As a whimsical feminist from the vermilion Texas desert, Rebekah Danae’s worldview hasn’t shattered, but surrealized. There are volumes to paint on the modern American western progressive experience— on streetwear and western wear, racism and Christianity, social media threads and community organizing meetings, and the people who live it each day. Impossible to portray in their totality, Danae offers her painted and sewn perspective as a provocation. Reckoning with the dark truths of our heritage and employing a childlike futurism, her work is for the new world, from the old world, about the world in-between.
Press
Rebekah Danae’s interdisciplinary practice of oil painting , leatherwork, and social sculpture culminates in collaborative installation based experiences that create culture and community .
FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES
EARLY YEARS
While completing her BFA at Baylor University, Rebekah Danae’s fourteen year painting practice was stylistically and thematically influenced by formative experiences in Belgium, studying surrealist Rene Magritte’s blend of comedy and peril, and in Texas, learning from Sedrick Huckaby’s metaphoric expressions of faith, community, and heritage.
INFLUENCE
Sculpturally— through leatherwork and interior design— Danae’s work has been influenced by the cowboy boot making community in Beggs, Oklahoma and the design firm of Christopher Murphy. In practice, Danae draws inspiration from Virgil Abloh, who blurred the lines of art and commerce through the tools of contemporary culture; by Rebecca Belmore’s ability to elicit intimate moments of reflection while tackling tremendous contemporary issues; the liberatory mysticism of Afrofuturism philosophy; the fiber artists of the wearable art movement in the 70s; and the community-based relational practice of Rick Lowe.
COLLABORATIONS
Through her work, Rebekah Danae and the Creative House orchestrate a movement in the middle of the country made up of a diverse creative choir. Far from a lone ranger, Danae works collaboratively across a curated network of Oklahomans— from the punk underground, homegrown rappers and producers, luxury interior designers, rodeo cowboys, rural bootmakers, to philanthropic, political, and educational leaders. Her approach, while comedic, whimsical, and surreal, has the intended impact of critical regional culture shaping from the current white supremacy that is prevalent regionally today and toward a co-created futurist Oklahoma, the liberated West.
