Steve Liggett
May 14 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is happy to welcome local author and artist Steve Liggett for a free, in-store event on Wednesday, May 14 to celebrate his book, Sketchbook Diaries. This event will take place in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books, 221 E. Archer Street in the Tulsa Arts District.
Sketchbook Diaries was independently published in 2025 and is available for sale at Magic City Books.
About Sketchbook Diaries
Twenty-five years before the area just north of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, became a revitalized arts district, Steve Liggett and a group of like-minded artists ventured into the empty brick storefronts and derelict warehouses looking for a cheap place to make art. In his memoir, Sketchbook Diaries: Making a Place for Uncensored Art in Conservative Oklahoma, Liggett chronicles a career that covers fifty years of creating, presenting, and defending contemporary art. Liggett’s belief that artists have the right to uncensored expression, however, didn’t always sit well with the conservative forces around him. With missionary zeal, he battles government bureaucrats, defies closed-minded critics, and dodges the fire marshal while struggling to raise a faltering arts organization from the ashes. As artistic director of Living Arts of Tulsa for twenty-six years (fifteen of which he worked without a salary), Liggett rescues the organization from near oblivion and builds it into a nationally recognized center for contemporary art. But Liggett’s obsessive, workaholic nature, which keeps him more focused on his work than his personal relationships, results in a trail of failed marriages and disaffected lovers. The memoir covers his journey from moving to Tulsa in 1971 to the move of Living Arts into the building at 307 E Reconciliation Way.
Steve Liggett is the recipient of the 2017 Governor’s Arts Award for Individual Contribution to the Arts in Oklahoma, a John Hope Franklin Award from the Center for Reconciliation, and a Harwelden Awards from the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. He has a BA and MA from the University of Tulsa. He has been keeping detailed sketchbooks/journals/scrapbooks for the past fifty years and is an obsessive record-keeper. His collection of sketchbooks, photographs, and memorabilia forms the primary source material for much of his memoir.
