Ai Weiwei Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE)
2011-05-13 00:00 - 2011-08-07 00:00 (America/New_York)
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.
Organized by Arcadia University Art Gallery, Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn features a selection of ceramic works and photographs ranging from 1993 to the present. In these works, Ai Weiwei transforms ancient ceramic objects, including 7000-year old Neolithic urns and Han dynasty vessels, by painting them with a “Coca-Cola” logo, dipping them into vats of industrial paint, smashing them on the ground, or grinding them into powder.
The largest piece in the exhibition appears to be a large pile of tiny sunflower seeds, a common street snack in China. Each seed, produced to scale, was painstakingly hand-crafted from porcelain. Weighing precisely one ton, the porcelain seeds were created by a team of workers in the town of Jingdezhen, China where porcelain has been produced for the past 1700 years.
Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn has been organized by Arcadia University Art Gallery and supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Curated by Richard Torchia & Gregg Moore.
Check out more exhibit images here.

Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments
2011-03-11 00:00 - 2011-05-15 00:00
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.
Additional Resources:
Gallery Tour with Curator Dan Mills (video)
Artist Lecture with Xiaoze Xie (lecture)

Peter Sarkisian: Video Works, 1996 – 2008
2011-02-11 00:00 - 2011-04-24 00:00
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 new body of work constitutes a break-through for Sarkisian, in that he has invented a new hybrid of video-object using three-dimensional vacuum formed thermal plastic screens. This technology gives the illusion of video in three dimensions, thus enabling the artist to render his metaphors and narratives ever more palpable.
Additional Resources:
Peter Sarkisian: Video Art, 1996 – 2008
Peter Sarkisian at Austin East High School

East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2010
2010-11-26 00:00 - 2011-01-09 00:00
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.
The awards ceremony will take place at 6pm on Tuesday, December 7, 2010, in the Great Hall of the Knoxville Museum of Art, for the artists participating in the Fifth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, their families, friends and school’s personnel.
If you have any questions please call the Knoxville Museum of Art at 865.525.6101, ext. 226 or e-mail rmartin@knoxart.org

David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
2010-10-29 00:00 - 2011-02-13 00:00
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.
This exhibition includes more than 40 works Bates produced in response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it brought to the Gulf Coast. His iconic images capture in dramatic fashion destroyed property and displaced people, as well as the emotional devastation in the wake of this event. Many of the paintings are monumental in scale, including The Storm, a triptych that measures 21 feet in width. In this series, Bates’ paintings affirm both horror and life and serve as powerful reminders of the ability of art to represent the spectrum of human experience.
The Knoxville Museum of Art is the only venue in the eastern United States that will host this exhibition, which is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
David Bates in conversation with curator Barbara O’Brien at the Kemper Museum Of Contemporary Art.

Check out more exhibit images here.
Additional Resources:
David Bates: The Katrina Paintings

Contemporary Focus 2010: Emily Ward Bevins, Nick DeFord, Evan Meaney
2010-08-27 00:00 - 2010-11-07 00:00
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.
Contemporary Focus 2010 is the second year of an annual KMA series that serves as a vital means of recognizing, supporting, and documenting the development of contemporary art in East Tennessee. Each year we feature emerging artists who work in new and experimental ways.
Check out more exhibit images here.

Artist Biography

Emily Ward Bivens
Emily Ward Bivens uses found and made objects to forge narratives, provoke or encourage interaction, and reveal fictional and non-fictional mysteries. These objects shift from prop to subject to evidence when used in performance, video, and installation. Characters or identities are created to act as subjects, authors, inventors, and curators of the work. She received her BFA from Colorado State University and her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Bivens recent exhibitions include installations at Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Emily Ward Bivens is an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee.
Nick DeFord
A Knoxville native, Nick DeFord earned his BFA in drawing from the University of Tennessee, and an MFA in fibers from Arizona State University. His work explores the visual culture of geography and cartography using common household materials. Through maps, globes, travel guides, pamphlets and charts, DeFord disrupts commonly recognizable systems to examine our relationship to identity and place, the known and the unknown. DeFord has exhibited work nationally, most recently at Fluorescent Gallery in Knoxville, the Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art, and Whittier College in California. Nick DeFord currently teaches drawing at the University of Tennessee.
Evan Meaney
Evan Meaney has been working with film, video, and emerging media for over a decade. Educated at Ithaca College and the University of Iowa, his interests have grown to include deconstructive sequencing, ghost stories, breakdancing, and the poetry of hexadecimal code. Meaney has been an Iowa Arts Fellow, a James B. Pendleton Grant recipient, and an artist in residence at the Experimental Television Center. He has held directorships of the Bijou Theater in Iowa City, the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, ICE Fest, and the Couch Physics Microcinema. A recent addition to the Knoxville community, Evan Meaney has joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee where he will serve as an assistant professor of time-based media.

Additional Resources:
Nick DeFord talks about his art
Emily Ward Bivens talks about her art

Jane South: Shifting Structures
2010-08-27 00:00 - 2010-11-07 00:00
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 exhibition consists of a single, monumental work made up of hundreds of individual drawing components that are re-configured according to the specifics of the KMA’s gallery. South is interested in responding to the unique architectural features of the space as a challenge to construct the work in unexpected ways. In two previous locations, the work assumed a shadowy, solid form, and in another location it appeared bright and open, and even allowed viewers to wander inside. Each is made up of a complex network of sculptural drawings resembling cages, boxed grids, latticed arches, and horizontal ladders—some suspended from tiny paper hooks. All her surfaces are defined in some way with colored marks, outlines and crosshatchings. During the latter stages of the installation, museum audiences will be able to watch South assemble her monumental drawing in the gallery.

Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South
2010-05-14 00:00 - 2010-08-01 00:00
Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period.
Walker Evans (1903-1975) is represented by incisive images of Alabama sharecroppers stemming from his epic collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern writer and photographer who traveled across Mississippi in the 1930s and early 1940s taking photographs and documenting rural and small-town life in her home state. Baldwin Lee (born 1951) is a professor of photography at the University of Tennessee, and a former assistant to Walker Evans. Complementing the 50 or so works by Evans and Welty are more than 30 of Lee’s images of African-American life in the South taken during the 1980s with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Vision, Language, and Influence was organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art in collaboration with Baldwin Lee.
Check out more exhibit images here.

Uncertain Terrain: Selections from the KMA Collection
2010-04-16 00:00 - 2010-08-29 00:00
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.
Uncertain Terrain includes works by Jim Campbell, Patty Chang, Herb Creecy, Robert Van Deventer, Tomory Dodge, Chuck Forsman, Natasha Kissell, Alison Moritsugu, Brian Novatny, Darren Waterston, Roger Weik, and Charlotta Westergren.
Additional Resources:
Uncertain Terrain: Selections from the KMA Collection
Uncertain Terrain: Selections from the KMA Collection

BLOOM: Brown + Scofield
2010-04-01 00:00 - 2010-08-01 00:00
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.
BLOOM includes 16-foot tall giant blades of nylon grass, large-scale synthetic flowers, and odd plant-like shapes inspired by nature. The installation combines the order and geometry of a flower garden with the organic and shifting nature of a field exposed to the changing elements.
Jason S. Brown is Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Tennessee’s School of Art. He and partner Elizabeth Scofield have been exploring public art projects and environmental issues as exhibiting artists for two decades.
Check out more exhibit images here.

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave
2010-01-22 00:00 - 2010-04-25 00:00
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.
Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave is an exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, installed by Wilson to investigate the crisis of production and skill based textile labor. Included is Rewinds, a new work created entirely in glass; video documentation of Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, a 2008 performance in Chicago; and a large site-specific project, Local Industry, that takes the form of an active weaving/winding factory set up in the museum space. Run over the course of several months, this project will involve the Knoxville community in the collaborative production of a unique bolt of cloth.
For more photos of weavers around the world, click here.
For more photo’s of women’s woven, textiles click here.
For more photo’s of Anne Wilson’s process, click here.

View Exhibit Website
Additional Resources:
Anne Wilson Lecture
Exhibition Research:
Anne Wilson and studio interns research utilizing libraries, the Internet, studio practices, interviews, and conversations. Kimberly Pence is the research lead. This is an in-process compilation of information, never intended to be comprehensive.
Bibliography:
Experienced weavers from Knoxville and surrounding states, as well as a “Chicago to Knoxville” group of weavers, are invited to take turns weaving a continuous bolt of weft-faced, selvedge-to-selvedge, striped cloth. Once one weaver has completed a passage of stripes, the next weaver responds to that passage and continues weaving. Proceeding this way, although abstract, relates to the Surrealist exercise of “exquisite corpse” drawing. The completed cloth bolt will be given to the KMA collection with an archive of all who participated.
Woven Stripes + Bands:
This log presents a diversity of woven textiles showing warp stripes and weft bands from various countries and time periods. Libby O’Bryan was the primary researcher of images. Emily Nachison added material, color corrected, and formatted the images with text. Olivia Valentine worked from this image bank to create the flat screen display in the exhibition.
How to Weave:

Bill FitzGibbons: Knoxville Colorline
2010-01-01 00:00 - 2010-12-31 00:00
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.
Knoxville Colorline is presented in conjunction with Filament, an exhibition at the University of Tennessee’s Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture that features the sculpture of FitzGibbons and mixed media work by fellow artist Creighton Michael.

Artist Biography

Bill FitzGibbons
FitzGibbons received his BFA from the University of Tennessee and has become internationally known for his large-scale public art projects. In 1991 FitzGibbons was selected as a Fulbright Scholar for the Hungarian Art Academy in Budapest. He has been the Executive Director of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center since the summer of 2002 and serves on the board of directors of the International Sculpture Center.

East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2009
2009-11-27 00:00 - 2010-11-27 00:00
The Tennessee Art Education Association is pleased to announce it’s partnership with the Knoxville Museum of Art to present the Fourth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition. This exhibition features artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. The 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 year exhibition will spotlight a remarkable cross-section of the region’s best student artwork from grades six through 12 and encompass an impressive variety of media, including ceramic, drawing, digital imagery, mixed media, painting, computer graphics, sculpture, traditional photography, and printmaking.
The Best-of-Show winner will receive a Purchase Award of $500, and the artwork will become a permanent part of the collection of Mr. James Dodson, on loan to the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Education Collection. Additional cash awards are made possible by the generosity of Sylvia and Jan Peters and Mary Ellen Brewington.
There will be an awards ceremony at 6pm on Tuesday, December 1, 2009, in the Great Hall of the Knoxville Museum of Art, for the artists participating in the Fourth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, their families, friends and school’s personnel.
For more photographs of the exhibition click here.

Threads of Perception: Devorah Sperber
2009-10-30 00:00 - 2010-03-14 00:00
Using ordinary spools of thread, Sperber creates pixilated, inverted images of masterpieces, which appear as colorful abstractions to the naked eye. When viewed with optical devices, however, the works becomes immediately recognizable as the famous paintings.
The thread spools works are hung upside down in reference to the fact that the lens of the eye projects an inverted image of the world onto the retina, which is corrected by the brain. A clear acrylic sphere, positioned in front of each work, functions like the human eye and brain, not only inverting but also focusing the image so that it appears as a sharp, faithful, right-side-up reproduction of the famous painting.
The concept was based on the technology of print making and how mechanical reproductions alter images and the scale of artworks as they exist in “the mind’s eye.” Sperber selected The Last Supper and Mona Lisa because they are two of the most recognizable and reproduced images in the history of art.
Check out Devorah Sperber’s website here.
For more exhibition images click here.
Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, New York artist Devorah Sperber deconstructs familiar images to address the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see. “As a visual artist,” she says, “I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic than the act of seeing—how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.”

Additional Resources:
Devorah Sperber: Threads of Perception
Devorah Sperber Lecture

Anton Vidokle: Exhibition as School
2009-09-04 00:00 - 2009-11-08 00:00
This exhibition presents several projects Vidokle has produced over the last decade: publications from e-flux, an NYC based artist resource and art video distribution center founded in 1999; the model of unitednationsplaza, a free year-long school based in Berlin initiated by the artist in 2006; a station of texts and lectures from seminars at Night School , an artist commission in the form of a temporary school at the New Museum in New York City (January 2008- February 2009); New York Conversations , a feature film shot by the artist in 2008 with Nico Dockx , Rirkrit Tiravanija, and A Prior Magazine; and a comprehensive archive of over one hundred lectures, talks, and seminars organized by Vidokle throughout the past three years in Berlin, Mexico City and New York.
Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow and arrived in the United States in 1981. He is currently based in New York and Berlin. Vidokle operates these projects with a large group of collaborators, including Julieta Aranda, Boris Groys, Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Nikolaus Hirsch, Brian Kuan Wood, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Hila Peleg, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Jan Verwoert.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with A.S.A.P. – The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

Anton Vidokle is one of many artists who recognize the educational potential of art, but his productions usually do not manifest themselves in the form of traditional art objects. In the place of sculpture or painting, Vidokle creates work in the shape of social forms familiar to us – such as libraries, schools, and public conversations.

Contemporary Focus 2009: Hunt Clark, Patricia Tinajero, David Wolff
2009-09-04 00:00 - 2009-11-08 00:00
Contemporary Focus is a new KMA series that serves as a vital means of recognizing, supporting and documenting the development of contemporary art in East Tennessee. Each year, we will feature three emerging artists who work in new and experimental ways.

Arms, Legs, Feet, Heart & Soul: The Cumberland Furniture Guild
2009-05-21 00:00 - 2009-08-09 00:00
This exhibition includes current works by leading members of the Cumberland Furniture Guild who explore the furniture tradition and its close association with the natural world and the human body. The selection of more than 30 works represents artists’ ability to draw inspiration from surprising sources in the creation of beautiful, functional objects that challenge the limits of the imagination.
To see more exhibition pictures, click here.

Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation
2009-05-08 00:00 - 2009-09-06 00:00
Featuring more than 90 vintage prints, Made in Hollywood offers a glimpse into the world of fantasy, glamour, and perfection that the image makers produced. Kobal (1940-1991) was a leading Hollywood historian who collected prints by some of most important photographers working in Hollywood during its golden era: Ernest Bachrach, Margaret Bourke-White, Nikolas Muray, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Eugene Richee, George Hurrell, and many others.
Their subjects are drawn from the pantheon of the greatest stars produced during the golden age of Hollywood: Garbo, Dietrich, Swanson, Cooper, Harlow, Gable, Hepburn, Bogart, and many others.
Organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; illustrated catalogue available.
For more pictures of the exhibition, click here.

Josh Simpson: A Visionary Journey in Glass
2009-02-06 00:00 - 2009-04-19 00:00
The selection of more than 100 objects from Josh Simpson’s personal collection documents his fascination with undersea life, astronomy, as well as the pure process of glass blowing. Included in the selection are works from Simpson’s various series—Goblets, Tumblers, Iridescent Vases, Perfume Bottles, Portals, Tektites, Planets, Copper Baskets, and Inhabited Vases.
Organized by the Huntsville Museum of Art; illustrated catalogue available.
For more pictures of the exhibition, click here.
Additional Resources:
Josh Simpson: A Visionary Journey in Glass

On a Mission: KMA Collectors Circle Acquisitions
2009-01-22 00:00 - 2009-04-05 00:00
The exhibition features a variety of works of art that have become the core of the KMA’s contemporary holding by artists such as Bessie Harvey, Sarah Hobbs, William Morris, Nancy Rubins, Robert Stackhouse, Robert Van Vranken, Andrew Saftel, Brad Sells, Darren Waterston, William T. Wiley, and others.
Formed in 1995, Collectors Circle is a special KMA membership group that helps support the museum’s purchase of works of art. Collectors Circle has been vital to the growth of the KMA collection, especially in the absence of an acquisitions endowment. Each year the group gathers for the Purchase Reception, during which members consider several works of art earmarked by the museum. Following lively discussion, the group votes on the work(s) of its choice and those are then purchased using funds established by the group’s membership dues.
For more information about Collectors Circle and how to join, please contact Margo Clark at 865.525.6101 x223 or mclark@knoxart.org.
For more photographs of the exhibition, click here.

Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art
2008-10-04 00:00 - 2009-01-18 00:00
The exhibition is organized by the Southern Arts Federation (SAF) in conjunction with American Masterpieces, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 100 works in a variety of media- clay, glass, fiber, metal, wood, paper and mixed media- by 60 artists from the SAF’s nine partner states: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
The master artists represented in the exhibition were selected because of their role as conduits for process and inspiration, as they influence other generations of artists working within the region and beyond. Artworks will be accompanied by a rich array of artist interviews, stories, and background information on the artists and their processes.
The South is home to numerous traditional art forms that continue to be practiced within families and communities throughout the region. Traditional visual arts- such as basket-making, pottery, instrument making, quilting and woodcarving- are usually deep-rooted, reflect a community aesthetic and often experience a slow evolution. Contemporary craft in the South possesses its own rich history beginning with the folk school movement in the early 1900s. Over the years, artists and artisans have been drawn to this region to learn and practice their chosen art forms. These artists create a broad scope of crafts that include glass, pottery, woodcarving and textiles. Together, the featured objects reveal important traditions and techniques passed from generation to generation, but also the way in which highly innovative artists bring new ideas to a tradition and in turn influence their peers and generations to come.
Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art is a project of the Southern Arts Federation, and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
Check out the Tradition/Innovation website here.

Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts and Beyond
2008-07-10 00:00 - 2008-09-21 00:00
The focused exhibition, Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts and Beyond, and its accompanying full-color, scholarly catalogue, examine Bendolph’s inspiration and creative process, as well as her profound connection to the cultural practices and expressive traditions from which her work arises. Twelve dramatically designed, richly colored, improvisational quilts created by Mary Lee Bendolph and her family members—her mother Aolar Mosely, her daughter Essie B. Pettway, and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph—are presented alongside complex and evocative found object sculptures by noted African American self-taught artist Thornton Dial and visionary “yard art” artist Lonnie Holley. Both of these Alabama-based artists have been influenced by the quilts and the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend. Intaglio prints by Mary Lee Bendolph and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph, along with documentary films about all of the artists provide further context for their creative exchange. As the deep social and aesthetic networks of these six artists intersect, they give rise to new pathways of artistic influence, resulting in a powerful mixture of communal and individual creative energies.
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts and Beyond is organized by the Austin Museum of Art and Tinwood Media. The Knoxville Museum of Art will be the only Southern venue for this important exhibition.
This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Frank and Virginia Rogers Foundation, the Friends of the Quilts: David Butler and Ted Smith, Linda and Pete Claussen, Sylvia and Jan Peters and the Kroger Company.
For more photographs from this exhibition, click here.

Additional Resources:
Mary Lee Bendolph: Gees Bend Quilts and Beyond
Mary Lee Bendolph Lecture
