Artist explores family, Vietnamese culture, food in immersive installation (2024)

Throughout her career, Tulsa artist Dan Lynh Pham has explored ideas about family, identity, history and belonging, as the child of Vietnamese immigrants.

But until this year, she had not been able to bring all these ideas, and the various artistic media she uses in creating her work, together into a single, immersive experience.

On March 1, Pham presented “I Bear the Fruit of My Ancestors,” an installation work inspired by Dam Gio, the Vietnamese tradition of the death anniversary, an annual commemoration of family members on the day of their death.

“I had been focusing a lot of my two-dimensional work and was wanting to get back into more three-dimensional work,” Pham said. “And food is a recurring theme in my work because food is maybe the most approachable way to learn about another culture.

“Food also is very much a part of the death anniversary — it’s almost an equivalent of Thanksgiving, in that it’s a time when family and friends gather to share memories and eat,” she said.

The installation, which took place at the Belafonte event space, 306 S. Phoenix Ave., featured food created by the James Beard Award-nominated chefs collective Et Al.

“Chefs Colin (Sato) and Chloe (Butler) often make food that is designed to evoke family memories and nostalgia,” Pham said. “And Colin himself is an Asian-American, so he was like a peer in that regard.”

Pham’s installation involved arrangements of flowers and fruits, photographs and hand-made paper lanterns, incense and cooking food, designed to establish a somber atmosphere that gradually lightened into celebration as participants moved through the space to the backyard, where the Et Al. cooks were set up.

“I Bear the Fruit of My Ancestors” was one of 20 arts events — exhibits, performances, installations, film presentations — presented over the past few months by the inaugural recipients of the Artists Creative Fund, an initiative of the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

The program was created to improve funding, visibility and professional development for Tulsa-based artists and creatives. A total of 20 Tulsa-area artists received grants of $10,000 to help them in creating new and innovative works before the conclusion of the grant period this past March.

Applications for the second year of the Artists Creative Fund will open at noon Monday, April 22, with Tulsa-area artists having until May 20 to submit their proposals. Twenty artists will be selected to receive a grant totaling $10,000 each, with each recipient required to present one public-facing event in Tulsa during the grant period.

Awardees will also receive cohort-based professional development opportunities throughout the grant period to support the continued development of their creative projects.

The program is open to artists in all disciplines: dance, theater, music, spoken word, performance art, traditional and folk arts, visual art (2D and 3D), film and literary arts, as well as any multi-disciplinary combination of the above.

Annie Koppel Van Hanken, chief program officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation, said the Artists Creative Fund arose out of some critiques the foundation had received about a different program, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, which was created in part to bring artists to Tulsa to live and work.

While the Tulsa Artist Fellowship has been awarded to some Tulsa artists and writers, Van Hanken said there were those who thought there were not sufficient opportunities for local artists to access the kind of funding and support the TAF offers.

“We really were hoping to have different points of entry for creative people to be able to have an audience for their work and to enliven the artistic community of Tulsa,” she said.

Van Hanken said the applications are reviewed by the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange, a Northwest Arkansas-based regional arts services provider, which selects the recipients through a blind review process.

In 2023, artists selected for the Artists Creative Fund ranged from popular local performers such as singer-songwriter Casii Stephan, Greg Fallis of the King Cabbage Brass Band and Symon Hajjar of the Hot Toast Music Company to artists such as Brad Rose and Nic Annette Miller, who created interactive works that combined visual art and sound, with the help of audience participation; from writers such as Isobel Perozo, whose “¿Donde están los mellizos Miller?” was performed at the Tulsa PAC, and Tamecca Rogers, who debuted the pilot episode of an animated cartoon, “Ameka and Her Magical Crown,” at the Circle Cinema.

Pham, a graduate of Oklahoma State University whose work has been featured in solo and group exhibits throughout the state, said the ACF grant provided her with more than just the funds needed to create such an elaborate installation.

“Receiving this grant has been so instrumental in my growth as an artist,” Pham said. “This project was something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and with the support of the grant, and the way the grant operates, it really gave me more confidence. I know there are aspects in this show — about storytelling, sculpture, the way light affects spaces — that I would love to dig more deeply into.”

Van Hanken attended Pham’s installation and said it encapsulated the sort of work the Artists Creative Fund wants to support.

“It was really the highlight of the year for me,” Van Hanken said. “To see the thoughtful way she considered her art, the way she incorporated community in every sense — it was a really intense and beautiful experience. It was community and culture and beauty, and just a wonderful statement about Dan’s background and who she is as a person. It showed the way artists look at the world and how that can enrich all of us.”

For more information on the Artists Creative Fund, including how to apply: artistscreativefund.art.

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