Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center is throwing open its doors Thursday evening for a free opening celebration of “Clever, Quick, Magnetic: The Art of Witty Banter,” a survey of 30 contemporary painters curated by internationally known artist David Salle. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. at the museum's Automobile Alley building, with a reception featuring light bites and refreshments running from 7 to 9 p.m. Registration is required to attend.
The evening kicks off with an ArtDesk Conversation from 6 to 7 p.m. featuring Salle alongside Nate Freeman, a Manhattan-based art correspondent for Vanity Fair who authors the “True Colors” dispatch tracking the intersections of contemporary art, high finance, luxury and pop culture, according to KGOU. The talk series is presented in partnership with ArtDesk, a quarterly print publication launched in October 2013 by the Oklahoma City-based Kirkpatrick Foundation to cover visual art, dance, performance and thought.
Salle's return to curate a major exhibition carries a hometown angle: he was born in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1952, before going on to become one of the leading figures of postmodern painting after studying at CalArts under John Baldessari, per Wikipedia. He's also an accomplished writer, having published the 2016 essay collection “How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art” through W. W. Norton and contributing art criticism regularly to The New York Review of Books.
A Show Built Around an Idea, Not Just a Style
The exhibition itself brings together works by leading contemporary artists, including Ross Bleckner, Cecily Brown, John Currin, Alex Katz, Neo Rauch, Amy Sillman, Carroll Dunham and Marina Adams, according to Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. Rather than grouping the painters by movement or aesthetic, Salle framed the show as an inquiry into what he calls “aesthetic personality,” exploring whether paintings that look visually distinct from one another might still share underlying connections and operate with something like an internal nervous system.
The exhibition invites visitors to consider how intention, style and artistic decision-making shape the experience of looking, and it explores relationships between paintings that may appear visually distinct yet share underlying connections, per KGOU. Oklahoma Contemporary has issued a content advisory noting the show includes two paintings depicting adult nudity, and it's advising parental discretion for visitors bringing children.
Inside Automobile Alley's ‘Folding Light’
“Clever, Quick, Magnetic: The Art of Witty Banter” runs from Thursday through Jan. 11, 2027, in the Eleanor Kirkpatrick Main Gallery, with free general admission to the exhibition itself. The opening celebration takes place at Oklahoma Contemporary's building at 11 NW 11th Street in Oklahoma City, a 53,916-square-foot facility completed in 2020 by Rand Elliott Architects and nicknamed “Folding Light” for its skin of 16,800 anodized aluminum fins designed to reflect Oklahoma's changing skies, according to Wikipedia.
That building has become a fixture of downtown OKC's cultural calendar, having previously hosted a comic arts festival and an animal welfare summit headlined by Jeff Corwin and Temple Grandin, and it's also home to Café Contemporary, which debuted inside the museum earlier this year. The institution's roots stretch back to 1989, when it was founded by Christian Keesee and Marilyn Myers as City Arts Center at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds before relocating downtown and rebranding as Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in 2018, per the museum's own history page.
Both the opening celebration and the exhibition are free and open to the public, though registration is required for Thursday's event. Visitors with questions can reach Oklahoma Contemporary at (405) 951-0000.
