month. So not just expecting people to come here to the mothership, but also making sure that we're being a positive and collaborative presence around our community at events, meetings and conferences and so on. Listening to what's happening, understanding what the needs of our community are and doing our best to respond to those desires and needs programmatically.

I think attendance for all our programming, for our exhibitions, for our outdoor installations, and for classes, public programs, performances, and events, will continue to increase over the next year. One of the ways we're celebrating that is through our Open House weekend of programming, Sept. 23-24, which is in celebration of the grand opening of our “La casa que nos inventamos: Contemporary Art from Guadalajara” exhibition that explores the rich creativity of the contemporary art scene in Guadalajara, Mexico through 19 artists and almost 50 art objects, both in our building in multiple spaces, and outdoors with public art installations. That's a project that we have been working on for years, really going back to 2014, when we first started collaborating with some of those artists at our experimental space. So, we're conceptualizing this weekend as not just an opening of an exhibition that's many years in the making, but also as a way to make up for the closure that we initiated on the grand day of our opening March 12. Since we closed the day we were slated to open, the Open House is a way to welcome our community, to celebrate them and to make sure they know that their arts center is open for business.

Congratulations for bringing this project to fruition!

Thank you, we're really excited. Not all, but most of the artists will be in attendance and we have people who are coming in from all parts of the country and around the world to experience that weekend of programming.

"This is a place where people from not only Oklahoma, but from all over the world can come to ignite their own creative potential, explore the culture of our contemporary moment and experience art they might not be able to find in many other places."

Talking about your programming, the center offers classes for all ages. How important is it to get kids involved in the arts at a young age?

There is almost nothing better caregivers, guardians, parents can do to contribute to their kids’ extracurricular lives than to get them involved in any kind of creative pursuit. The data are clear on early childhood arts participation in creativity. I think a common misperception may be that people think, “well, my kid probably won't be an artist, or I don't want them to be an artist, so they don't really need to have exposure to the arts or to art classes.” In fact, what we find is even for people who in later years end up becoming lawyers, doctors, engineers, or economists, those who had exposure to arts education early, we can see a correlation between that exposure and later positive life outcomes. That includes whether they were able to complete high school or education beyond high school, their health, and their overall wellbeing over decades of their lives.

So, there's lots of ways that we need to help our kids grow and learn, but certainly one of those ways is to get them connected to their own creativity. We have a lot of great ways to do that in Oklahoma City. There's some great summer camps and summer programming that happen at Lyric Theater, at the Science Museum Oklahoma, at Oklahoma Children's Theater, the YMCA, YWCA, and many other places. But for us, it's unique. We don't focus on one discipline so in any given week, you might come to Oklahoma Contemporary and find one camp that's dedicated to the making of murals, one camp might be about skateboard design and culture, and one camp could be about sound design. Another one might be about collaborative art making and public art installation, and another one could be about comics and cartooning. It's really rich and diverse. It explores disciplines from music and dance to all the visual arts. That's what makes it special and unique. You can have your children here really for 10 weeks all summer and they can do something different each week, exposing them to a different aspect of art, of creativity, and culture.

"The more sources of inspiration that we have, the more we can continue to innovate as a city and as a community. I see Oklahoma Contemporary playing a central role in that process, not only as a catalyst for culture, for creativity and for innovation, but at this point in our life cycle an accelerant."

For those who might be interested in exploring the classes, who are older, who didn’t have that experience young in life and are a little bit hesitant to step out, what would you say to them and how would you encourage them to get involved?

Well, we believe here at Oklahoma Contemporary that art is for everyone. We say it in all earnestness that this is your arts center. It belongs to this community, and there's no barrier to entry here. Our admission is always free, and we do have scholarships available for our camps. We have some adult classes that are free of charge, and we have lots of free programming, but if you're interested in getting creative and picking up a skill, working with your hands, or finding that time to apply your imagination into three dimensions, we have all kinds of programs in our Studio School that are just introductions. It doesn't require any previous experience. People don't need to have a degree in art. They don't need to have ever picked up a paint brush or a lump of clay or thread or any other medium that people are interested in. There are many different disciplines that we teach here and are really broad.

It goes from working with fiber arts from thread painting classes, which is using thread like you would a paintbrush to create images, portraits, and landscapes, to visible mending where you're working on clothing to repair it but to call attention to the repair through the use of bright threads and colors. Whether it's multiple ceramics programs, either hand building or wheel throwing, or whether it's oil painting, life drawing, poetry, memoir writing, to DJing, we have DJ school for adults, there are so many different ways that you can apply your passion and your creativity. And while some classes are more for people who have some advanced skills, in every discipline we have a great group of instructors who are happy to work with people who are brand new to a given medium or discipline.

And the classes are really fun. We have people of all ages, but we've found that recently the biggest demographic of people taking our classes are between the ages of 25 and 35. So the atmosphere is fun. It's people trying things for the first time, it's building community and it's getting to know your neighbors here in Oklahoma City. A lot of people end up taking classes again and again, some of them form friendships based on the classes that they're taking here. Many of them become really tapped into the broader Oklahoma Contemporary community, joining us for art openings, for public programs, for performances, and generally just hanging out here to make it the special community-driven arts center that it is.

That's incredible. What excites you about the future of Oklahoma Contemporary and Oklahoma City?

I'll answer the second part first. I'm sure that you were in attendance for Mayor Holt's State of the City program with the Chamber, and that energy and excitement that he was so successfully able to convey is exactly the kind of excitement and enthusiasm that I share, and that our staff or Board of Trustees shares, for the future of this city. Having added over 100,000 people to our population, being the 20th largest city, growing in our economy and the diversity of industries that we have here, encouraging movement of not only companies, but also of people from all over the country to relocate to Oklahoma City to bring their knowledge, their skills, their experiences from different markets to help contribute to the ongoing cultural and economic renaissance of our city, makes me know that the future continues to be bright.

I would say in our context, the more people that are moving here, the more that we grow, the more that the culinary scene develops. We have great spaces like Factory Obscura, who are continuing to do some exciting, cutting-edge and funky programming with immersive art. 21c Museum Hotel is having ongoing rotating exhibitions. We have our strong cultural institutions that are well established, like the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Science Museum, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Ballet, and the Philharmonic. Then, exhibitions that are recently open, like our great dear friends at the First Americans Museum and in the forthcoming Clara Luper Civil Rights Center. There is just so much appetite for culture, for art, for creativity and that's true not only for the leisure sector, entertainment, or art sector, but also in the creative economy.

"You can't get wisdom without experience, and you can't gain knowledge without hard work and exposure."

There are companies moving here. There are startups happening in biotech and aerospace. The great misperception is that those fields of science, technology, engineering and math somehow don't require creativity. Anyone who has built a business, who solved a great problem with science, with engineering, anyone who has created something that previously didn’t exist in terms of real estate development or in professional development, will tell you that a lot of things are required, but creativity is chief among them. The more sources of inspiration that we have, the more we can continue to innovate as a city and as a community. I see Oklahoma Contemporary playing a central role in that process, not only as a catalyst for culture, for creativity and for innovation, but at this point in our life cycle an accelerant. We can take the great advancement and achievement that our city's already had, and our state is continuing to have, and we can throw fuel on that fire and to continue to allow it to burn in ways that will warm our hearts and continue the dynamic growth that we're all benefiting from here in Oklahoma City.

A lot of other cities are jealous of what we have going on. Not every city can boast of the successes that we've had over the last few years. As long as we can figure out a way to maintain the cost of living here and the accessibility of housing, we're going to be well positioned to continue this growth trajectory. That's just extraordinarily exciting. For us, that energy, that movement, that dynamism of the city just fuels what we do. It allows us to continue to grow with our city grow as our audiences grow and develop more interesting creative and cutting-edge programming, whether that's exhibitions, whether that's works of dance, of theater, of opera, of interdisciplinary collaborations, or film. Whether it's new ideas for classes, new programs for youth, new ways of engaging our young people and our teenagers through our teen arts council, the more we have a dynamic economy and a dynamic city, the better we can be placed to respond to that and innovate with programming and with ideas that will help continue that growth and that visionary future that we all have for ourselves.

You're not too far into your career, but is there any advice that you would give to your younger self or anything that you've learned that you wish you would've known sooner?

Well, first I would say the phrase, ‘if I knew then what I know now,’ I would write it down on a piece of paper, I would crumple that piece of paper up and I would throw it in the garbage can because the benefit of knowledge and wisdom is the journey. You can't get wisdom without experience, and you can't gain knowledge without hard work and exposure. I don't have regrets in terms of I wish I would've done this. Yes, of course, in hindsight, there are lots of different choices that I may have made in my life. I'm sure anybody could say the same, but I wouldn't trade any of the experiences, including the negative ones that I've had, for anything else because it's led me to the point where I am, and I value that process and that ongoing journey of life.

In terms of advice I would give my younger self or younger people, you know, it's so hard to see the future. Matter of fact, it is impossible to see in the future. We can plan for it, we can envision it, we can set goals for ourselves, but nobody has a crystal ball. So, it's important to just keep the dream alive, no matter what that dream may be. Keep it alive and allow it to grow and to evolve and to shift but continue the hard work and the commitment and the drive to achieve what you want to see in the world for the betterment of our community, for the betterment of humans, for society. Whatever field or endeavor that may be. In my case, it's the arts and culture. There were times, especially after the 2008 economic collapse, I was living in New York, I was in graduate school, and it was tough. It was hard to make a living. It was hard to find work. It seemed like nobody was interested in offering me a full-time position in a creative field for years. There were a lot of times I doubted myself, I doubted my abilities, but I stuck to it. If I hadn't stuck to it, if I had decided to go in a different direction, or if I decided to move home prematurely when I was still in grad school and right out of grad school, I wouldn't be able to offer my expertise and my knowledge and my energy and passion to what we're doing here at Oklahoma Contemporary. So, that's a long-winded way of saying just keep it going.

I would encourage anybody to read Professor Angela Duckworth's “Grit” because that is really what it takes. The idea of perseverance, or colloquially what we call stick-to-itiveness, any kind of success relies on that.

Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you'd like to share?

I would just say for any member of the chamber, we're a member too, and any reader of this publication, if you haven't been through Oklahoma Contemporary yet, I encourage you to stop by. Admission is always free. This is always a place for you to relax, to enjoy, to experience art, to get some inspiration or just to cool off from the heat. This is your place, your center for arts and culture. We want you here activating our space and making it the special place that it is.