Original exhibition of Op and Kinetic art features OKCMOA’s permanent collection 

Organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, “Moving Vision: Op and Kinetic Art from the Sixties and Seventies” highlights one of the great strengths of the Museum’s permanent collection–OKCMOA’s extensive, high-quality holdings in Op (optical) and Kinetic (movement) art. This groundbreaking new exhibition, which also includes many historically significant loans from private collections, will be open Oct. 24, 2020 to Jan. 17, 2021.

 

“Op and Kinetic art feature movement, both real and perceived,” said Dr. Michael Anderson, president and CEO. “Visitors will enjoy the dynamic experience that this exhibition provides. I encourage everyone to visit more than once as I think visitors will enjoy that their experience changes each time they see the exhibition. We are thankful to Randy, Sheila and the rest of the Ott family, Carl and Marilynn Thoma and our other private lenders for their generous contributions to this exhibition.”

 

“Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, two separate yet complementary art movements brought something new to plastic, two and three-dimensional forms,” said Dr. Roja Najafi, guest curator. “In the case of Op art, artists created the perception of movement on a two-dimensional surface; while with Kinetic art, artists experimented with moving three-dimensional forms. This exhibition brings together these two movements to tell the story of artists’ explorations of motion in the 1960s and 70s.”

 

“Moving Vision” will bring together approximately 40 works centered around the Museum’s own masterpieces of Op and Kinetic Art, alongside a series of loans from major private collections. The exhibition will feature all the great names in Op and Kinetic Art—from Alexander Calder and Victor Vasarely to Richard Anuszkiewicz and Fletcher Benton—to a host of lesser-known figures who also deserve to be household names.

 

The Museum will produce an original catalog for the exhibition, contributing significantly to the scholarship surrounding these highly accessible and deeply creative artistic movements.