Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Faith Ringgold

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To celebrate Black History Month and to honor the memory of Dr. S. J. Pickens, Pickens Museum has opened a new exhibition in the atrium of City Central at 400 E Central in Ponca City titled "Letter from a Brimingham Jail" which includes eight seriagraphs by Faith Ringgold that depict the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The exhibition will be on display during February, 2020. There is no admission charge. "This is a opportunity for citizens of Ponca City to view art that are superlative accompaniments to Dr. King's stirring text," says Hugh Pickens, Executive Director of Pickens Museum. "The subjects and scenes that fill Ringgold’s compositions are inspired by the American experience. The themes are universal: inequality and the struggle for its eradication that should inspire us all."
Before she went to Alabama in 1963, where Dr. Pickenswas assaulted for desegregating lunch counters, her father told her never to flinch when she was struck by segregationists and to turn the other cheek when she was beaten. Before she left for the South, her father made her commit to memory the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley which was her favorite poem and sums up her life.

Pickens Museum Opens New Exhibition

To celebrate Black History Month and to honor the memory of Dr. S. J. Pickens, Pickens Museum opened a new exhibition on February 16, 2020 in the atrium of City Central at 400 E Central in Ponca City titled "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" which includes eight serigraphs by Faith Ringgold that depict the major events in the Civil Rights Movement including “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi in 1964. The exhibition will be on display during February, 2020. There is no admission charge. "This is a opportunity for citizens of Ponca City to view art that are superlative accompaniments to Dr. King's stirring text," says Hugh Pickens, Executive Director of Pickens Museum. "The subjects and scenes that fill Ringgold's compositions are inspired by the American experience. The themes are universal: inequality and the struggle for its eradication that should inspire us all."

The public viewed the prints for the first time in 2008 at a reception honoring Ringgold at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ringgold's art has been exhibited in major museums around the world and is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Boston Museum of Fine Art

The exhibition honors the memory of Ponca City resident Dr. S. J. Pickens who traveled to Alabama with freedom riders in 1963 to help register black residents to vote and to integrate lunch counters. Dr. Pickens marched with King and attended Dr. King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She said that she never thought she would live to see a black President but forty-five years after the March on Washington Dr. Pickens traveled to Washington DC with her husband to attend Barack Obama's inauguration on the National Mall in Washington DC.

Artist Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930. Her family included educators and creatives, and she grew up surrounded by the Harlem Renaissance. The street where she was raised was also home to influential activists, writers, and artists of the era-Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Dubois, and Aaron Douglas, to name a few. "It's nice to come up in a period where great changes are being made," she once said. "And that was my period: the '30s to the '60s, when radical changes were being made."

Ringgold received her art education at City College, down the street from her childhood home. "I got a fabulous education in art-wonderful teachers who taught me everything except anything about African art or African American art. But I traveled and took care of that part myself," she's said. After graduating, she began her career painting landscapes and still-lifes in the style of modern European masters. But her practice quickly pivoted to focus on her own experience and the political and social tensions that surrounded her, namely the struggle for equality among women and the black community.

Throughout her career, Ringgold's work has been driven by the challenges and fulfillments of her life and the lives of those around her. "First of all, you should never make something, as an artist or even as a writer, that is outside of your experience," she once said. "People will use what is available to them. I am black and I am a woman. There it is."

In 1963, as the fight for racial justice animated the Civil Rights movement, Ringgold began her seminal "American People Series." According to Alexxa Gotthardt, it was the artist's first body of work to manifest her mature style-one that fused the forms and techniques of folk art with content inspired by the most vocal social critics of her time, such as the writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. In an early painting from the series, The American People Series #1: Between Friends (1963), two women, one black and one white, stand close but seem to stare through each other. A red divider cuts through the center of the composition, bifurcating the two women and emphasizing their distinct experiences and, perhaps, their inability to understand one another.

The '60s also gave birth to Ringgold's role as an activist. In 1968, she organized a demonstration protesting the omission of black artists in a Whitney Museum show highlighting American sculptors of the '30s. Two years later, she was on the front lines of another demonstration at the Whitney-this time protesting the woeful dearth of female artists across the museum's exhibition program. The demonstrators brandished police whistles, feminine products, and eggs: "I boiled mine, painted them black, and wrote 50 percent on them [to indicate the percentage of women who should be included in shows]," Ringgold said. "It felt like we were doing something and were a part of the movement in America to equalize things."

“Ringgold passionately combines a deep commitment to social activism with a style that draws from folk art and modernist painting,” says Gotthardt. “Across her body of work, paintings and sculptures lay bare the discrimination that plagues our world and double as rallying cries for urgent change.” "You can't sit around waiting for somebody else to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it," Ringgold once said. "That's the power of being an artist."

The serigraphs were a gift to Dr. Pickens from her husband on her birthday in June 2018 that Dr. Pickens treasured. One of the most striking features of the display of the serigraphs is the way they are matted and framed. “Dr. Pickens chose the mattings and the colors for the mattings before she died in October of the same year,” says Hugh Pickens. “She had an amazing color sense and sense of proportion. The mattings and framing of the pieces is stunning.”

Before she went to Alabama in 1963, where she was assaulted for desegregating lunch counters, her father told her never to flinch when she was struck by segregationists and to turn the other cheek when she was beaten. Before she left for the South, her father made her commit to memory the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley which was her favorite poem and sums up her life.


Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

The exhibition will be on display at Pickens Museum thorugh February.

About the Author

Hugh and Dr. S. J. Pickens
Dr. Pickens and Hugh Pickens celebrated 33 years of marriage before Dr. Pickens passed away in 2017.
Pickens Museum opens on NOC Tonkawa Campus. Pictured (L-R): Dr. Cheryl Evans, NOC President, Hugh Pickens, Executive Director of Pickens Museum, and Sheri Snyder, NOC Vice President for Development and Community Relations. (photo by John Pickard/Northern Oklahoma College)

Hugh Pickens (Po-Hi '67) is a physicist who has explored for oil in the Amazon jungle, commissioned microwave communications systems across the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia, and built satellite control stations for Goddard Space Flight Center in Australia, Antarctica, Guam, and other locations around the world. Retired in 1999, Pickens and his wife of 33 years moved from Baltimore back to his hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma in 2005 where he cultivates his square foot garden, mows seven acres of lawn, writes about local history, photographs events at the Poncan Theatre, produces the annual Oklahoma Pride series with his wife at Ponca Playhouse, and recently sponsored the first formal dinner in the Marland Mansion in 75 years. Pickens is founder and Executive Director of Pickens Art Museum with locations at Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, City Central in Ponca City, and Pickens Gallery at Woolaroc. Pickens can be contacted at hughpickens@gmail.com. Pickens is a covid survivor and a stroke survivor.

Personal Statement

Most days you will find me sitting in my easy chair with an HP laptop or a book in front of me. I enjoy intellectual pursuits: studying, writing, reading, researching, analyzing, and predicting. During my off time I like riding the backroads of Oklahoma in my hot rod, working out, watching old movies on TCM, playing games like chess or dominoes, participating in community theatre, and, my secret pleasure, reading trashy detective novels by John D. MacDonald. I enjoy theater and concerts and I go to NYC several times a year to see Broadway shows and visit galleries and museums.

Pickens' Publishing

In 1996, Pickens edited and published ''My Life In Review: Have I Been Lucky of What?'', the memoirs of Jack Crandall, professor of history at SUNY Brockport. Since 2001 Pickens has edited and published “Peace Corps Online,” serving over one million monthly pageviews. Pickens' other writing includes contributing over 2,000 stories to “Slashdot: News for Nerds,” and articles for Wikipedia, and “Ponca City, We Love You”. Pickens has written the following articles available on his wiki at Research and Ideas.

History and Biography

I enjoy doing in-depth research on one person and writing a detailed biography of lesser known events or figures. I like to find someone, an artist, a politician, a former Peace Corps Director, or an Oklahoman, that I like and am interested in learning more about them and writing their biography from scratch. I started and filled out dozens of biographies when I wrote for Wikipedia back in the stone age in the early 2000's when they were getting started. But Wikipedia became too bureaucratic and political for me so now I research and write biographies on my own mediawiki platform. (I only make anonymous edits to Wikipedia now usually on the discussion pages.)

Science and Technology

I have a degree in physics from SUNY in 1970 and have worked in science and technology my entire career. I have held such jobs as Geophysical Observer on a geological survey crew in the amazon jungle, running a portable hydrocarbon detection laboratory on an oil rig, systems engineer for the microwave communications system and supervisory control system on the 800-mile long Trans-Andean Pipeline, independent contractor to Collins Radio in 1979 installing, commissioning, and testing microwave repeater stations all over Saudi Arabia, military advisor to the Royal Saudi Navy on naval communications, navigation, and fire control systems (1980 - 84), project engineer, then project manager for Bendix Fields Engineering (later becoming AlliedSignal Technical Services, then Honeywell Technical Services) from 1984 until my retirement in 1999.

Business and Investing

I am a speculator and enjoy designing and executing trading strategies that exploit market inefficiencies through my assessment and evaluation of information asymmetries, market psychology, and human emotion. Over the years I have put together several open-source histories of companies I am interested in including micro-caps that I have invested in.

Ponca City, Oklahoma

I was born and grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, a town of about 25,000 somewhat isolated in North Central Oklahoma (a two hour drive to the nearest metropolitan areas in Tulsa, OKC, and Wichita.). After I left Ponca City to go to college, I worked overseas and on the East Coast for 30 years. But my wife and I came back to Ponca after our retirement in 1999.

Ponca City is an interesting amalgam of historical developments including being being founded and created from scratch during and after the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893, becoming an oil boom town in the 1920's, home of the "Palace on the Prairie" built by oil magnate E.W. Marland, home to Conoco's R&D facility employing hundreds of Phd.'s in the 1950's, 60's and 70's giving Ponca a character of a university town, and finally the continual influence of Native American tribes on our history especially the Ponca tribe and Osage Nation. Some interesting articles I have researched and written about Ponca City include:

Pickens Museum

Pickens Museum is a distributed museum that is active in three location: Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, City Central in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and at Woolaroc Museum near Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The museum has plans to build a 15,000 ft2 art museum on highway 60 West of Ponca City, Oklahoma. in the next few years.

Art

Peace Corps Writing

I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru from 1970 - 73 working with the Peruvian Ministry of Education teaching high school science teachers how to build lab equipment out of simple, cheap materials. In 2000 I started "Peace Corps Online" to document the work volunteers are doing around the world both during and after the Peace Corps Service. I ran the web site for ten years and posted about 10,000 stories. Even though the site is no longer active, I still get over 50,000 monthly pageviews.

Personal

Phillips 66

Conoco and Phillips 66 announced on November 18, 2001 that their boards of directors had unanimously approved a definitive agreement for a "merger of equals". The merged company, ConocoPhillips, became the third-largest integrated U.S. energy company based on market capitalization and oil and gas reserves and production. On November 11, 2011 ConocoPhillips announced that Phillips 66 would be the name of a new independent oil and gasoline refining and marketing firm, created as ConocoPhillips split into two companies. ConocoPhillips kept the current name of the company and concentrated on oil exploration and production side while Phillips 66 included refining, marketing, midstream, and chemical portions of the company. Photo: Hugh Pickens all rights reserved.

For nearly 100 years oil refining has provided the bedrock of Ponca City's local economy and shaped the character of our community. Today the Ponca City Refinery is the best run and most profitable of Phillips 66's fifteen worldwide refineries. The purpose of this collection of reports is to provide a comprehensive overview of Phillips 66's business that documents and explains the company's business strategy and execution of that strategy.

Safety, Environment, Legal

Corporate

Strategic and Financial

Business Segments

Stock Market

Reference

Refining Business Segment

Increasing Profitability in Refining Business Segment

Detailed Look at Ponca City Refinery

Other Phillips Refineries

Other Locations



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