Original article by Tom Streuli for The Journal Record
Stroll past the Skirvin Hilton Hotel these days and you’re likely to see a picture in the making. And the person you’re likely to see making the picture is Romy Owens, who, by her own description, spends most of her time taking photographs and sewing them together.
If you missed her recent show at JRB Art at the Elms in Oklahoma City (it closed Sept. 29), fear not. Owens gets around. She already has two Oklahoma City exhibitions booked next year, as well as one in Ada. And you can spy some samples on her website, which will lead you to some fun stuff on Flickr that hasn’t been subjected to the needle and thread.
But if you want to see how the art is made, you’ll have to go to the Skirvin. Owens is the hotel’s first artist in residence, selected from a sea of applicants that was pared to a dozen semifinalists, then to three finalists, and, ultimately, to Owens. The prize was one year of free studio space in the hotel, the high-visibility area previously leased to Avis Scaramucci for her Painted Door boutique. The rent-free studio comes with a stipend of undisclosed amount paid by the hotel.
The Skirvin is the third of the Milwaukee, Wis.-based Marcus Hotels and Resorts to launch an artist-in-residence program.
In the newspaper business, no one gives a hoot about watching reporters type stories or seeing salespeople fill out insertion orders. But everyone – everyone – will stop to watch the presses run. When elementary school classes used to take field trips to newspapers, the highlight of the tour was always the basement, where those giant, noisy machines magically applied ink to an uninterrupted stream of newsprint that wound its way through mazes of metal rollers at speeds known only to astronauts and physicists. Astute newsmen eventually took note and designed office buildings that put the presses behind windows at sidewalk level instead of in the basement. Sure enough, passersby stopped passing by and stopped to watch.
Count on that same phenomenon to occur as tourists and office workers and basketball players and singers and land men stroll up Broadway just north of Park Avenue. We can see art anywhere, just as we can find a newspaper on most corners. But the chance to watch it being made is extraordinary and the impulse to pause and consider is insuppressible.
I do not know Romy Owens, but I would. Her Flickr gallery called “Kids I Know” makes me wish she knew mine, because I’d maybe have better pictures of them. Now that her studio is but a paint splatter from my office, I will ramble down Park, turn left and gawk through the window from time to time. Eventually, I will send her a friend request on Facebook. Or perhaps I’ll just march in and introduce myself. We journalists have an odd relationship with the whole introvert/extrovert thing.
No matter, because anyone who posts things like “there’s glass between us” as her Facebook status is probably pretty cool. Besides, we have 66 mutual friends already. How could she say no? And her occasional abstruse posts are balanced with the pragmatic. From installing Friday’s 12×12 OVAC (Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition) fundraiser: “we still don’t have a lunch donor for today and by noon, we might be so hungry we start to eat the art. can you donate lunch for six volunteers? please?”
Owens at the Skirvin for a year is a great confluence: The baroness of city hotels has just the right bit of stodginess about her amid her renaissance, and she is paired with a young, ascending artist who has never met anything stodgy.
It’s cool squared.