Holly Wilson has spent her career making small figures that carry large stories. The Mustang, Oklahoma, artist, of Delaware Nation and Cherokee Nation heritage, is known for intimate bronze and mixed-media sculptures — figures often caught mid-gesture, dancing or turning, built to hold shades of emotion that words handle poorly. This October, the University of Oklahoma's School of Visual Arts gives her a different kind of frame: a show she shares with her own children.
"Call and Response: Works by Holly Wilson featuring Zoe Hundley and Wilson Hundley" runs October 5 through October 30 at the Lightwell Gallery, on the second floor of the School of Visual Arts building at 520 Parrington Oval in Norman. The exhibition explores family and identity through figurative sculpture, photography, and multi-media installation, setting Wilson's work alongside pieces by her adult children, Zoe Hundley and Wilson Hundley. The gallery describes it as a continuing lineage of storytelling — which is, in a sense, exactly what Wilson's work has always been about.
A free public reception is set for October 22 from 4 to 6 p.m., with Wilson giving a gallery talk around 5 p.m. There is no ticket and no capacity barrier; the exhibition and the reception are open to all.
The pairing of mother and children is less a novelty than a natural extension of a practice that has been generational from the start. Wilson was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, one of five children. Her father taught at the Indian boarding school in Lawton before being transferred to the Cherokee Indian boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina; the family lived there a couple of years before returning to Lawton, where he stayed until the school closed and then went to work for the military. Her mother, Wilson recalled in a 2014 oral history interview for the Oklahoma Native Artists collection at Oklahoma State University, "always did crafts and art-type things," and the family "built on the house incessantly" — a household where making things was simply what people did.
Wilson earned a bachelor's degree in 1992 and a master of fine arts in sculpture in 2001, both from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, along with a master's in ceramics in 1994. She has shown widely in galleries and institutions that do not always have a Native focus, a point interviewer Julie Pearson-Little Thunder raised with her in that 2014 conversation — her figures travel into rooms where the audience may not know the first thing about Delaware or Cherokee storytelling, and the work has to carry the story on its own.
That has been a consistent theme. In "Holly Wilson: Upturned Flower that Travels," an exhibition at the Volland Foundation, the title itself married her English name to the translation of her Native name, highlighting her perspective as both white and Indigenous. The show included "Bloodline," in which she shares her family history through non-descript figures, and "Two Sides of the Self, Wilson and the Bear," in which her son is depicted in detail — an intimate observation of the artist's present moment set against the longer sweep of ancestry. The Volland Foundation described her aim as creating "a tapestry that tells stories that are sacred and precious, personal and universal, powerful and at times volatile."
Her children have been inside that tapestry for years. In a 2015 profile in The Oklahoman, reporter Brandy McDonnell described Wilson sifting through twisted twigs, dead bug bodies and odd bits of metal, turning found objects — including half-spent cigars — into works of art. The same piece noted that Wilson's photography had surprised people who knew only her sculptures; one image, "ER," captured her son Wilson Hundley, then 10, lying on a bed in an emergency room where he was being treated for a stomach ailment. It is the kind of picture that only a parent could make, and the kind of subject that a child might later have complicated feelings about — which is precisely the territory "Call and Response" seems built to explore.
Now those children are adults with practices of their own, and the Lightwell show puts their work in direct conversation with their mother's. The title is apt in more than one register: call and response is a musical structure, a pattern of statement and answer, and also a description of what happens across generations when one person makes something and another answers it. The exhibition's mix of media — sculpture, photography, installation — suggests the answers are not imitations of the mother's work but replies in different languages.
The setting matters too. The Lightwell Gallery sits inside a working art school, where students pass through between classes. A free reception with a gallery talk is a rare chance to hear an established artist walk through a show that includes her own family, and to hear how a practice built on ancestry and personal history looks when the next generation picks up the thread.
For anyone in Norman, the evening of October 22 is the one to mark: 4 to 6 p.m. at the Lightwell Gallery, 520 Parrington Oval, with Wilson speaking around 5. The exhibition itself remains up through October 30, free and open to all.