FIRST FRIDAYS: JANUARY 2026

FIRST FRIDAYS: JANUARY 2026 Friday, January 2, 2025 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Tulsa Artist Fellowship - Flagship 112 N. Boston Ave, Tulsa, OK 74103 FREE AND OPEN TO ALL Begin the new year with Tulsa Artist Fellowship at a focused First Friday highlighting Le’Andra LeSeur’s powerful exhibition, Monument Eternal, at Flagship. While studios will be closed in observance of the holiday, we invite you to experience this profound body of work—an evening of reflection, presence, and connection in the Tulsa Arts District. What began as LeSeur’s personal reckoning with Stone Mountain, Georgia—the site of the Ku Klux Klan’s 1915 resurgence—has evolved into a wider investigation of American landscapes where racial terror has taken root and its memory remains unmarked or distorted. Through video, sculpture, photography, and sound, Monument Eternal builds an embodied archive of presence in spaces long shaped by silence and erasure. At the center of the exhibition is a titular video drawn from LeSeur’s return to Stone Mountain, a public park dominated by a three-acre carving of Confederate leaders on horseback. A site she visited often during her Atlanta adolescence, LeSeur revisited it as an adult and began to consider its physical and psychological impact. In the film, slow-motion captures show the artist falling repeatedly along the mountain’s peak—a poetic translation of the body in collapse. Borrowing its title from Alice Coltrane’s abridged autobiography, the work echoes Coltrane’s own accounts of physical and mental trial in pursuit of transcendence. LeSeur similarly pushes her body to its limits as a way of confronting both inherited histories of Blackness and her personal identity as a queer Black woman. Her spoken-word poetry forms the basis of the film’s score, underscoring the work’s themes of endurance and self-discovery. The newest iteration of Monument Eternal shifts focus to the 1911 lynching of Laura Nelson and her son, LD Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma. Though predating Stone Mountain’s role in the Klan’s resurgence, the event belongs to the same lineage of racial violence. With no official marker at the site, its memory survives primarily through a circulated image—gruesome and dehumanizing. Through five new sculptural and photographic works, LeSeur resists this spectacle, creating alternative memorials defined by quietude and intentional refusal. The works echo generations of avoidance—stories untold, histories unrecorded. Additional paintings, drawings, and blown-glass pieces stem from LeSeur’s visits to Stone Mountain, where she tracked involuntary physical responses—flicks of the wrist, shifts in breath—and transformed them into material gestures. These marks become evidence of how bodies carry history and how art can become a vessel for witnessing, processing, and healing. Join us at Flagship to experience Monument Eternal—a powerful beginning to the new year and an invitation to reflect on presence, memory, and resilience. SCHEDULE 6 ...