Sovereign Futures

The University of Tulsa’s Department of Film Studies presents Sovereign Futures, a three-day convening of leading artists, academics, curators, and minds that will unfold over time and in multiple locations. Organized by New York-based Visiting Curator Allison Glenn, Sovereign Futures presents a constellation of artists’ projects, performances, meals, and panel discussions that provoke dialogues on sovereignty through the lens of contemporary practices.

Convening sites include the Osage Nation’s Harvest Land Farm; the historically Black pioneer town of Boley, Oklahoma, home to the first Black-owned electric company and the first Black-owned bank in the United States; Guthrie Green, Tulsa’s urban park and performance space, and interdisciplinary artist Kalup Linzy’s Queen Rose Art House, a social and critical art space that hosts performances, exhibitions, and short-term artist residencies.

Curatorial advisers to the project include Kalyn Fay Barnoski (Cherokee Nation enrollee, Muscogee Creek descent), assistant curator, Native American Art, Philbrook Museum of Art; visual artist Yatika Starr Fields (Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Osage); Caleb Gayle, professor, Northeastern University School of Journalism, and contributing writer, New York Times Magazine; and interdisciplinary artist Rick Lowe, co-curator, Greenwood Arts Project. Insight providedby Jeff Van Hanken, department chair and Wellspring Associate Professor of Film Studies in TU’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences and GAP Project coordinator.

The curatorial framework for the Sovereign Futures convening is developed by Glenn, in conversation with Barnoski, Fields, Gayle, and Lowe. During the four-day gathering, artist-led projects will explore themes of sovereignty through the lens of food, land, speculative futures, and histories of the place that is now called Oklahoma.

Learn more here.