Bartlesville artists turn memories of home into new Lyon Gallery show
Andy Dossett | The Wiley Post
Oct 4, 2026
Home can be the Sooner Park play tower you probably climbed when you weren't supposed to.
It can be a school mascot, a stretch of Oklahoma sky, a song that immediately takes you back 30 years or, apparently, a flock of angry geese that terrorized you at Jo Allen Lowe Park as a child.
For Erinn Rakes and Jon Lindblom, those little pieces of memory are worth painting.
The two Bartlesville artists have filled the Lyon Gallery at The Center with more than 70 paintings for "Smells Like Home Spirit," a joint exhibition opening Thursday, Oct. 8.
"Smells Like Home Spirit," featuring more than 70 works by Bartlesville artists Erinn Rakes and Jon Lindblom, opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 8 at the Lyon Gallery inside The Center.
The name is, yes, absolutely a Nirvana reference.
But underneath the '90s joke is something more personal.
Both artists grew up in Bartlesville. Both were shaped by music, places, people and experiences here. And both have spent the past several months digging through those memories to figure out what "home" looks and feels like when you try to put it on a canvas.
The result is less a collection of paintings about Bartlesville than a collection of stories about living here.
"It's kind of my impressions of home in all its many forms," Rakes said. "Oklahoma, Bartlesville, my family, just kind of everything that inspires me in my daily life."
Lindblom describes his side of the exhibition even more simply.
A love song to Bartlesville.
The artist who wasn't planning to have a show
There is a certain irony in Rakes being nervous about putting her artwork in public.
She has spent 21 years teaching art at Bartlesville High School, where she currently teaches Art II, Pre-AP and AP courses. She spends her days asking young artists to experiment, develop their voices and put their work out into the world.
Doing it herself was another matter.
Rakes has painted in acrylics for about 20 years, but primarily considered herself an amateur artist. She had never particularly envisioned filling a gallery with her own work.
Then Lindblom saw her at the opening of Josh Waddell's "Rise of the Robots" exhibition this summer.
Lindblom had been selected for the First Impressions Series and decided he wanted to share the gallery with her. He had known Rakes and her work for years and had repeatedly encouraged her to exhibit more of it.
So he asked.
Her reaction unfolded in stages.
"Terrified," Rakes said. "Then excited, and then panicked, and then excited. So all the emotions."
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Now 34 of her acrylic paintings hang in the gallery.
Rakes describes her work as contemporary impressionism, filled with landscapes, animals, nature and pieces pulled from her own life. But this show became as much an exploration of how she paints as what she paints.
She experimented with layering, subtraction, different techniques and ways of capturing something harder to define than a physical place.
A feeling.
"I was more exploring in my work, kind of the process of trying to capture those emotions and feelings," Rakes said. "For me, it was the process."
Which is fitting for a show about home. Because home rarely exists exactly as we remember it.
Memories blur around the edges. Places change. People leave. Buildings disappear. The details become less important than the feeling that remains.
A love song to Bartlesville
Lindblom came at the same idea from another direction.
Most people around Bartlesville probably know him first as a pediatric dentist. Others know him through the paintings he has donated to nonprofit fundraisers around town.
Those two parts of his life operate at very different levels of precision.
As a dentist, Lindblom said his work is measured in quarter-millimeter increments. His early art training was similarly exacting, with a heavy focus on drawing and intricate detail.
Painting was another matter.
In fact, Lindblom said he "despised painting" for years because it was messy, imprecise and difficult to control.
Eventually, that became the point.
Painting gave him permission to loosen up, stop trying to capture every detail and concentrate instead on how something feels.
This will be only his second major gallery exhibition.
His first, held at Price Tower in 2022, leaned heavily into portraits and included a series of AI-inspired angels.
"Smells Like Home Spirit" looks very different.
Lindblom has almost 40 paintings in the exhibition. The majority are oils, and many move away from the portraits he often paints toward architecture, landmarks, schools, music and pieces of Bartlesville life.
There are Bartlesville Bruins. There are local landmarks. Pop-art interpretations of musicians who helped soundtrack his childhood.
Jon Lindblom describes his work in "Smells Like Home Spirit" as a "love song to Bartlesville," with paintings inspired by local landmarks, childhood memories and the experiences that shaped him as an artist.
Andy Dossett | The Wiley Post
And there are objects that might not mean much until Lindblom tells you the story behind them.
That is why, for the first time, he has written a small note to accompany each painting.
They are not traditional gallery descriptions explaining technique, composition or artistic theory.
They are stories.
A few sentences about why he painted something. A childhood memory. A joke. An explanation of why an otherwise ordinary object has lived rent-free in his mind for decades.
"It's not just going to be looking at art," Lindblom said. "If you really want to see the mind or the person behind the piece of art," the stories offer a peek behind the curtain.
Take one painting inspired by a structure in Jo Allen Lowe Park.
Lindblom doesn't primarily remember the architecture — he remembers the geese.
Specifically, the aggressive white geese that chased him around the park as a kid. One even bit him.
That memory followed him into adulthood.
A painting of a place therefore becomes a painting about being a kid in Bartlesville — and, perhaps more importantly, an invitation for someone standing in the gallery to say, "Those geese chased me, too."
Your story is part of the show
That may be where Rakes and Lindblom's work intersects most clearly.
They are not documenting Bartlesville.
They are leaving room for everyone else's version of it.
A painting of the Sooner Park Play Tower comes with Lindblom's memories of the structure, but someone else sees their own memories in it.
A Bruins painting means something different to a football player, a teacher, an academic-team kid or a parent who spent years sitting in the stands.
A landscape may remind one viewer of Oklahoma and another of a specific afternoon they had forgotten about until that moment.
"You're going to have your own story about the things I painted," Lindblom said.
That, he believes, is where art becomes valuable.
Not because paint and canvas have some inherent worth, but because people attach stories to them.
"Art should tell a story or bring about some sort of story," Lindblom said. "It's about either the subject matter sparking a conversation, or there's a conversation about when you see a really cool piece of art, the way it made you feel, a nostalgic feeling."
A painting hanging in someone's home can evolve into more than wall decor — it becomes an invitation to share, learn and connect on a new level.
Art that doesn't take itself too seriously
For all the talk about memory, emotion and artistic process, neither artist seems particularly interested in making the exhibition feel precious.
That might be part of what makes the pairing work.
Rakes has spent two decades helping high school students make art and admits she is still nervous about calling attention to her own.
Lindblom openly rejects the idea that every painting has to be destined for a museum or loaded with some grand intellectual statement.
He wants his work to be approachable.
He wants someone to walk into the gallery, see something that makes them smile and imagine living with it.
"I like painting what I like painting, and I like doing the stuff that makes me happy," Lindblom said. "Maybe somebody wants to hang this on their wall."
He said some of the pieces in this exhibition may be among the best he has made, either in technique, concept or both.
Rakes, meanwhile, has a harder time choosing favorites.
While she is working on a painting, she loves it.
Then she finishes.
And starts another.
"I'm just excited to share kind of my work with everyone," she said, "and hopefully they enjoy it as well."
Smells Like Home Spirit
"Smells Like Home Spirit" is part of The Center's First Impressions Series, a grant-funded initiative that gives emerging and unestablished artists professional gallery exposure at the Lyon Gallery.
The series is supported by the Arvest Foundation, Bartlesville Community Foundation and Lincoln Community Foundation.
Previous exhibitions have introduced Bartlesville to Waddell's strange, lovable robots assembled from forgotten objects and AJ Uphold's explosion of color, abstraction and imagination.
This time, the gallery turns inward.
Toward home.
Toward memory.
Toward the things people walk past every day without realizing they have become part of them.
Rakes and Lindblom may have painted their own versions of Bartlesville, but once the doors open, those paintings no longer belong entirely to just their memories — they transform into breadcrumbs that invite the viewer back through their own journey.
And, ideally, Lindblom said, maybe that inspires some to take some local art home.
"I'm hoping that people buy some cool ass art," he said.
"Smells Like Home Spirit" opens with a public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, at the Lyon Gallery inside The Center, 300 S.E. Adams Blvd. The artwork will be available for purchase.
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