Join us for an artist & author talk with Dawn Tree. Dawn will talk about her graphic novel, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street: A Modernized Revelation as well as the art she is showing during the Sankofa Festival in the Oak Bluffs Library’s meeting room. 

About the Book: Tree’s book discusses the 1921 Race Massacre and brings the history to life via botanical images of nature, archived photos and her journalistic artistic imagination from before, during, and after the 1921 Race Massacre that shook Tulsa, Oklahoma.

About the Artist: Dawn Tree is a professional abstract surrealist artist and owner of a creative marketing agency, Underground Tree Studios. She obtained a B.A. in Journalism and a Minor in African and African American Studies from the University of Oklahoma in 2007.  

Her love and focus on her art career has led her to hold artist residences, for instance, contribute to many art exhibitions and even publish a book. In 2019 Tree published a graphic art history book entitled Tulsa’s Black Wall Street: A Modernized Revelation. The book takes her graphic art history composed of archived photos from the largest race massacre in history that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma and her imagination and explained in a digestible and truth telling way.  

Justice is a resounding theme in most if not all the work Tree creates.

A majority of her works are on wood, combining various mediums of paint & materials from aerosol, latex acrylic, gold leaf and found branches, feathers, shells and more.

Pieces are intended to provoke thought of community, humanity, spirituality and connections of present and past. They often use bright colors that contrast with each other; allowing you to interpret and see many perspectives within one.