Imagine a small bedroom in Oklahoma sometime in the 1940s or 1950s. Sunlight streaming in from a nearby window illuminates a young girl lying on the floor surrounded by paper scraps – clippings from her mother’s discarded issues of Better Homes and Gardens. Glamorous ladies lounge on plush furnishings in houses that sit on tree-lined streets in Anywhere, USA. The little girl moves a chair here or a desk there, creating a near-perfect scene, but it’s missing something. Maybe a plant or a rug? So, she grabs a pencil and draws one.
Maybe to us, she is merely playing, but anything is possible in the limitless imagination of a child, and to her, the world she has created is very real. She is combining color, texture, and shape in a way that is entirely new. She is creating art.
And one day, her creativity will impact millions.
Laura Warriner was born in Tulsa, but at age three, her family relocated to Oklahoma City. Her father worked for the state highway department, and her mother was employed at John A. Brown’s department store in downtown OKC. Living in the heart of a busy downtown, Laura fell in love with the energy of the city.
“As a child, In the 1940s and 1950s, downtown OKC was the center of all commerce – bustling like New York City with hundreds of people filling the streets. This is when I developed a deep love for the city, exposed to its shops, stores, and theaters,” she said.
Laura’s family may not have had much, but what they lacked in “stuff” they made up for in appreciation for the things they were fortunate to have.
When Laura was 11, her father was promoted and transferred to Clinton, Oklahoma. Being the new kid in a smaller town was a challenge. Laura longed for the excitement of the big city. While she was living in Clinton, she began visual exploration and journaling.
She stayed in Clinton through high school graduation, and then attended Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. After her freshman year in 1962, Laura moved back to Oklahoma City, where she lived and worked downtown, witnessing the heartbreaking effects of urban renewal as it transformed the city she had once loved so much.
In a 2017 interview with OETA’s Gallery America, Laura remembered being a young woman and watching the Oklahoma City she knew become something she barely recognized.
“I was very familiar [with the area], and I loved it, and then a little bit later on, they started with urban renewal, tearing the place down, and building by building destroying this beautiful, vibrant city,” said Laura.
Amid Oklahoma City’s overhaul, Laura Warriner became an artist. Although she was accepted to juried art shows in New York City and won several awards for her realistic watercolors, she felt like something was missing.
“That did not fill my soul,” she said.
Swipe ->I was raised at a time when we were all very poor, and we couldn’t afford to have very much. My parents taught me to be very respectful and appreciate everything that we had.
– Laura
During her time visiting galleries and museums in New York, Laura felt drawn to the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Clyfford Still, and she began trying to understand the world of abstract art.
“I could not wrap my brain around this artist until I saw a complete one person show of his, and it changed my life,” said Laura. “That’s when I realized abstraction was just realism. It was just looking at it in a different way.”
Learning to look at the world around her from a different perspective led her to consider the things people discard.
“Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, and then in the 1960s and 1970s, we became this society of throwaways. Nobody made anything that was meant to last,” she said. “And there were all of these changes that were going on, and we were living on top of garbage.”
She began looking for ways to redefine these discarded items and give them new definitions by using them in sculptures and placing them in different environments.
Perhaps her most ambitious environment, however, was Artspace at Untitled.
Laura had been fortunate to travel the world with her husband, who was a dentist at the forefront of dental implant surgery. In her travels, she visited museums, studios, and art communities that inspired her to bring some of that collective creative spirit back home. In the mid-1990s, Oklahoma City had a budding art community, but it lacked galleries and maker spaces for an art scene to truly thrive. Laura decided to change that.
“I wanted to be a new voice in Oklahoma City when I first started this because I wanted to share what I had the privilege to experience outside,” Laura said. “I wanted to bring exposure to other forms of art to the artists living here and the people that lived here.”
Today, Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce neighborhood flourishes with whiskey tasting rooms, chic cocktail lounges, and live jazz and blues venues that are throwbacks to the 1920s when the area was a cultural hub for African Americans living in the city. But in the 1990s, when Laura began work on Artspace at Untitled, the neighborhood was a shadow of its former self. Years of neglect had left the once vibrant district peppered with abandoned buildings and overgrown lots, which earned it an unsavory, and according to Warriner, unfair reputation.
When she happened upon the abandoned structure that would become Artspace at Untitled, Laura Warriner saw past the collapsed roof, broken windows, and peeling paint. Just like that little girl constructing make-believe worlds from her mother’s magazines so many years earlier, she saw the potential for beauty lying dormant in the “throwaway” building.
But as the First Lady of Song Ella Fitzgerald once crooned, “It wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.”
So, Laura got to work realizing her vision of an inclusive art space that would welcome creators young and old to hone their crafts, collaborate with like-minded peers, and bring to life the images in their minds. A few months into the project, her husband joined her as an equal partner.
“I don’t think anybody can do anything by themselves,” Laura said of the partnerships with her husband and others. “It takes a village to do something like this.”
—Laura
This act of love for her hometown not only helped spark revitalization efforts in the Deep Deuce neighborhood, but it also paved the way for Oklahoma City’s art scene as we know it today.
As a founding member of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, Laura worked tirelessly with other creators and community leaders to bring artists to Oklahoma City to jury exhibitions for local artists. She was also able to use the connections she had made over the years to bring in art collections that were worthy of galleries in L.A. and New York City.
With the success of Artspace at Untitled, Laura felt the need to do even more. She began reaching out to the youth in the community and inviting them to come to Artspace to learn and practice a wide range of creative arts, including visual art, film, printmaking, and more.
“I think I get more out of it than they do because it’s fun to be around these young people that are having fun and doing what they want to do,” said Laura.
She is especially proud of her partnership with the Oklahoma City public school system, through which she works with over 150 students from 14 different schools to help them learn appreciation of art and appreciation for each other.
“There’s so much anger around, and it’s kind of scary to me,” said Laura. “You have to respect each other. And if someone is different than you, that’s good because that makes you better. When you think that way, then you can collaborate. You can work. You aren’t jealous. You aren’t angry. You learn more from each other.”
That’s certainly good advice for all of us.
To learn more about Laura Warriner’s journey, check out OETA’s “Legacy of Laura” on Gallery America and Artspace at Untitled.
The Together We’re More team would like to extend a special yakoke (thank you) to OETA and Imagn for their collaboration and assistance on Laura’s story.
