A showcasing of art enhances OKC community

Oklahoma City has some of the region’s greatest art museums and galleries, with the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s impressive permanent collection, Oklahoma Contemporary’s cutting-edge exhibitions, Factory Obscura’s interactive, immersive art and rich and diverse work housed in multiple galleries throughout the city, art is clearly valued in our community. Though the art-lover wouldn’t want to miss visiting these places, one doesn’t have to go to an arts-centric location in order to satisfy their creative appetite. Oklahoma is fortunate to have a generous support network for visual artists from our business and retail sectors, and we are starting to see even more art fill and enliven our metro area. Chamber members and other businesses like The Skirvin Hotel, Stella Nova,  21C Museum Hotel, Lively Beerworks, The Collective Food Hall and more  have consistently offered great spaces for artists to showcase their work, which has perhaps led others to follow suit. With the opening of The Omni Oklahoma City Hotel in January, a new and impressive display of local artwork has surfaced.

When the hotel was in their planning stages, the leadership team determined the importance of including work of local artists as permanent elements of the space. Designers spent significant time researching and vetting creators in order to curate what exists in the hotel today. Six local visual artists are now featured throughout their building: Eric Bloemers, Sara Cowan, Matt Josef, David Holland, Ruth Loveland, and Sean Ramsey. According to the hotel’s Marketing Director, Paul Kiley, all of the elements of the hotel were intentionally selected to play homage to our history and identity. The lobby area was created specifically to represent Oklahoma’s living room, greeting guests with textures and tones of natural earth materials which mimic the red clay, waving wheat, and vast skies distinct to our state. The artwork throughout the hotel falls under the same framework, showing off the state’s natural beauty through a sort of all-encompassing, immersive experience.

The work provides a sense of welcome, adding a personal touch to the modern aesthetic of the space.

David Holland, Incus

One of the featured artists, David Holland, is an Oklahoman oil painter who focuses on cloudscapes. Holland took a leap of faith when he decided to paint full time in 2012, and the chance to share his work at the Omni Oklahoma City Hotel couldn’t have come at a better moment. With the pandemic’s disproportional negative impact on the arts community, it was special for an opportunity like this one to arise. Holland’s work explores depth, color, and layers, drawing from the natural beauty within the Oklahoma sky. Due to an industrial accident, Holland can only see from one of his eyes. Creating three dimensionality within his work became important to his practice due to his personal visibility limits.

Hollands’s painting process begins with photographing the sky, especially when the weather creates unique and playful forms in the clouds. He then works from the photographs to create his pieces, often shifting the shades and tones to enhance and highlight certain elements of the sky. Though he doesn’t have a favorite painting or print, he has several favorite storms that he’ll often revisit when he begins a new piece. According to Holland, “There is a beautiful side to storms, I don’t see them as threatening. If Monet lived in Oklahoma, he would be painting these.”

In addition to a mostly deep-blue and stormy print, Incus, located in a common area on Floor 2, his work can be seen outside of each of the guest room doors—94 prints in total. Each of these prints is a cropped image created from an original Holland painting. His paintings were photographed in high-resolution and cropped in order to fit the vertical frames that sit in between each pair of doors that line the guest room halls. With high attention to detail, colors were matched to the original paintings and Holland was given full authority to approve the cropping of his work in preparation for each quality print. Few hotels include a quantity of art as generous as what is found at the Omni Oklahoma City Hotel. For the visitor who isn’t great with memorizing numbers, they can simply walk down the hall until they find the specific cloud that lives outside of their hotel room door.

In addition to the permanent art collection, the hotel’s gift shop will also feature rotating work of local artists and vendors. So, even though the art on display in the Omni Oklahoma City Hotel is not for sale, there are still opportunities for visitors to bring home a special piece of Oklahoma art with them.

Art enhances our community through creating moments for connection, documenting the unique elements of our state, and welcoming visitors with a rich sense of our culture and identity. It is wonderful to see new developments and existing organizations support the inclusion of art in their spaces.