#5: Gilcrease Museum

Readers might comment that my ratings are distorted by my particular visit rather than representing some cosmic essence of the tourist attraction independent of personal experience.  Well... yeah.  We are all Kant's children.

My Gilcrease visit was distorted by going as part of Orientation week.  Orientation is designed to ease anxious freshmen into independent living.  Back home this involves supermarket brand spirits and dressing up as Smurfs.  Freshers week at the University of Tulsa was decidedly more wholesome, potentially because this is a small private university on the Right side of the bible belt.

I went to three Orientation events: the Gilcrease Museum, a laser quest event for grad students, and a surreal trip to Ultimate Pizza.  Ultimate Pizza offers bowling, 6D cinema, arcade games, go karting, laser quest and a pizza buffet all affordable on a complimentary re-chargeable* fun card.  My colour pallet cannot do justice to Ultimate Pizza's decor unfortunately.

It would be stretching the definition of tourist attraction to make Laser Quest a card, which leaves the Gilcrease Museum

*I was enthusiastically told this when I tried to return my card at the end.  The employees live and breathe the Ultimate Pizza spirit.

Date of creation: 1943

Thomas Gilcrease was gifted 160 acres of government distributed lands by virtue of his tribal membership.  He subsequently got oil rich, founding the Gilcrease Oil Company in 1922, and developed a taste for European museums over a series of visits in the 1920s and 1930s.  The first Gilcrease Museum was opened in 1943 at his oil company headquarters and a public site was opened in 1949.

Gilcrease considered selling the collection ran when he ran into financial trouble in the 1950s.  Fearing the collection would leave Tulsa, voters backed issuing a bond to pay Gilcrease's debts at a 3-to-1 margin.  He deeded the collection to the City in 1955 and bequeathed the rest upon his death in 1962.  
 

Historical significance: 28

The tour guide lost my interest as she laboured over how War bonnets were made.  These are the native American head dresses traditionally worn by male leaders.  Any society capable of wasting resources on symbols of hierarchy must be producing an economic surplus.  The elephant in the room was the question of how that surplus came about.  Talk to me about technological innovation, agricultural imports, proto-property rights, new organisational structures and we're getting towards historical significance.

European-ness: 5.0

Are museums particularly European?  I don't even know anymore.

Cowboy hats: 57

Design an exhibition with Tulsa Top Trumps in mind, and you get Blake Little: Photographs from the Gay Rodeo.  Liberal vibes and cowboy hats complete with quotes from the front line.  Here's Blake Little talking about Gordon Fiedor:

"Gordon was a graphic designer and he started wearing Western clothes constantly.  He would go into meetings in L.A. with his Western jacket and cowboy hat.  He really took it to heart.  Sometimes I was amazed that he could have the guts to go into a meeting in Los Angeles dressed like that"

 Big up Gordon right off the bat.  But also, what an incredibly important insight into the cowboy psyche.  How can we design our institutions to empower cowboys and their fleeting pride?

Collective consciousness: 83

Orientation/Freshers week is weighty stuff.  You meet hundreds of people who could form your network of emotional support, hook-ups, future business partners and those people who never advance beyond a half-hearted smile.  Nailing your outward appearance is crucial and that involves making decisions.  

Steve Jobs wore the same thing everyday to lighten his decision making load.  British undergrads bury decisions under oppressive drinking games.  American undergrads decide.  

Do you visibly listen to the tour guide and appear too sincere to the bros-to-be?  Looking disinterested risks looking ignorant in the eyes of the cutie tastefully signaling liberal politics.  Taking your phone out suggest both poor impulse control AND a social life.  

I would have been paralysed by the possible interpretations of my every decision doing this sober.  Fortunately I am now visibly OLD and no longer passable as an 18 year old.  With no hope of blending in, I could fly-on-the-wall to my inner anthropologist's content.

My fellow visitors were all too aware of the collective.  (Alternatively, I'm projecting my own angsty over thinking onto a load of 18 year olds who thought it'd be cool to go to a museum high.)

Wokeness: 74

Inadvertently wading into a national debate, I tried to signal my own wokeness by making a joke about wearing a temporary tribal chief tattoo. The gift shop manager explained the conditions for appropriately producing native American imagery, which included doing so in good faith and documenting the particular tribe being represented.  British politeness meant I couldn't not buy the tattoos after a long explanation.  Now I'm left wondering when I'll get the opportunity to wear a tribal chief tattoo in good faith... 

The Gilcrease is woke AF regardless.

Overall

Putting the gay rodeo aside, the exhibitions were largely under whelming.  My favourite part  was the conference room backing onto a green valley, especially glorious given Tulsa sits at a lower latitude than Athens.

Notes from an artist

Representing a black and white photo as a water colour is hard.  Not cross-contaminating hair and skin colour to create a ginger, fake tanned Frenchman should be straight forward...  I do like the cowboy hat and some of the stripes on his shirt though.  Long strokes are my jam.