After five years of working on my memoir with Shirley Elliott, we have finally received a truckload of books. My goal was to help people understand that this has been a long struggle to find places in Tulsa where artists could work and show their art without the worry of censorship. After going through around 100 sketchbooks, interviewing over 15 of the artists who were a part of this time period, receiving much help from the publishers of Uptown News, the Eidotrope, a Tulsa Artists Coalition Newsletter from the time period and searching both the Tulsa Tribune and Tulsa World’s archives, we feel this is a pretty thorough reporting on the process and influences that I and others drew from in making a place in Tulsa for uncensored art.
About the book, Elliott writes: “Twenty-five years before the area just north of downtown Tulsa became a revitalized arts district, Steve Liggett and a group of like-minded artists ventured into the empty brick storefronts and derelict warehouses looking for a cheap place to make art. In his memoir, ‘Sketchbook Diaries: Making a Place for Uncensored Art in Conservative Oklahoma,’ Liggett chronicles a career that covers 50 years of creating, presenting and defending contemporary art. Liggett’s belief that artists have the right to uncensored expression, however, didn’t always sit well with the conservative forces around him.
With missionary zeal, he battles government bureaucrats, defies closed-minded critics and dodges the fire marsha.