Pins on a Map: Tulsa

The bright young talents who gathered in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a local literary magazine's annual festival hardly fit the stereotypes of the elite literati. Take Elyse Fenton, a featured reader who chatted with me about her part time job doing chores on a Texas farm.

As she rose to the podium, the farmhand was transformed, reading in a powerful voice from "Infidelity," her piercing poem about the Iraq war. Her audience — in addition to other featured artists — was a motley mix of professionals and amateurs, of prose wordsmiths, poets, book club devotees, spoken word performers, college students, and other assorted fans of literature, some clutching finished novel manuscripts, others dressed down in t-shirts and blue jeans, and holding rough drafts of poems.

The unlikely combination of fine art and homespun folksiness at the Nimrod festival is a Tulsa hallmark. In this town of 387,000 people, where the breadth of cultural venues is one of the most diverse and surprising attractions, there is an art gallery, music hall or literary club for just about every taste, not to mention the Gilcrease Museum, one of the country's finest repositories of western art, and the Tulsa Opera, conceived way back when the city was little more than a dusty road and a general store. Nor is there a shortage of the rock music or spoken word poetry you'd find in many other cities.

What sets Tulsa's cultural scene apart from St. Louis, Denver, or many other cities is a populist, Southwestern frontier spirit. Even with the prosperity brought on by oil money in the 1920s, it retained the plainspoken manners of the South and unpretentious tastes often associated with the West. Locals might attend a performance of Rigoletto and then supper on barbecue ribs and potato salad. Cain's ballroom, a downtown concert venue where rock music fans flock to watch performances of groups like the Ramones, has never managed to shed its early beginnings as a horse stable.

Tulsa, an expanse of manicured residential neighborhoods and parks that quickly give way to open pastures and oil fields, doesn't register on most radars as a stronghold of literature, or any other genre of art. It's only the second biggest city in its state, the 45th largest in the country, and its location, in the northeastern corner of the Sooner State, is nowhere near the top of most folks travel lists.

If East or West Coast dwellers think of Tulsa at all, they imagine a dot on the map in the vast blob of middle America. Drivers crossing the country along Route 66 have found in Tulsa a logical mid-point between the two coasts, a place to pull off the road and dig into a steak or catch a nap in a motel. Bible Belt enthusiasts are smitten by the city's groundswell of churches and other religious institutions. Their Tulsa is anchored by the campus of Oral Roberts University, built and named after the nationally known televangelist and graced by a 60-foot high bronze sculpture of a pair of praying hands.

Even those who know about the arts scene face the challenge of exploring it: the sights are spread far and wide, because like many cities in the American Plains, Tulsa spreads out wide itself. Its land surface, 186 square miles, encompasses dozens of residential neighborhoods and business districts. The downtown area, home to a couple of dozen magnificently preserved Art Deco buildings, is otherwise pretty sleepy. The Brady District, a warren of low rise brick buildings just north of downtown, has been turned into a 'hood of funky bars and ethnic restaurants. Cherry Street, a couple of miles south of downtown, is lined with coffee houses and art galleries. Brookside, a mile further south, is a stretch of upscale restaurants and clubs. Navigating it all requires a car and a good map.

In my latest trip to "T-town" a few weeks back I started my tour of the arts horizon at the Gilcrease. Both the works displayed there and the setting — the woodsy neighborhood of Gilcrease Hills, located ten minutes by car northwest of downtown — capture the rugged aura of the Southwest wonderfully. The museum owns more than 10,000 paintings, sculptures and artifacts, including many world class works. Foremost among its possessions is one of biggest collections of works by Thomas Moran, the British born 19th century painter known for his broad canvases of western landscapes. It also has an impressive display of sculptures by Fredric Remington, the 19th century master of bronzes.