The Future of Our Past
The OKPOP Foundation has officially completed the $18 million Heart & Soul Campaign, and the State Treasurer has now approved and certified the pledges, releasing the state’s matching funds. This milestone marks the beginning of OKPOP’s next chapter: exhibit design, fabrication, and the build-out of Oklahoma’s first museum dedicated to the global creative impact of its people.
Hello Friends and Potential Donors,
“You know, this whole campaign wasn’t just about raising $18 million – it was about backing a mission that means something. OKPOP is here to celebrate the crazy amount of creativity that comes out of Oklahoma, to tell the stories of the folks who shaped music, film, and art, and to fire up the next generation to chase their own big dreams. The way people showed up to support this blows me away. Oklahoma should be proud of what’s coming.”
Honorary Campaign Chair
Today, on his birthday, we remember Lynn Riggs, one of Oklahoma’s most important and influential storytellers.
Born near Claremore on August 31, 1899, Riggs was a Cherokee playwright, poet, and screenwriter whose work drew deeply from the people, landscape, humor, hardship, and contradictions of the Oklahoma he knew. Of the roughly 30 plays he wrote, many explored life in Indian Territory and the Southwest.
His best-known work, the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, brought the people of Indian Territory to the New York stage. More than a decade later, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Riggs’s play into a new musical called Oklahoma! Much of Riggs’s original language survived into the adaptation, helping provide the foundation for a production that would transform American musical theater and forever change the way Oklahoma was imagined around the world.
But Riggs’s legacy reaches far beyond Oklahoma!. Works like The Cherokee Night, Roadside, and Russet Mantle reveal a writer interested in complicated people, a changing landscape, identity, belonging, loneliness, community, and home.
More than 125 years after his birth, Lynn Riggs still reminds us of something we believe deeply at OKPOP: stories rooted in a particular place can travel remarkably far.
Today we celebrate an Oklahoma storyteller whose words continue to echo from Claremore to Broadway and beyond.
Happy birthday, Lynn Riggs. 🎭
#LynnRiggs #GreenGrowTheLilacs #OklahomaHistory #OklahomaTheatre #OKPOP
🎻 Happy Birthday to the incomparable Jana Jae! 💙
For generations of country music fans, that unmistakable blue fiddle has meant one thing: Jana Jae is in the house.
Known as the “First Lady of Country Fiddle,” Jana has brought an extraordinary mix of classical training, old-time fiddling, bluegrass, Western swing, and pure showmanship to stages around the world. She became the first female member of Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, joined the cast of Hee Haw, and has performed alongside some of country music’s most beloved artists.
But we especially love the chapter of Jana’s story rooted right here in Oklahoma. From her longtime home near Grove, she has spent decades not simply making music, but passing it on, teaching, mentoring, and helping keep the fiddling tradition alive for new generations.
That’s a creative legacy worth celebrating.
Please help us wish the extraordinary Jana Jae a very happy birthday today! Here’s to many more tunes, stories, and flashes of that famous blue fiddle. 🎻💙✨
#JanaJae #OKPOP #OklahomaMusic #CountryMusic #Fiddle @janajaeowens
Happy birthday to Marquis James, born on this day in 1891.
James grew up near Enid, Oklahoma, where his family settled on a prairie claim following the opening of the Cherokee Outlet. By 14 years old, he was already working as a reporter for the Enid Events, and while still in school he helped establish Enid High School’s student newspaper, The Quill.
Then he hit the road.
James spent years working for newspapers around the country, served in France during World War I, wrote for The New Yorker, covered the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” and eventually became one of America’s best-known popular biographers.
And he was pretty good at it.
🏆 In 1930, James won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston.
🏆 In 1938, he won it again for his work on Andrew Jackson.
That made the young newspaperman from Enid a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
James believed history didn’t have to feel dry or distant. He helped champion a style of writing that combined serious historical research with the energy and readability of great storytelling. His own Oklahoma story became the subject of his 1945 memoir, The Cherokee Strip: A Tale of an Oklahoma Boyhood.
That idea feels right at home for us. History comes alive when someone knows how to tell the story.
#OKPOP #MarquisJames #OklahomaHistory #EnidOklahoma #PulitzerPrize
It was an honor to connect with Emmy Award-winning Vietnamese-American filmmaker and documentary photographer Việt H. Nguyễn for an OKPOP video interview about his creative journey and the mission driving his work.
The son of Vietnamese refugees, Việt grew up in Tulsa immersed in comic books, MTV, punk music, and American pop culture. Again and again, his creativity began with someone placing a camera or instrument in his hands and saying, “Here you go. Figure it out.”
That DIY spirit carried Việt from teenage punk bands and self-taught photography to seven years as a multimedia specialist with the United States Army Special Operations Command. After earning his degree in Film Studies and Photography from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he returned home to Tulsa in 2019 and has since worked on more than 40 documentary and narrative films nationwide.
Việt’s work, including Lee Roy Chapman vs. the Ghost of Tate Brady, explores truth and authenticity through vivid photography and sincere storytelling. He is also a founding member of NAM common, a community project exploring Vietnamese culture, history, and identity through curated art and media programming.
Vietnamese is Oklahoma’s third-most-spoken language, after English and Spanish, yet the stories and creative contributions of Vietnamese and Asian communities remain underrepresented across our cultural landscape. Việt is working to change that.
“Be honest with who you are. Be honest with the stories you want to tell. Don’t try to copy or be anybody else. Just be your authentic self.”
We’re grateful to Việt for sharing his story, his creative philosophy, and his vision for a more representative Oklahoma creative landscape.
#OKPOP #OklahomaCreatives #TulsaFilm @lameolomo @nam.common
Before Hollywood, there was the 101 Ranch.
Born on this day in 1892, Helen Gibson is widely regarded as Hollywood’s first professional stuntwoman. Before she leaped onto moving trains and became a silent-screen action star, she found her first stage with one of Oklahoma’s most famous traveling spectacles: the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show.
Born Rose August Wenger in Cleveland, Gibson was working in a cigar factory when a Wild West show captured her imagination. She answered a Billboard advertisement seeking “girl riders” for the Oklahoma-based 101 Ranch troupe and joined in 1910. With little prior horseback experience, she became a quick study, thrilling crowds by leaning from a galloping horse to snatch a handkerchief from the ground. The show gave her the horsemanship, timing and fearlessness she would carry into motion pictures.
After the troupe’s 1911 season ended in California, Gibson entered the young film industry. She doubled for Helen Holmes and then became a star of The Hazards of Helen, performing her own dangerous stunts with horses, motorcycles, rooftops and moving trains. She also formed her own production company and continued working in film for decades.
Gibson never forgot the place that helped launch her. In 1922, she returned to the 101 Ranch near Ponca City as a featured attraction at its Labor Day Round-Up, sharing the program with fellow legends Lucille Mulhall and Bill Pickett.
Helen Gibson was not born in Oklahoma, but Oklahoma helped make her a pioneer. Her story is a vivid example of how the 101 Ranch carried Oklahoma showmanship into American popular culture and helped shape the earliest language of action on film.
Today, OKPOP remembers Helen Gibson, a fearless rider, screen trailblazer and one of the women who made Hollywood move.
#OKPOP #HelenGibson #101Ranch #OklahomaHistory #FilmHistory
It was great connecting with Tulsa-based Choctaw filmmaker and curator Colleen Thurston for an OKPOP video interview exploring her creative journey, her Oklahoma roots, and her commitment to community-centered storytelling.
Colleen reflected on everything from experimenting with hand-colored film and working with the Smithsonian to platforming local filmmakers through the Tulsa American Film Festival. She also shared the deeply personal, seven-year journey behind her feature documentary Drowned Land, which explores displacement, memory, man-made lakes, and the relationship between people and the land.
“The land is always very centered in our stories,” Colleen told us. “Okies position the land as character in our on-screen narratives.”
We also discussed her work supporting emerging Native filmmakers, the Indigenous Moving Image Archive, and the responsibility she carries into her filmmaking: “I’m accountable to my crew. I’m accountable to the folks that I’m filming. I’m accountable to my community. I’m accountable to the land.”
We’re grateful to Colleen for sharing her story with OKPOP and helping us preserve another important chapter in Oklahoma’s creative history.
#OKPOP #ColleenThurston #DrownedLand #Choctaw #OklahomaFilm
It was an honor to connect with musician, producer, and engineer Stephen Egerton for a life-history video interview at OKPOP.
Stephen shared the remarkable story of a life devoted to music, from building a homemade “zitar” and busking at age 11 to joining the Descendents in 1986, performing with ALL, producing and mixing records, and becoming part of Tulsa’s music community.
“I knew by age five exactly what I wanted to do with my life without question,” he told us.
We also explored Stephen’s distinctive approach to guitar and recording, the friendships and challenges of life on tour, his 2003 move to Tulsa, and the continued multi-generational appeal of the Descendents. Most recently, he celebrated his 60th birthday by recording 10 songs in Studio 3 at Abbey Road for his new album, I Think You’re Overthinking This, arriving September 11.
From busking at Trolley Square to recording at Abbey Road, Stephen’s journey is a testament to curiosity, persistence, collaboration, and the lifelong compulsion to create. We’re grateful to him for sharing his story and helping OKPOP preserve another important chapter in Oklahoma’s creative history.
#OKPOP #StephenEgerton #Descendents #TulsaMusic @stephenegerton
We enjoyed connecting with Stevie “Dr. View” Johnson for a recent OKPOP video interview, tracing a creative journey rooted in music, education, community, and a deep belief in the power of Oklahoma stories.
A DJ, producer, professor, and creative scholar, Dr. View has spent his career finding new ways to bring people together through hip hop. His work has included transforming his doctoral dissertation into the album Curriculum of the Mind, creating the acclaimed Fire in Little Africa project around the history and legacy of Greenwood, and exploring Ralph Ellison’s Oklahoma roots through his jazz-influenced Invisible Man project.
Again and again, our conversation returned to place, purpose, and responsibility.
“Oklahoma is the most slept-on place I’ve ever been… we don’t have a lot of skyscrapers, but we have a lot of spirit.”
And perhaps the idea that sums it up best:
“Everything is us… not only is everything us, but everything is on us.”
For Dr. View, creativity isn’t simply about making something. It is about remembering, questioning, connecting, healing, and helping build what comes next.
We’re grateful to Stevie for sharing his story with OKPOP and adding his voice to Oklahoma’s ever-growing creative story.
#OKPOP #DrView #OklahomaCreatives #Tulsa #FireInLittleAfrica @drview1
Donate
Your charitable donation directly contributes to OKPOP’s future, we are grateful for your support! Donations to support the OKPOP Museum may be made to the OKPOP Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Donations are tax deductible as allowed by law.
Donations may be made through the secure online donation form or mailed to:
OKPOP Foundation
422 North Main Street
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74103
If you have questions about additional gifting options, please contact Abby Kurin at akurin@okpopfoundation.org
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