September 2025-September 2026

SITE: Plaza of the Americas
702 S. DENVER AVENUE

Studio Visit
 

In 2023, when I first stepped into Richard Zimmerman arts district studio at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, which brought him to town in 2019, I remember enchantment and confusion. This is what I hope for and rarely experience with art. I wanted more, but didn’t know why.

At 6’7” Richard hovered over me, yet he moved and spoke with uncommon gentleness. Compelling contradictions were everywhere. Richard graduated in 2018 from Cornell University’s MFA program, which is known as conceptually creative but also structurally savvy. He mainly makes sculptures and installations, but on his studio walls were an arresting suite of enormous cyanotypes. Each sun-made unique print presented a cracked windshield in haunting blue and at a discomforting life-size that summoned imagined accidents—beautiful, and scary. Nearby, on the studio floor, was a riveting sculpture made of more than a dozen different floor-lamps programmed to illuminate at varying intervals. The piece seemed to set the stage for a performance never to be.

Even in the most playful artworks, tension was evident. As I was leaving his studio, Richard reached atop flat files to give me a couple of ceramic objects he had been casting from ordinary items: A potato’s organic surface was now silky smooth, a plastic doorstop now fragile and porous. Pinned to the wall above these were dazzling watercolor sketches. A memorable grouping depicted sun-dappled grassy scenes with bubbling fountains made not of stone or cement,but of exposed and stacked plumbing: pipes, sinks, toilets. The scenes depicted the impossible of dreams, I wanted to be in them.

And then, a couple of months later, Richard brought the surreal sketches to life on the studio building’s rooftop. There, he installed a trio of temporary fountains made of exposed and stacked plumbing. I marveled at the rough exterior of a light pink bathtub that gurgled with water spilling endlessly within it, via a pair of stacked ceramic sinks connected to each other and another beside through metal piping,complete with red and blue shutoff valves. The pipes and parts did not play supporting roles, they were the sculpture. The most arresting of the three fountains was the largest. Elegantly rising from a shallow pool laid with small square tile was a pedestal sink, its faucet continuously spouting an arc of water. Next to it a toilet, elevated overhead by a heavy black pipe, overflowed. The inside-out fountains were utterly captivating.

Assembling

Richard’s skill with playful tension is used to impressive effect in his largest artwork to-date, Assembly, a monumental sculpture—5,400 pounds of steel, 2,000 distinct parts, 14,000 feet of fiberglass tape—made for Plaza of the Americas. The artwork revolves around nineteen green fiberglass-wrapped forms that rise vertically high into the air,from the center of the concrete Plaza. Richard created the sculpture for this site, which drops below grade from Denver Avenue to form a natural amphitheater ringed by steps and an arced bench. The Plaza is described in Vision Tulsa’s 2018 Arena District Master Plan as “outdated, unkempt, uninviting, and unprogrammed” and proposed for renovation into green space more inviting to area residents (at a price of $3.5 to $4.5 million + $1 million for public art). Yet, as Richard observed, the Plaza is active. It is well-used as a place to rest and meet by those walking the busy Denver corridor, which serves nearby social services, office buildings, the County Courthouse, the Central Library, and more.

Assembly playfully intervenes into the Plaza, taking familiar park forms—bushes, trees, benches—and making them beautifully strange, through materials and color. Visitors are now welcomed at either end of Denver by planters filled not just with dirt, but seven-foot-tall bright purple forms. Each of these is made, like the taller green forms below, from decidedly inorganic materials: upcycled plastic and aluminum consumer goods attached to steel rods and wrapped in fluorescent fiberglass cast tape. Bumpy bulges are smoothed over by the purple fiberglass wrapping, suggesting surreal topiary.

From the Plaza’s entrance, Assembly’s centerpiece is visible and reached by descending gently sloping staircases. Here, a grove of twenty-foot-tall green forms emerge from the formerly empty center of the Plaza, whose stage-like setting suggests its history as backdrop for a long-gone statue of 19thcentury South American independence leader Simon Bolivar, donated by a corporation. The concrete sunken stage now showcases Assembly’s soaring core: the grouping of tall green forms, each widening in the center and tapering at the top to appear like slender, synthetic trees. Gaps in the fiberglass wrapping reveal some of the recycled consumer goods—buckets, car bumpers, gutters, plastic bottles—attached to the steel trunks. Differences inspire wandering—Is that a dollhouse? A plastic bat?—and three bright yellow wooden benches encourage contemplation. Yet the round benches are also like small platforms,awaiting performance. Assembly is not just a colorful monumental sculpture—it is a stage for human activation and gathering.

In an age and city where creativity is often discussed in terms of placemaking, Richard Zimmerman’s Assembly soars. It does what I hope for in public art, by harmonizing and contrasting with the surrounding concrete park. It playfully calls out Plaza of the Americas as a site where people can and do assemble.

-By Kate Green

Tulsa, Oklahoma
September 2025

Artist Bio:

Richard Zimmerman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans various media, including sculpture, photography, sound, video, and drawing. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from Cornell University and BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. He received the John Hartell Graduate Award, a Cornell Council for the Arts Grant, and a nomination for The Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at various venues, including Miami Art Basel, Artlot, Shore Institute for Contemporary Art, Signal Gallery, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Enter Enter, and Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. He has been an artist in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland, California, Zero Foot Hills in Durham, Connecticut, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Currently, he lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.



Installation Documentation:
photos by: Dan Farnum