Processing: Learning While Creating is an exhibition by two former OU art history graduate students who have also been practicing artists for several years. Singer/songwriter and ceramicist Elizabeth Wise and painter/photographer Mark Esquivel bring their works together as examples of how the process of creating played an important role in their graduate work as well as other parts of life – closely following the research and evidence of brain function while creating, and how art can play a significant role in things like rehabilitation and therapy.

From Elizabeth Wise

When Mark and I met as OU art history grad students in 2018, we realized how important our respective art practices were to how we processed everything we were learning in our research projects.  But it’s a cyclical process where everything – however unrelated – becomes part of the decision making and problem solving that feeds into the objects, and in turn, our research.  Since grad school and further into our art, it’s become even more apparent that the mental space of creating is where information and experience are internalized, grappled with, and personalized in the effort to better understand the world, ourselves, and our place in the world.  Even more profound is how directly in line this is with the evidence from medical research in brain function during the making of art, and why it helps in things like rehabilitation and therapy. 

Born and raised in Virginia, Wise has lived in many places including Memphis, TN; Oxford, MS; Norman, OK; Germany, and New Zealand.  A mostly self-taught ceramicist for over a decade, as well as a mostly self-taught professional original and recording musician for over two decades, Wise holds a BA in Art History from Sweet Briar College and an MA in Art History from the University of Oklahoma (OU).  She also worked as an Andrew W. Mellon curatorial intern at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at OU. 

In music and ceramics, Wise is all about the unexpected and imperfect moments in life where those profound connections with self and others happen.  She strives for constant improvisation by never writing the same song twice, never playing a song the exact same way twice, and never making the exact same form twice.  She approaches music as storytelling using a wide range of styles from rough slide playing to lyrical fingerpicking, and from gravelly and belting to airy and soft vocals depending on the story and moment.  In ceramics, she works organically with each step of the process beginning with a perfect form, and then altering it because the unique is personal, not perfection.

From Mark Esquivel

Lensatic Objects

When Elizabeth and I met as art history grad student at OU and conversed about our preexisting art practices we realized how much they informed our art historical research projects, and later our formal academic training expanded our understanding of the how we make, why we make, and context cognizant of our art. A seemly tautological turn to both academic and artistic practices were both processes for each of us blurred into one. Our academic thinking became more expressive and art making object oriented. 

The objects, of course are the works, however like a lensatic compass, we’ve ambitiously created them to both expand or magnify our understanding of topics important end to each one of us, acting as a compass would, giving direction even if only personal, and tool to identify location or context.  Utilizing horticultural and entomology watercolors on reclaimed trailer truck floorboards I’ve attempted to utilize material and form from a Nahua understanding to bind a hopeful migrant experience, one centered on growth and transformation, to bring to light a shared nexus with non-migrants of the global south of hope and beauty.  

Mark A. Esquivel Espinoza, a Xicano from Texas, is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History within the University of Oklahoma’s School of Visual Arts, and a former Andrew W. Mellon intern at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. He has a BFA in Drawing & Painting, and BA in Art History from the University of North Texas, an MA in Art History from Arizona State University where he was also curator for ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research, and studio assistant for artists Claudio Dicochea and Saskia Jorda. His art is indigenously centered drawing from a Xicano vernacular that is historical, learned Nahua sensibilities, and informed by a generational indigenous diaspora from the global south. Together with a rasquache approach which draws from bricolage of sources and assembled though a verity of media, his work articulates the in-between realities of those who find themselves ni aquí, ni allá (neither here, nor there)

Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 6:00 - 9:00 pm