Past

The Tennessee Art Education Association is please to continue its partnership with the Knoxville Museum of Art to present the Ninth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, featuring artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. This competition provides the opportunity for students to participate in a juried exhibition and to have their artworks displayed in a professional art museum environment. The student art exhibition provides an excellent competitive arena for young artists.

Contemporary Focus is the KMA’s annual exhibition series designed to serve as a vital means of recognizing, supporting, and documenting the development of contemporary art in East Tennessee. Each year, the exhibition series features the work of artists who are living and making art in this region, and who are exploring issues relevant to the larger world of contemporary art.

This exhibition examines the work of established and emerging international contemporary artists who use a variety of strategies to bring a sculptural dimension to printmaking. Some achieve this by using centuries-old methods while others take advantage of cutting-edge digital tools. These include low relief printing or embossing, printing on mold-cast paper forms, post-print cutting, scoring, folding, etc., art installations that use repeated print elements, relief printing through repeated print runs to accumulate layers of material, and printing out imagery that is applied to 3D forms. The featured artists are Enrique Chagoya, Lesley Dill, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Gober, Red Grooms, Hideki Kimura, Nicola Lopez, Oscar Munoz, Leslie Mutchler, Marilene Oliver, Dieter Roth, Graciela Sacco, and Jonathan Stanish. Organized by the KMA and presented in conjunction with the Printmaking Program, School of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Intellectual Property Donor is the first major U.S. one-person presentation of the artist’s pioneering, multi-faceted and interactive installations, custom software, prints, sculptures and websites. Roth, a self-professed “hacktivist” artist, is interested in uses of technology in popular culture and the urban environment. He playfully transforms existing information systems into public, often political, statements. Blurring the line between artist and hacker, the exhibition challenges gallery visitors to consider how everyday life intersects with virtual reality and how viral media can become high art. Organized by Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.

The Paternal Suit consists of over 100 paintings, prints, and objects created by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist F. Scott Hess, presented as legitimate historical artifacts, and supported by photographs, documents, and historical ephemera. Each object and artwork bears a fictitious artist’s name and detailed provenance and has been executed in the style of the century from which it supposedly originates. Sculpture, ceramics, furniture, toys, newspaper clippings, historic photographs, guns, and costumes advance an elaborate storyline whose subtext is the seven-year old artist’s abandonment by his own father after a parental divorce. Through the prism of his ancestry, Hess examines the impact of false history and deception within each generation and throughout society as a whole, and questions the authority of these perceived “truths.” Organized by the Halsey Institute, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston School of the Arts.

This is a collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association designed to bring together the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region; award winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.

This exhibition examines an influential group of progressive artists in Knoxville who energized East Tennessee’s art scene between 1955 and 1965. The group included C. Kermit “Buck” Ewing, Carl Sublett, Walter Stevens, Robert Birdwell Joanne Higgs, Richard Clarke, and Philip Nichols. While Sublett and Stevens shared an exclusive interest in the landscape as a point of reference for their abstractions, Birdwell and Ewing often found inspiration in urban settings and the human figure. Sometimes they exhibited as a foursome and other times as the “Knoxville Seven” with Higgs, Clarke and Nichols. Each maintained an individual style and utilized varying degrees of abstraction. Together, they together produced what are likely the first abstract paintings in Tennessee and helped establish a foothold for modern art in the region. Organized by the KMA.

FULL STOP is an elaborate 9 x 18 x 18-foot installation fabricated entirely of cardboard and ink by New York-based contemporary painter Tom Burckhardt. It takes the form of a mythical modern artist’s studio, complete with hundreds of tools, paint brushes and other supplies each constructed with great care. FULL STOP examines the artist’s inner sanctum, and explores notions of creativity, inspiration, and the lives of individuals who helped shape the art world of today. Organized by the Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio.

This annual exhibition is designed to represent the most adventurous work being made by emerging artists living and working in East Tennessee.

This year’s exhibition features Artist John Douglas Powers. Drawing from areas as diverse as natural history, architecture and the history of technology, John Douglas Powers investigates the intersection of cinema, engineering, computation, music and physical space. By employing motion and sound in his work, he incorporates the passage of time as a compositional element in an attempt to examine abstract and often intangible topics such as memory, thought, emotion, and language.

Romantic Spirits features more than 30 nineteenth century masterworks from the renowned Spartanburg, South Carolina-based collection. The paintings present an evocative glimpse into nineteenth-century Southern life, and reveal the importance of oral tradition and “a sense of place” in the development of the Romantic Movement in the South. The exhibition seeks to present a balanced view of how Romanticism evolved in the North and the South, the genre’s ties to Europe, and how culture, customs, education, and travel influenced each artist. It also reveals connections between featured painters and their contemporaries, specifically authors and poets such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among others.

This is a collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association designed to bring together the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region; award winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.

Knoxville-based artist Jered Sprecher (born Lincoln, Nebraska 1976) is among a generation of contemporary painters exploring anew the creative territory between figuration and abstraction. He describes himself as a “hunter and gatherer” who draws inspiration from an eclectic array of image sources including graffiti, architecture, cut gemstones, family photographs, and ancient frescoes. From these sources, the artist generates a broad spectrum of creative ideas and compositional possibilities that fuel his studio practice.