City Arts Dept.
Co-Creating With The Creator
City Arts
City Church Tulsa
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Our Mission
Our mission is to inspire, cultivate, and advance the creative spirit within our community, nurturing artistic excellence and innovation while fostering spiritual growth and discipleship. Guided by our faith, we believe in the transformative power of art to enlighten minds, open hearts, and uplift spirits.
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Our Vision
Our vision for the City Arts Department is to create a vibrant, collaborative, and spiritually grounded artistic community. We seek to elevate the voices of our artists, amplify the messages of our faith, and contribute to a culture of love, truth, and beauty within our church and beyond. We envision a community where art serves as a conduit for spiritual enlightenment, a catalyst for social change, and a beacon of divine creativity.
Call for artists
City Church Tulsa
We are currently looking for artists to volunteer with the kids and youth on Sunday mornings to create engaging arts curriculum.
Projects
City Church Tulsa
The Lord’s Table
The Lord’s Table is the sacred centerpiece of our sanctuary. A 1,200-pound altar of concrete and white oak, designed and built in-house by seven craftsmen. The three-legged base, styled in a Danish contemporary form, features intersecting crosses nailed into the floor for both structure and symbolism. Its round concrete top recalls the stone rolled away from the tomb, cracked and mended with gold. Inlaid along the edge are the words of Christ: This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me. The table stands not just as furniture, but as an altar and invitation—to come, remember, and receive.
The Lord’s Prayer Room
The Lord’s Prayer Room is a fully immersive, contemplative environment designed around the movements of the Lord’s Prayer. Every element—from layout to materials—was envisioned, sourced, and built by the City Arts team to invite sacred stillness. A 100-year-old upright piano, reclaimed pews, and worn vintage rugs anchor the room in a sense of spiritual inheritance. Custom-cut mirrors framed as arched portals create the illusion of expanded space, referencing the eternal within the present moment. Interactive prayer stations line the walls, guiding guests through confession, intercession, and reflection. The result is not just a room, but a liturgical experience. Designed for presence, formed by prayer.
Poets & Saints Magazine
Issue 01: Streams in the Desert is the inaugural issue of a printed devotional journal curated by the City Arts team. Conceived as both an artistic offering and a spiritual companion, the magazine explores themes of beauty, renewal, and sacred longing. The name Poets & Saints reflects our conviction that the world needs both—those who illuminate mystery through art, and those who embody love through action. Every page was thoughtfully designed in-house, featuring original poems, liturgies, photography, essays, and visual art contributed by our creative community.
Streams in the Desert Gallery
Streams in the Desert Gallery was a multi-media exhibition exploring the intersection of spirituality, technology, and art. The show featured thirteen original works created by a diverse group of artists using both traditional and digital techniques. From surreal photography to vibrant collage to ethereal acrylics, each piece engaged the emotional and sacred dimensions of modern life. Every work served as both personal expression and shared invitation, offering a unique lens on faith, mystery, and the human search for meaning. Designed as a contemplative space, the gallery asked a central question: where do we find living water in the dry places of our lives?
Advent Gallery
Make Room for Advent: A Visual Quartet was a gallery installation of four abstract paintings inspired by the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. Each artist was given a single word, a liturgical color palette, and the shared direction to work in abstraction. The resulting 48x60-inch canvases became visual meditations on making space for Christ during the Advent season. Together, the pieces formed a modern expression of ancient longing—an invitation to prepare our hearts through reflection and beauty.
Stations of the Cross
Stations of the Cross is a series of fifteen minimalist stained glass compositions reimagining the traditional Lenten journey. Created by Amy Oettle and Cody Jensen, the installation draws inspiration from Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin chapel, using bold geometry, shifting color, and reflected light to evoke the suffering, sacrifice, and hope of Christ’s Passion. Each panel invites quiet contemplation through abstraction rather than imagery. The final station, a mirrored piece, shifts the focus to resurrection, offering viewers a chance to see themselves within the story and carry it forward.
Pathway Mural
Pathway Mural is a large-scale geometric installation designed by Joy Grogan and hand-painted by members of the City Arts team. Created to bring warmth and energy to the Pathway classroom, the mural features bold shapes and a vibrant color palette that reflect movement, growth, and joyful learning. The abstract composition transforms the space into a welcoming environment—one that feels alive, approachable, and full of possibility.
For Our City
A meditation of movement
How does the Spirit dwell and move inside me? Through the medium of abstract expressionist painting, this piece begins as a meditation of movement. When poured into worship what does this movement look like? Is there something that this movement wants to tell me? Wants to tell you?
An exercise in faith
As an artist I have practiced many different mediums, though I have never painted. But deep in my core where the gentle whisper of the soul lives, I feel God wanting to work through me, to paint a prayer.
When the noise of the mind creeps in I can feel like an imposter and start to doubt. I think I’m not qualified, skilled, worthy, or the right person for the job. But as Vincent van Gogh said:
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
So this piece is as much a public exercise in faith as it is a painting.
A work in progress
Like our new building, this piece is a work in progress. Over the next six weeks a series of paintings will be revealed in the video and build progressively upon the last as an homage to the construction process.
The artistic process
This painting has been one of the most spiritually significant things I’ve done in my life. I view it as an exercise in remaining absolutely present to the gentle whisper of the soul, at all moments, with every stroke. Doing whatever necessary, whatever practice required of me, to remain here–right now–listening. It required me preparing and sharing my entire being.
Painting #1 – Joy and Wonder
Starting from a blank canvas and working to an expressive monochromatic picture of what the Spirit had bottled up inside me. A boyish joy and wonder, enraptured with the act of painting itself. This painting truly showcases the ease at which music moves my body into celebration, into form.
Painting #2 – The Unseen Spiritual Life
This painting is a piling on of more movement. Layer over layer of expression. I was full of excitement to paint this one. When I get alone with God my eyes are often closed and that infinite black void is my place of peace. I view this black painting as a beautiful representation of Spirit movement and the working, toiling, and joy of the unseen spiritual life.
Painting #3 – Restore the Ruins
Knowing from the beginning that each painting was going to be painted over, I had already accepted the death of each but painting over “The Unseen Spiritual Life” was the hardest. I was frustrated and I was fighting to be fully present. I showed up empty and exhausted but I just had to start. I had a preplanned progression of color but from the beginning the strokes did not feel right and I didn’t know what it needed. I had to get the energy out and lamented “WHAT DO YOU WANT!?”. I felt an urge to grab a bright red and slap it on the canvas with a paint stick. Somehow it felt great to ruin the plan. It needed out of the box I created. My frustration with the silence of the voice of God, the emotion of the moment, is what made it onto the canvas. Ultimately, I regard this painting as a disaster. A representation of the messiness of life. Unpleasant to experience, ugly to look at, but full of the reality that life will never go according to plan and we just have to keep pushing. The Whisper said “Keep going, my beauty will be revealed. Just keep going.”
Painting #4 – Reckless Abandonment
(The dance of David)
By far, this experience was the most intense. I came into it with an emptiness and a frustration that the last painting didn’t go as planned but also a spirit renewal in knowing that I had found what it was asking for even though I didn’t find it aesthetically pleasing. I knew for this painting I had to, at any cost, get present. The central point of this project. A visual prayer. An intercessory prayer for the heart of our city. A prayer that I was not going to contain. I gave myself over with reckless abandonment into everything the Spirit asked for and Love asks for everything. This prayer led me into an internal and external barring of my entire self in expressiveness, into the act of Art.
Painting #5 – Cody’s Prayer
I came into this painting with a deep resonant peace. A sense of movement was stirring within me. Painting #4 was so much work, emotionally and physically, but with ease I began to paint white over it as City Music’s “Your Kingdom” played in the background. This is the one that I will happily call “Cody’s Prayer”. A temporal moment in time that I wish I could have forever but I had to keep going because the Spirit led me to the final piece.
Painting #6 – Worshiper of Yahweh
A week prior to painting this, we asked a group of people to write a prayer on the walls of the new building and a toddler took a pen and scribbled his prayer. As I was scanning the wall, reflecting afterwards, with tears in my eyes I was magnetized to this child’s drawing. I knelt down and stared at it, knowing there was something there. Knowing that I am going to make something out of this and took a picture of it not knowing what that thing would become.
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