Living Arts of Tulsa Podcast

Christopher Creese is a First Generation Vincentian American photographer and filmmaker originally from the Washington, D.C. suburb of Hyattsville, MD and currently based in Tulsa, OK. His work has taken him all across the country for clients including The New York Times, A&E Networks, Interscope Records, NBC News and more. When he was 4 years old, he received a gift: a 35mm Fisher-Price Perfect Shot camera that helped foster the love of photography at a very early age. He uses color and light to create a visual experience that takes you into the image. His work is a vivid tour de force.

To learn more about Tulsa Creative Engine, visit
https://www.tulsacreativeengine.org

Chris Davis is an entrepreneur, community organizer and creative producer from Tulsa. A graduate of Booker T. Washington high school and the University of Oklahoma, Chris has spent most of his career as an independent project manager, communications specialist and strategic consultant for clients in the worlds of music, sports, food and culture. He is an executive producer for ‘Fire in Little Africa’, a multimedia project commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre including a hip-hop album released in 2021 on Motown Records. He has been a co-organizer of DREAMLAND (formerly World Culture Music Festival) since 2018, and that event has since grown to one of the largest festivals in the region. Chris won the 2016 Tulsa Startup Series for his ice pop business The Pop House, and that has since evolved into a creative agency called POP HOUSE specializing in content production, creative direction and augmented reality.

To learn more about Shawna and her comedy, visit
https://www.shawnablake.com

Shawna Blake delivers  surprising and hilarious performances with calm confidence, a wink and finger guns. She brings a crowd along as if we were all close friends while she divulges embarrassing moments, private thoughts and personal victories. Her small town charm and cutting wit have delighted audiences across the region

Barbara Corso Ide, a native of Indiana, has lived near Nashville, TN, for 28 years. 

She has a BS and MA in Elementary Education from Ball State University, and an Ed.D. from Trevecca Nazarene University in Leadership and Curriculum. 

Barb and her husband have three children and four grandchildren. She enjoys gardening and food preservation, exercising, book clubs and quilt guilds. 

She comes to the art quilt world after retiring from a 43-year career in public education. 

Taking and manipulating digital photographs has become the fuel for her interest in
storytelling through art quilts.

Steph Simon is a leader of World Culture Music - a collective of artists inspired by the legacy of Black Wall Street to stake their claim to the city and restore the excellence that 98 years ago turned to ashes.

A true leader and visionary for the city, Simon uses his music to uplift and inspire transformation both personal and communal while never taking himself too seriously. There is a spiritual undercurrent to his work that is unmistakable, perhaps what one would expect from an artist who grew up listening to Notorious B.I.G. in the heart of the Bible Belt. As he puts it on the gospel-tinged track “Silver n’ Gold”, his music is “like a mix between holy ghost and Hova quotes.”

On his new album Born on Black Wall Street, Simon draws parallels between the creative culture in Tulsa today and the energy that made Black Wall Street thrive in the first place. Throughout the album Simon takes on the persona of “Diamond” Dick Rowland, a 17-year-old boy scapegoated for instigating the 1921 massacre after an incident with a white girl in an elevator. Of this creative choice Simon said, “I feel a connection to [Rowland] that I can’t explain, almost like I’m carrying his spirit with me. It wasn’t right that his name was used as a catalyst for a lot of pain and destruction, I use the name Dicky Ro to be the catalyst for transformation and hope.” His authentic spirit carrying messages of economic empowerment, community healing and personal growth will be felt by all who listen.

Born on Black Wall Street stands as a seminal album for the emerging Tulsa hip-hop scene, but Simon is speaking to a uniquely black American experience that will find resonance in the heartland and beyond. On album centerpiece “Diamonds” he raps, “See it, want it, buy it then you own it/put your pot with mine let’s make it grow.” 

To learn more about Cam and his music, visit
http://www.camjamesmusic.com
Instagram: @itscamjames
Twitter: @itscamjames
http://biglink.to/camjames

Tulsa-based rapper Cameron James Williams, professionally known as Cam James, is a storyteller. At Georgia Tech in 2011, he started turning his spoken word pieces into music. He has built a career around thematically motivated songs that lend themselves well to film production.

Following his first major television placement on BET's Being Mary Jane in September 2017, Cam starred in an international tourism campaign called "Hear The USA" for Brand USA and Spotify in 2018. His song "Lately" earned a placement in the Netflix Original movie Uncorked (2020), "114 AM" in the Netflix Original series Grand Army (2020) and "Babyface" in the OWN series Queen Sugar (2021).

To learn more about Jane and her work, visit
https://www.janedunnewold.com
https://www.instagram.com/jane.dunnewold
https://www.facebook.com/janedunnewoldartist

Jane Dunnewold teaches and lectures internationally, and has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, including Inspired by the Masters (National Quilt Museum (2020) & Texas Quilt Museum (2018). A second mixed media series featuring re-purposed quilt blocks and gold leaf was exhibited at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas (2017) and more recently at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Fl.

Her archives were recently acquired by the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Her work won Best of Show in the exhibition Timeless Meditations (Tubac Art Center/2013). She is a recipient of the Quilt Japan Prize, and Gold Prize at the Taegue (Korea) International Textile Exhibition. In 2019 she was named Artist of the Year by the San Antonio Art League.

Dunnewold has authored numerous books, including the classic Complex Cloth (1996) and Art Cloth: A Guide to Surface Design on Fabric (2010.) In 2016 North Light Books published Creative Strength Training: Prompts, Exercises and Stories to Inspire Artistic Genius. Her recently self-published books, Best of Both Worlds: Enhanced Botanical Printing, and Improvisational Screen Printing are both available world-wide on amazon.com.

She is a former President of the Surface Design Association and currently facilitates a ten month Creative Strength Training community online.

Anita (Annie) Centeno is a mixed-media artist in San Antonio, Texas. Although working with cloth and stitching are primary somehow mixed media finds its way into the things she loves and does: resin, beads, paper, found objects.   A love of creating things by hand was passed down from her father, a jeweler and her mother, who loved to sew and all things related to stitch. 

Currently she creates jewelry designs using resin, shrink film, and beads and also stitched statement purses using recycled/re-purposed materials which are sold at a local boutique/gallery.  In addition, she shows other artwork at galleries whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Anita can be contacted by email: [email protected]

Some of her work is on Etsy: Jewelry3Daughters, that she shares with her sister.

To learn more about Elizabeth and her work, visit
https://www.elizabethsalvia.com

Elizabeth Salvia was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up drawing, sewing and writing poetry. She also created collages using unconventional media—autumn leaves, wallpaper samples, Sears catalogues, National Geographic magazines, and scrap fabric from clothes her mother made.

She earned her B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she made art that examined life in city environments. After twenty-two years in Chicago, she moved to California, where she became involved in habitat research and restoration. Her studies of plant and animal habitats also inform her artmaking.

Elizabeth Salvia creates textile and collage artworks that explore ideas of origin and place. Her works investigate the ways in which we are indelibly shaped and marked by our own histories and environments, as we struggle to understand and control them. Her stories are rooted in deep observation and attention to context, and often play out in locations where human-made and natural environments collide. Archetypes such as the Child, the Wanderer, and the Witness have been powerful tools in her work.

She composes her works as collages, using silks, cottons, and papers. She begins with low-water immersion dyeing, and painting and printing with thickened dyes and paints. She then adds stenciling, embroidery, applique, quilting and beading, to create richly textured artworks.

Elizabeth Salvia has shown work in galleries in the U.S. and internationally. She is a full-time artist living and working in the Central Valley of California.