Past

Semmes, A Brooklyn-based artist, is known internationally for her unique multimedia installations. She works in contradictions, challenging the conventional definitions of craft and “women’s work” by creating completely non-functional pieces out of traditional materials such as clay and fabric. Treading the line between fantasy and reality, she evokes visions of fairy tales with her massively lush silk and velvet dresses, pieces that evolved from costumes the artist designed for her photographic and video pieces. Semmes’ ceramic and crystal pots defy the time-honored symmetry and beauty expected in pottery and glass. Although irregular and distorted, the crystal work poses a dazzling contrast to the lusciously colored, but misshapen, clay pots. Organized by the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga.

This renowned video by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss earned a cult following since it premiered at international art festivals in 1987. The video documents the artists’ use fire and fireworks, blasts of air, gravity, and a variety of corrosive liquids to sustain a chain reaction of materials and events for 30 minutes. The imagery touches on themes common in the duo’s work, such as order and chaos, humor, transformation, and illusion. In 2007, the Tate Gallery, London, organized “Flowers and Questions,” a major retrospective exhibition devoted to Fischli and Weiss’s creative achievements.

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 is a collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association designed to bring together the best student work grades 6-12 from a 20-county region; award winners are eligible for $600,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA

Larry and Brenda Thompson have amassed a remarkable collection of art by African Americans from around the nation. The strength of the Thompson’s collecting process lies in their considered attention to artists who have typically not been recognized in the traditional narratives of African American art.

This pioneering exhibition will present an under-appreciated side to the work of Thornton Dial, Sr. (b. 1928), an artist best known and celebrated for his large-scale, multi-media assemblages dealing with a wide range of charged social and political themes. Since the early 1990s, Dial has also produced a rich body of lyrical works on paper, often engaged with themes of gender and human relationships. This exhibition focuses on the very earliest of those drawings, a group of 50 sheets with Dial’s characteristic and broadly coherent iconography of women, fish, birds, roosters, and tigers, rendered in a variety of media. Organized by the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina.

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 20-county region; award winners are eligible for $600,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.

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.

Ansel Adams’ ability to create photographs with a remarkable range and subtly of tones is legendary. Yet for all his technical mastery, Adams recognized that what made a compelling photograph was far more elusive. This exhibition of 23 Adams photographs from the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts’ collection emphasizes the role of the artist’s intuitive and emotional response to the landscape in the creation of his powerful and enduring photographs. Included in the KMA’s presentation of this exhibition will be three rare prints Adams made during his little-known 1948 visit to East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Organized by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of Richard Jolley’s permanent glass installation Cycle of Life in the Ann and Steve Bailey Hall is an exhibition surveying the work of modern and contemporary artists who approach glass using innovative methods and techniques. Among the featured artists are Oben Albright, Graham Caldwell, Daniel Clayman, Andrew Erdos, Luke Jerram, Rashid Johnson, Dominick Labino, Karen LaMonte, Libensky & Brychtova, Beth Lipman, Harvey Littleton, Ivan Navarro, Mark Peiser, Lino Tagliapietra, Bertil Vallien, Norwood Viviano, Christopher Wilmarth, and Fred Wilson. Organized by the KMA.

Silaghi is an emerging contemporary painter whose monumental canvases represent a bold fusion of realism and abstraction. Often using black and white photographs of abandoned Cold War machinery as starting points, the artist launches into forcefully executed paintings populated by conveyor belts, vehicles, ductwork, and other industrial debris. Carefully painted shadows and highlights imply that these relics exist in pictorial space, while sweeping brushwork and rugged surface textures shift attention to his dynamic process. Organized by the KMA.

This exhibition of more than 50 photographs traces this influential street photographer’s career from 1962 to the present. Lyon rode with a notorious Chicago biker gang, marched against segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, and spent hours inside the death-row “Walls Unit” of Texas’ Huntsville Prison. His goal, he said, was “to destroy Life magazine”—to present powerful, real alternatives to the hollow pictures and stories permeating mass media in America. A special group of Lyon’s photographs taken during his visit to Knoxville in 1967 will be featured in the KMA’s presentation. Organized by The Menil Collection, Houston.