Art Without Stopping: Tulsa’s No Parking Studios

“What Will Be Said, When I Can Not” by Antonio Andrews

A few years ago, Antonio Andrews had a problem. At the time, downtown Tulsa was under major construction, and finding a parking spot felt like a never-ending nightmare. But Andrews also recognized that the construction meant growth and possible prosperity for the city he grew up in. Those elements inspired the multidisciplinary artist to create No Parking Studios LLC.  

“We’ve been going for five years now, and now it’s starting to grow into a team of artists that’s starting to just grow into a real company,” Andrews says. “So now it’s just me empowering artists that I work with and want to work with, so I can just give them a platform.” 

With NOPS, Andrews wanted to create a sanctuary that could not only spark his own artistic journey, but also be a home for others with different talents, but the same mindset.

“No Parking Studios started out as an idea, just a way to express myself creatively outside of music,” Andrews says. “Just wanted to do something, try some new stuff. Always been a creative person. So, I was trying to make an outlet to do that and that’s what No Parking turned into. Honestly, the way I do it with No Parking, it’s how we did it with the hip-hop community.” 

The idea for NOPS came to Andrews in 2016 (the first studio home didn’t come until 2018) when he was in a rut. He was making music, but he didn’t feel like he was tapping other talents that were lying dormant.   

“I just didn’t want to be boxed in. At the time, music just wasn’t serving the same purpose and I just wasn’t feeling music at the time,” he says. “I’ve always been into architecture, just different types of photography. At the time I didn’t know it.” 

To fill the need that was inside him, Andrews turned to painting. While he had no formal training, it was something he had an interest in.   

Andrews quickly sold his first painting and assumed that was how the art world worked. But when he didn’t sell another one for two years, it taught him a lesson about the business side.   

“The Road To Zion Is Windy” by Antonio Andrews

He currently has paintings for sale on the NOPS website, noparkingstudios.com, that range from “Golden Skies” ($100) to “What Will be Said, When I Can Not” ($12,500). He describes his style as abstract realism.   

“The painting really opened my mind and I started noticing how all these other elements work with it as well,” says Andrews. “A couple of years after I started, I’m just thinking, ‘This is hip-hop. This is what the elements of hip-hop are.’ So now I’m just looking at it from carrying on the tradition of hip-hop.” 

That meant growing NOPS beyond just his own boundaries. Over the past five years, Andrews has added like-minded friends and artists to the collective, including Tyler James, Deren Walker, Cruz Thompson and De’Raisha Smith. While some of their artistic approaches overlap, they all have their own areas in which they specialize. So much so that if Andrews is offered a job that he feels is better suited for someone else, he gladly passes it on.  

“I’ve given all of them probably one good job to do that I came across and ever since I did that, it’s like they’ve been snowballing with that one job,” Andrews said. “It’s like everybody has stuff to do. So, it’s just the more I give, the more it comes back to me.” 

NOPS has had its fits and starts. Andrews has watched the company grow and branch out into other areas, which he said has been great, but despite its success, the company currently has no home — the rental market in Tulsa has priced it out of where it had been working.  

“It’s been a lot of learning for me, honestly, because right now we’re in between studios,” Andrews says. “It went from a time [when] I didn’t even know how I could afford a studio, and then last year we were working out of three different studios, and now we’re back to no studios. So, it has just been a learning process for me, just honestly getting used to being uncomfortable, and I’m just embracing it now.” 

Antonio Andrews shares a stage in Tulsa with Steph Simon.

NOPS is exploring different options moving forward; everything from just renting out Airbnbs to work in or buying its own building to transform into a studio is on the table. Regardless, the end goal is still the same for Andrews. 

“If I could make up the perfect scenario, I would get my own No Parking Academy where all these different artists are coming in and working on projects, and it just gives them their foot [in the door] and to go out into the world and be who they are,” Andrews says. “We are always going to keep this core collective doing different exhibitions and projects, but I want to be able to make a space that’s like — they know when they come to that space, they’re going to see some next-level art, some next-level artists, just a part of the city that’s like nothing else out there. The perfect plan is being a prominent studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”