Most people meet a public sculpture only after it is finished — polished, planted, monumental, and seemingly inevitable. What they almost never see is everything that came before: the sketchbooks, the foam models, the failed proportions, the arguments over a curve. That gap between the idea and the object is the subject of an unusual exhibition now occupying the Ronald J. Norick Downtown Library in Oklahoma City.
"Choose Your Own Adventure: The Art of the Art" gathers preparatory sketches and models by the Oklahoma City artists Denise Duong and Gabriel Friedman, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how their large-scale public work gets made. The show is inspired by their recent and largest effort, "Formless Matter and Its Devastating Gestures," at Oklahoma Contemporary's Campbell Art Park. But its scope reaches further: the exhibition also traces the planning, experimentation, and artistry behind more than 25 sculptures and murals by Oklahoma City artists, turning the library into a kind of workshop archive.
The artists at the center of the show have spent years making that process public. Duong is a Vietnamese American artist whose practice is rooted in storytelling, movement, and a deep connection to nature. A proud Putnam City High School graduate, she is an internationally acclaimed visual artist based in Oklahoma City. Friedman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sculpture, interactive installations, art-book publishing, and site-specific community projects, with materials chosen to serve the story at hand.
Their partnership has produced some of the city's most visible recent public art. Scissortail Park was one of a dozen organizations awarded a "Bright Golden Haze: Reflections" grant by the Kirkpatrick Family Fund — part of Oklahoma Contemporary's grand opening programming — to commission Duong and Friedman to create "The Unexpected Us." The result was a bird-shaped structure woven from willow shoots. "Much like a child's fort or treehouse, this structure is crude, playing on the importance of imagination, the purity of childhood and the belief in magic," the artists said at the time. "The structure embodies the contrast of the immensely complicated web of life encircling and framed around the golden glow of our own ever hopeful hearts."
Then came "Formless Matter and Its Devastating Gestures," unveiled in Campbell Art Park on May 28, 2026, and on view through April 26, 2027. Admission to the park installation is always free and tickets are not required. The piece is a constellation of six sculptural forms: a head, a hand, and four birdlike spheres. The head rises nearly thirteen feet, built of cedar and embellished with Duong's signature floral motifs, and pierced by hidden apertures that let visitors glimpse an interior world of characters, narratives, and light. The hand reaches toward the smallest bird in a gesture of recognition and care. The four birds, ranging from five to twelve feet in diameter, are woven from welded steel rod; visitors can step through doorways aligned along a single axis, passing through sightlines that extend from one bird to the next and culminating in the open eye of the woman. Inside each form, delicate metal drawings depict fragments of family — two parents and two children — rendered as abstracted archetypes speaking to lineage, resilience, and loss.
The work is grounded in chaos theory, in close observation of the artists' young daughter, and in the search for meaning amid disorder. "Beneath the veil of order lies the grand story of humanity," Duong and Friedman said. "The question endures: How do we create order from chaos?"
That question is essentially what the library exhibition puts on display. A finished sculpture reads as order — resolved, stable, certain. The sketches and models behind it read as chaos: options tried and abandoned, scale tested in miniature, forms argued into being. By showing the preparatory work for "Formless Matter" alongside the planning behind more than 25 other Oklahoma City sculptures and murals, the show makes an argument that public art is not handed down finished from on high. It is built, revised, and chosen — one decision at a time, by people who live here.
The exhibition is free, open to all ages, and runs daily at the Downtown Library at 300 Park Avenue. It is the rare chance to see the city's public art the way its makers do: unfinished, uncertain, and full of possibility.