CHIYOKO MYOSE ’07/11
Gift, fiber installation, “Sojourning” solo exhibition
Oklahoma Contemporary, through Aug. 11, 2018
Oklahoma City’s Oklahoma Contemporary is hosting a solo exhibition of fiber installations by Chiyoko Myose, a Japanese artist who has been living and making art in Wichita for the past two decades. “I grew up in Japan,” Myose says, “but I have been living in the U.S. for over 20 years now. I still feel I am in the space between these two places. Moving from one place to another, leaving things behind, and facing a new landscape and culture makes me feel like a traveler, a sojourner, a temporary dweller. As a sojourner, I am consoled by the belief that life is like a journey. We are all sojourners on the earth. My work explores various perspectives into my search for meaning within the sojourner’s journey. Through the art forms which are primarily paintings and installations, I mainly explore cultural, philosophical, spiritual, and social aspects.” Myose, who often explores the varied threads of relationships in her artworks, is no stanger to the WSU Alumni Association. Two of her paintings, “Sojourning No. 6” and “Sojourning No. 5,” graced the WSUAA’s Shocker ArtReach series of event invitations in 2010-11. And in 2009, her daughter Sarah, then 10 years old, drew the winning entry in the age-10-to-12 category of The Shocker’s “WuShock As Muse” drawing challenge. The contest was in celebration of WuShock’s 60th birthday.
“When Is It Summer in Kansas?”
When the wind sends your words
back into your throat as you speak them,
when the sun banks its heat up under
your hat brim, and the cool of morning
is lost in months past, when robins thirst
thirteen ways for water, and the first cicada
rasps at the heat before noon, when leaves
curl and click rather than brush against
one another in the breeze, and turtles
scratch at parched earth for moisture,
when heat wavers above roads in spasms,
when farmers disk spindly wheat back
into dusty grounds, when foxes dig their
dens a little deeper, and earthworms
are nowhere to be found, when storm clouds
say with lightning what they refuse
to speak with rain.
Roy Beckemeyer ’69/74
2018
“When Is It Summer In Kansas?” is one of three poems by Roy Beckemeyer published in the spring 2018 edition of the poetry blog at RiverCityPoetry.com. River City Poetry is the brainchild of another Shocker, April Pameticky ’06, a poet, teacher and former student assistant at The Shocker.
