Knoxville Colorline is a site-specific light installation by San Antonio-based artist Bill FitzGibbons. The work consists of programmed LED lights placed along the KMA's north facade that transforms the building into a shifting canvas of colored light every night through the end of 2010.
Visual artist Anne Wilson has been at the forefront of artwork connecting conceptualism and handiwork, activism and aesthetics, investigating new possibilities for what has been called "relational aesthetics."
Wilson's practice extends the relational in terms of labor, collaboration, and identity construction, blending pedagogy with aesthetic production. Her work has been exhibited extensively including exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and as part of the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Knoxville-based artists Jason S. Brown and Elizabeth Scofield have designed and fabricated an outdoor sculpture installation in the KMA’s North Garden that combines botanical forms created with synthetic nylon fabric.
Uncertain Terrain features a broad selection of works—paintings, photographs, drawings and video—by artists whose chief inspiration stems from the surrounding landscape, whether rural or urban, perceived or imagined. The exhibition examines the many ways artists reference the external environment in constructing scenes marked by instability, ambiguity, deception, or fragmentation.
Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period.
Shifting Structures is a site-specific project conceived by Brooklyn-based artist Jane South, who has become known internationally for her elaborate sculptural drawings. Using little more than a scalpel and colored inks, she transforms fragile folded paper into structures that appear industrially reinforced.
The art we call “contemporary” represents the leading edge of where artists are working today. Contemporary art is experimental, provocative, exciting. It is an investigation into new ideas that change the way art is made.
Since the early 1980s, internationally-acclaimed painter David Bates has chronicled the people and places all along America’s Gulf Coast. His Blacktip Shark (1989), a rugged, monumental canvas that depicts heroic fishermen at work is one of the best-known and most visible paintings in the KMA’s collection. David Bates: Katrina Paintings boldly addresses one of the most severe and inexplicable tragedies in recent memory and its devastating aftermath.
The Tennessee Art Education Association and the Knoxville Museum of Art present the Fifth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, featuring artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. This competition is open to students in grades 6-12, attending public, private, or home schools in East Tennessee, and offers students the opportunity to display their talents and be honored for their accomplishments in a professional art museum environment. The student art exhibition provides an excellent competitive arena for young artists.
For fifteen years, Peter Sarkisian has explored the parameters of video installation, always relating themediated experience of video to our actual tactile experience of the world, working in an area between cinema and sculpture.
This exhibition surveys the development of an important contemporary Chinese artist’s large-scale painting and installations. Xie examines political and cultural realities in his homeland through beautifully painted, symbolic imagery derived from newspapers, decaying books, museum libraries, and media images of current events.
This is the first public exhibition of the Local Industry Cloth, produced in 2010 by 2,100 volunteers alongside 79 experienced weavers at the Knoxville Museum of Art. The cloth, 75’ 9” long, was created over the course of three months during the artist’s project Local Industry, part of the exhibition Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave.