Coming up on Gallery America.

It's time to celebrate the cowgirl.

And that's exactly what one Tulsa based artist is doing.

We'll meet her and revisit a past story on another Oklahoma artist known for impressionist horse paintings.

That and much more beginning right now.

Wow.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America.

The show that brings you the best of art in Oklahoma and around the nation.

We're in Hennessey, Oklahoma, looking at a very big cowboy hat.

In fact, it's the biggest all steel cowboy hat in the world.

Or is it a cowgirl hat?

I ask because the first artists were meeting created the cowgirl artists of America.

The ever inspiring Megan Wimbereley Many women really don't like the term cowgirl.

Instead, they'll say cowboy girl or cowboy girl.

I've even heard people say, Don't don't call a woman who's a good hand with a horse or with cattle or whatever.

Don't call her a cowgirl.

Call her a cowboy.

And I think that tells a story about the West that is not accurate.

It's not the story of the West that I grew up in.

People want to be a cowboy.

Why don't they want to be a cowgirl?

I chose my cousin to portray in this part because I think she is an incredible horsewoman and she's definitely knows lot more.

Than I know.

She's done it for a long, long time.

My art, which I would say I would call contemporary Western art, kind of falls between the cracks sometimes because there is definitely Western galleries in Western shows that my work would not fit and they would say it's too, too modern or too contemporary.

On the other hand, there's shows that, you know, like the things that aren't Western, which I would be way too Western for.

A lot of times when people go really colorful, they really began to be more abstract or expressionistic and lose some of the realism to it.

And for me, the realism is also important.

You know, I literally was riding horses before I could walk, and I know that that seems like a tall tale, but it's not.

And there's pictures of me as soon as I could hang on to a saddle.

And I was up there and my mom said I would cry as soon as they took me off.

I just always wanted to be around the horses.

Right now we're in Tulsa.

It's a lot different living in a city.

I you know, that's not really my preferred place to live.

But there's beauty.

No matter where you are.

And then, of course, there's the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.

And I really try to get down to the Cowboy Museum as much as I can.

It's always informative, always beautiful, looking through the old saddles and all of that.

It's so inspiring to look back at the craftsmanship and the patterns and the styles that were used.

Hi, Priscilla.

How are you?

Good.

Megan, how are you doing today?

Doing well.

So, are you ready to get started?

So, Cowgirl Artist of America is an organization that's working to increase opportunities and representation for female Western artists and makers.

The idea for CGA happened in 2018 when I went to a really beautiful Western art show, and as I looked around, I began to notice that there were not very many women, and I just thought, I want to do something about this.

And so I just started with Instagram, and I started reaching out to female Western artists, and I would send them a message or expect a follow up.

Can I share it?

I started doing monthly Zoom meetings and then people were like, How do I join?

How do I join?

And don't only get stuck in art based hashtags so and so.

In May of 2021, I was like, okay, we're doing it.

They are fine artists, so they're painting, sculpting, they're photographers or traditional artists.

So maybe they're saddle makers or they are boot makers.

Silversmiths.

And when I think about it, it's kind of like mind boggling how much the organization has done in such a short time.

I'm really happy with it.

Yesterday I called it, what did I call it, Vintage Pop.

Vintage pop, it feels like to me right now a vintage pop piece, which I don't if that's a thing or not.

But if it isn't, it should be.

Women are really good with horses.

And a lot of times you see these cowgirls out there, too, with the baby on their hip.

All of that is so important.

And it's because of women like my grandma Betty and my Aunt Shelly that women are able to grow up and to do the things that they want to do because we've been supported to go out there and and be cowgirls.

So.

So thanks, Grandma.

You're very welcome.

You're one of my special kids to It's time to celebrate the cowgirl.

You can get more information on CGA artists and events by visiting their website, CowgirlartistsofAmerica.org, or Megan's artwork at her website.

MeganWimberley.com.

Next, going on a trip back into the Gallery America archives to revisit a story we did on an artist who also helped her anymore.

This is Jean Richardson.

I have a lot.

That's us.

My name is Jeanne Richardson.

I live in Oklahoma City and I'm a painter.

I paint large abstractions of the horse.

I use the horse as a metaphor for the human spirit.

I have been raised around horses.

I know them well.

I can you know, I've owned horses.

My children rode.

My parents were both from ranching families.

So I have that as background.

But I just love the image, the power and swiftness, energy, all of the things that I wanted to paint about.

I could do it in that vocabulary.

I have accepted that my subject is going to be a horse, but I don't think I'm going to do it in a certain way.

And I turn that thought off and I begin just with the gesture of brush and color and make conscious decisions about whether it's going to be horizontal or vertical.

I make a conscious decision about what colors to put out on the palate and what brush to pick up.

But I don't have any other conscious thing in mind.

And I would I think maybe Zen would describe the process.

I'm not literally describing a thing or even an emotion.

I'm just starting evoking that in myself and hopefully in the viewer.

I will get have a painting that I'll say, that painting makes me feel like it's the Oklahoma with my horses standing in the Oklahoma wind.

And so the next time I do a painting, I might start with brushstrokes that have that message in mind.

And then as it develops, well, then the next, when I think of something else that might make that and it just it turns out to be not one painting, but a whole series of painting about the same idea or coming from the same place.

And I don't try to write.

I think what I'm going to do next, I just do it until there's not another word left.

Next, we're going to go out west to meet a couple artists.

The first is a Filipino-American artist in Nevada who uses different media like Woodblocks and Silk and written word to tell her story.

Then we'll meet a Native American artist in California who uses murals and workshops to tell the story of her culture at a local.

I go to sleep asking to see visions so I can paint them.

When images come, that means there's something coming out of it that means it's meant to come out.

My name is Jackie Pierce Carlin.

I'm an artist based in Carson City, Nevada.

I'm originally from Maui, Hawaii.

I'm an eclectic artist.

I don't stay with the same medium.

I usually go with the flow.

I use different methods of art depending on the subject matter.

Sometimes when I look at a subject matter, I think, that's a beautiful watercolor, or I'll do that.

I love the watercolors because you can't control it.

Watercolor is very forgiving if you start light and layer on it can work out what you don't want as you do the layers in watercolor painting with silk as different than painting on canvas.

The silk has to be stretched on stretcher bars and the stretcher bars are sized to fit the piece of fabric that you're working on.

The silk is then stretched on the bars and either can drawn freely or following a template.

I use a resist to keep all the colors in the sections where I want them to be and the resist goes on.

Then it dries.

And then I paint them.

I paint the sections where I want the colors to go.

After the painting is done, it's dried, and then it goes through a series of steaming, which takes about 2 to 4 hours to set the colors and then rinsed over and over again to get the excess dyes out.

I've always wanted to go into the abstraction.

Wood blocking is very time consuming.

Each color on a woodblock is determined by the carving on the woodblock.

This is a paste that I make myself with water and rice flour.

This adheres the ink to the paper love.

When I take the paper off the block and see the print.

For some reason or other, I have not stopped creating.

I turned to writing because I've always wrote, and that's when I went back to college and then wrote and published my memoir.

This is the story of me growing up in a Filipino sugar plantation village on the island of Maui.

When sugar was king, the sugar industry closed down several years ago, but this has become a historical background of my life as a Filipino youngster growing up amongst the rest of the Filipinos that migrated from the Philippines to work in the sugar plantation industry have 40 plus years of experience as an artist in different mediums and it is the time of my life where I should make a little bit of a difference.

I mean, I have Georgia O'Keeffe here and she's 90 years old in that photo, and I keep her there to remind me I have much more to put out.

[Singing] I hope when someone sees my work they feel joy and feel the colors and how exciting the genius life is and designs.

And these are all created by my ancestors and they were experts in this fields.

She has been committed to rejecting the idea of the vanished American Indian.

She wants audiences and everybody who sees her art to know that Native American cultures are a living and vibrant culture.

There's nothing about us.

In the fourth grade, I never learned about California Indians, and I said, We're all Indians because just me and my sisters were born in the school and we were the ones that were getting beat up.

On when Jean went away to college at UC Berkeley.

She was told by her professors that she couldn't include cultural content in her artwork.

She couldn't paint things that had native relevance or cultural relevance, or it would be considered folk art.

Jeanne has always rejected those types of ideas, and she's been committed to forging her own path.

Well, finally we get to be recognized.

We finally get to be recognized, and we're proud of who we are.

We know our own history and nobody can put us away because we had a lot of brave people, because they were so brave, were able to be alive.

Now, I don't want to begin.

Murals are so important because they're like a community statement, especially if you can go out with the oral histories and learn some early histories and what really happened to that community.

You can put that image in that community and no non-Indian can come in here and say, No, that's all wrong.

This mural is done in Susanville, California on East Larson Street, our ancestors, our future.

So I interviewed all these different people in town because I know they had ancestors here from a long time ago.

We got a lot of the comments, people walking by, this is really nice.

The Indian people, I see them standing by their relatives, all the little kids standing in front of their relatives, and they take a picture of it.

It's just really nice.

It's really nice.

That's what I like to see.

I respect the fact that murals do need to be changed.

They can't stay forever.

It's not a michelangelo where they happen repairing it.

So it reflects kind of life, the times.

If we do murals that says we're present here and now, that means we're still alive.

In the early 1990s, Jane returned to her hometown of Susanville, where she established the Native American Graphic Workshop.

The graphic workshop is a unique community hub where she brings together youth from the community elders as well as different artists is fun for people to do.

It's a kind of an introduction to printmaking, working with the oils, solvents, paper, how to handle press, how to handle the paper.

I got people that do some fantastic work, but they wouldn't even realize what they're they're doing.

They're doing something beautiful.

If I could do it, they can do it.

I hope I can lock down barriers.

I like how the transparency looks.

It's not heavy, so it's softer.

Then you can bring up some hard lines with a definite imagery.

All of us here.

These are learned from your work with have been inspired by her work.

Continue to be inspired by the work to my house for Jamie and Tobi.

Sing honor song for Jean.

The Nevada Museum of Art is really proud and honored to be able to present this retrospective exhibition of Jean LaMarr's work.

It features over 50 years of her paintings, prints, murals, installations.

I'm so grateful for and to give me this opportunity.

No other museum not to be missed opportunity.

I'm a community artist, political artist, so it's difficult to get into a place I hide.

As you're looking at Jean's artwork, you'll see a variety of symbols and motifs appear from time to time.

Sometimes that's a military fighter jets flying overhead.

Sometimes it's sort of this ubiquitous barbed wire that you see throughout the American West.

Sometimes it's an American dollar sign, and she uses all of these symbols in different ways to critique American culture and to critique what has been a dominant culture that's for a long time suppressed Native American cultures in the United States.

Everyone has a hope.

Everything has hope, happiness and their it might look negative, but there is hope for every little thing.

Or I'm making fun of something but never hurt anybody's feelings on purpose.

That's not not my personality because we're really kind hearted people.

Being positive, being positive aren't all notes that there's there's a way out.

There's.

There's hope.

There's always hope.

I always have that hope.

I, I had I know.

Next.

We're going all in on the theramin.

You know that spooky sounding instrument that sounds like it's from a Twilight Zone episode?

Well, this Virginia artist has sung Baroque jazz, done ukulele workshops, but now all she wants to do is a theramin opera.

Have a look.

I have the video of this actually of me playing a fair amount for the first time.

I was terrible, but it was like one of those lightbulb moments in life.

This is it.

This is my instrument.

And here it is.

And it's the weirdest instrument in the land.

I started doing virtual music lessons.

This is my second time doing ukulele camp.

I'm super excited.

I for you, just greasing the The Old Machine.

The Gears.

the biggest one for everyone is fear.

Like fear of failure.

Fear of rejection.

Fear of not being good enough.

When we're about to put ourselves out there and do something really vulnerable, which is what art is, because you're literally making something out of nothing.

And that's very scary.

Instead of using that fear and as a sign to, like, run as far as you can in the other direction.

If you can instead use it as a sign, hey, pay attention, because what's on the other side of this is going to be like, crazier and more interesting than you could ever imagine.

Be trying to make my own jazz band.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Matt, my fiancee, I started singing with his band and he has taught me a lot and he's amazing.

You won't meet a better band leader.

It's all New Orleans inspired.

So Louis Prima and Louis Armstrong, of course.

That's like a very high energy, super fine, like swinging band.

Just fantastic musicians.

One of the many projects in my head that I have planned is to do a jazz album with the theremin being the main instrument.

It is the first electronic instrument that was ever invented.

It was invented in 1920, so 101 years ago.

This is actually the last theremin that Bob Moog had a hand in designing before he passed away.

This is called the Ether Wave probe.

So this is how it works.

You have to antenna on either side.

This is the pitch antenna.

This is the volume antenna And how you how you are maneuvering your hands is basically like your fretboard, as it were.

Your line of pitch is from your collarbone, just about to the pitch antenna.

And then with the volume antenna, you're moving this hand up and down to create sound.

So it's a very like pat your stomach, rub your head kind of deal.

It was such a frustrating process learning the theremin.

Like, I can't stress that enough that it is so difficult to play for many reasons.

One of the only instruments in the world played without touch.

I think the reason why I connected with it that first time, it felt like a second voice, which I've like I said, I've always just identified as a singer first and foremost.

And so that's really what clicked.

There are very few like people play this, like technically, you know, like as an instrument, I think I'm up there.

I think I'm on par.

I can hang.

You know, it's not my main concern either.

Obviously, like, my concern is how can I use it to enhance my music and to experiment and to keep me inspired with sound in there?

Not a lot of people out there writing songs with the theremin.

So I think automatically that just established a part of my style because this is such a rare thing.

It's just endlessly experimental, like you can do so much with it and so versatile in ways that people don't realize because they just see it kind of as a novelty, like a weird kind of instrument, which it is, but it can be so much more than that.

I've definitely dreamed about making a theremin opera or something like that, so I know that I'll spend my whole life just just pushing those limits and seeing all that it can do all the possibilities.

Yeah.

It's just so magical and weird and spacey.

That's all the time we have for Gallery America.

Thank you so much for joining us.

As always, you can revisit past episodes at our archives at OETA.tv/GalleryAmerica.

And don't forget to follow Gallery America Online for updates of the Oklahoma art scene on Facebook and on Instagram at @OETAgallery.

Thanks again for joining us.

We'll see you next time.

Until then, STAY ARTY OKLAHOMA.