Gabriel friedman, oklahoma city, oklahoma

Gabriel considers himself a myriad of things... “an artist, father, designer, builder, Okie, fixer, crafts person, gardener, explorer, photographer, organizer, teacher, naturalist, city dweller, skateboarder, idea factory... I studied most available avenues of art at Classen SAS in high school, then attended The Art Institute of San Francisco, The Boston Art Institute, The Chicago Institute, University of Central Oklahoma, and again The Art Institute of SF. I worked as a freelance photographer, writer, artist, designer, magazine editor in California and Europe in the skateboard industry in the 2000s. I took a hiatus from most normal ‘art’ for about 10 years to study wood craft, primitive skills, sustainable framing practices, nature skills, carpentry, blacksmithing... and other random stuff. I taught and co-taught workshops with adults and children focusing on blacksmithing, knife making, Japanese timber framing, carpentry, basket making, etc through out the decade. I have recently felt the calling back to more traditional ‘creative’ practices… I am finding a space to combine all my experiences and talents to contribute to building a healthier, more open minded, magical, and exciting community for my daughter and her generation to experience… I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to collaborate with children in my immediate community to design and build full size natural material play forts. I have also started experimenting in scaling down this idea by building ‘tiny’ fantasy tree houses... Both full sized and my ‘tiny’ fantasy play houses have been constructed out of mainly locally foraged materials.”

During Gabriel’s residency, he worked with our PreK class to design a larger fantasy play house and built it to live on the SixTwelve property. (One can find it on the west side of our gardens on Lee Ave.) He also worked with our Urban Farm and Creativity Camp kids to design and build two large fantasy tree houses, which were installed in two locations around the Paseo neighborhood. The campers also designed and created their own. Through this process, our kids gained building skills that could be applied to other projects down the road. We were so proud of their creations!