I am an artist

An afternoon at the Tulsa Girls Art School

“Mr. Matt!  Mr. Matt! Mr. Matt!” boomed the chorus of girls. Many of them had returned to this room every Monday and Wednesday night for years—some of them half their lives. Matt Moffett, director of Tulsa Girls Art School, walked the room in wire-framed spectacles. The girls were busy drawing in their sketchbooks. One worked on a Tulsa cityscape, a hummingbird zooming through the foreground. Another girl penciled a cartoon—a girl holding a heart balloon by a string.

Later, while Moffett lectured, the girls snacked on Doritos and peeled clementines. The girls are in Moffett’s advanced class at TGAS and are free to work independently. The day I visited, the girls created Valentines for their upcoming Valentine-art show. I watched these mementos of love take form through printmaking, photography, painting, and access to the rows of supplies along the west wall and the fully stocked basement.

“I didn’t even like art until I discovered there are a lot of different things you can do,” said Yamya Jackson. She didn’t think her public-school art teacher wanted to teach, she told me.

The studio that night was a world away from her public-school experience of art education.

A TGAS-student piece hangs in the Zarrow Art Center. It’s “Saleeid,” a large-scale oil painting by Amanda Zimmerman. In it Zimmerman combined the forms of her two friends and fellow TGAS students, Adalid Ciriaco and Saleen Eshelman, into one. Magazine clippings take the place of the figures’ faces. Zimmerman explained, like a seasoned artist, “It represents how society wants them to look.”

Ciriaco, the model for half of “Saleeid,” has a few months left at the school. She worked on her senior show the day I visited. She mentioned her interest in cosmetology school. “It’s an art in itself,” she said. TGAS encourages continued education. Tulsa Community College stops by during the students’ junior year to tell the girls how to attend tuition-free. Also, the girls visit art schools as part of their yearly trip.

This year, with a grant from the Schusterman Family Foundation, the advanced class is headed to San Francisco. There, students will study Henri Matisse at a traveling exhibit and visit museums, an art college, and the Redwoods. Most students have never been on an airplane, Moffett told me. “It will make their world a little bigger,” he said, stepping away to help one student sew a button on her Valentine.

I asked another student, Yori Jones, if she was an artist. “I have shows and come up with plans to make art. If it weren’t for the school, I don’t think I would do that alone,” she said. “I do stuff that artists do.”

“Mr. Matt tells us we’re artists,” she added.

The public is invited to Tulsa Girls Art School Feb. 11, 6 – 8 p.m., to peruse and buy students’ day-of-love creations, $10 each. Canned art—tiny painted canvases rolled into candy-filled tin cans—will also be for sale.