The G.A.P. Van Poster Project: Community Amnesia Therapy

Led by artists Rick Lowe and William Cordova, The G.A.P. van has officially launched the Greenwood Art Project with a team of Tulsa citizens. Activist Kode Ransom, Poet Jerica Wortham, filmmaker Jeff Van Haken, and visual-anthropologist Marlon Hall travel throughout Tulsa to engage community residents to create posters that share stories about the massacre. It strives to reflect their voices and to advance a powerful and healing approach to the commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre.

Travelers from all over the nation were drawn by the winds of laughter and sophisticated ease that swept the streets clean of prejudice. On June 1st of 1921 thousands of people were massacred and every building burned by a racist attack on the community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The trauma still lingers in the Greenwood community.

Once known as Black Wall Street for its Black and bold genius, this community was a thriving testament to the freedom and justice for all that sings America whole. The success of Greenwood produced over 300 businesses in a 34 square block radius and sustainable community practices. It drew what is today called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. For nearly 100 years this story has been forgotten and buried in the ashes of trauma and past pain.

Amnesia is the result of mental, physical, or emotional trauma that creates memory loss. Sometimes the trauma of what communities go through can knock the memory of who they are, what they can contribute, and why those contributions are important right out of them.

The work of the Greenwood Art Project is to create art therapy for the souls of the Tulsa community while re-narrating beauty from the ashes. This is an effort to remember who we were and imagine who we can become. Memory informs imagination!

The lack of cultural memory caused by trauma impairs the life of a community's imagination for present and future possibility. This community amnesia has symptoms that resemble the memory loss of an individual only the impact is collectively more severe.

The G.A.P. Van and The Poster Project are designed to remember Tulsa and the Greenwood Community back to its past greatness through the power of being present. A kind of presence that comes through art. We want to revive community memory in Tulsa and Greenwood specifically through imaginative programming.

As community members intentionally place pens, paint brushes, and found objects onto their canvases; they will discover a healing presence that may unlock the potential of the future through interactive art therapy.