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.

Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE) is the first solo exhibition of works by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to be presented outside of New York City in the United States.

Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun began work on his series of Aggregations in the 1990s. Today, he is recognized internationally for these sculptural forms.

This is the third installment of an annual show that serves as a vital means of recognizing, supporting, and documenting the development of contemporary art in East Tennessee. Contemporary Focus 2011 artists are John Bissonette, Brian Jobe, and Greg Pond.

This exhibition includes faxes by nearly 100 artists sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center, NY, along with seminal examples of early telecommunications art. The KMA is inviting additional artists to submit works through a working fax line in the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. All of the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result- an ongoing cumulative project – is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation.

This exhibition is one of the first major surveys devoted to the wealth of exciting art being produced by a new generation of artists from Eastern Europe’s former communist countries. Many of these artists are in their thirties, and several are quickly becoming widely known after being featured in international biennials, art fairs, and museum exhibitions. Each was born under Communist rule but their art training occurred following the fall of Communism. Despite being internationally involved in the art world, these artists are devoted to living and maintaining studios in their home towns. Organized by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in partnership with the KMA.

The Tennessee Art Education Association is pleased to announce its partnership with the Knoxville Museum of Art to present the Sixth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, featuring artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. This competition 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.

This exhibition showcases recently acquired watercolors by East Tennessee artists Thomas Campbell, Charles Krutch, George Galloway, Walter Stevens, Carl Sublett, Richard Clarke, Whitney Leland, and Jered Sprecher, and presents them in the larger context of the museum’s watercolor collection alongside works by Charles Burchfield, Janet Fish, and other internationally known artists. Organized by the KMA.