EXHIBITION
Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
Grand Ambitions
Shaping a Regional Identity
Beauford and Joseph Delaney
The Knoxville 7
Bessie Harvey
Sponsors of Higher Ground
Mobile Guided Tours
Overview of Exhibition
Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee traces the evolution of artistic activity in Knoxville and its Appalachian environs from roughly the 1860s to the 1980s. Many of the featured artists spent their entire lives and careers in the area, while some moved away to follow their creative ambitions. Others came from outside the region, attracted by its natural beauty. Together, these artists’ works form the basis of a visual arts tradition that is both compelling and largely unheralded.
Higher Ground, the KMA’s flagship permanent exhibition celebrating the richness and diversity of East Tennessee’s visual culture, was reimagined in the museum’s newly renovated entrance level galleries in the fall of 2023. The exhibition and accompanying 300 page catalog are organized into broad thematic sections that follow the period of Knoxville’s development into a vital commercial and cultural hub, from the emergence of the first professional arts community to the establishment of the area’s first major arts institutions.
Grand Ambitions: Forging an Arts Community
Grand Ambitions: Forging an Arts Community addresses the early formative period of a community of professional artists and their dialogue with contemporary currents of American art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This section is built around pioneering Impressionist Catherine Wiley, who trained in the Northeast and returned to Knoxville to encourage the development of a true artistic community along with Lloyd Branson and Hugh Tyler, and helped organize some of the first large art exhibitions in the South.
Shaping a Regional Identity: Mountain Vistas and Urban Life
Shaping a Regional Identity: Mountain Vistas and Urban Life includes visual representations of a complex and changing region by homegrown and visiting artists over the course of the twentieth century. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Danny Lyon document the hardscrabble reality of industrial Knoxville’s working class, echoing the photographs of Lewis Wickes Hine and Charles E. Krutch that were commissioned by the Tennessee Valley Authority and that record new land-management efforts in rural East Tennessee. In stark contrast are the majestic landscape paintings and photographs by an array of artists, including Ansel Adams, Rudolph Ingerle, and Charles C. Krutch, lured by the beauty of the nearby Great Smoky Mountains.
Beauford and Joseph Delaney: Expatriate Masters
Beauford and Joseph Delaney: Expatriate Masters, the physical and conceptual centerpiece of the new Higher Ground installation, celebrates the achievements of the immensely talented brothers who left their Knoxville hometown and eventually earned national and international acclaim for their work. Thanks to the depth and richness of the KMA’s holdings by Beauford Delaney, arguably the most important artist East Tennessee ever produced, visitors can assess a broad segment of the painter’s evolution, with particular emphasis given to the ethereal abstract paintings of his fertile Paris years of the 1950s and 1960s—works once described by his protégé James Baldwin as evidence of the painter’s “metamorphosis into freedom.” Joseph Delaney’s inventive compositions vividly capture the turbulent character of modern life in a manner that also conveys in bold terms his passion for the physical act of painting. Balancing elements of descriptive realism and gestural abstraction, Joseph effectively conveys a vibrant modern world in transition while representing an unvarnished record of his energetic painterly process.
The Knoxville 7
The Knoxville 7 celebrates the adventurous works produced by a group of progressive artists united by their common interest in cultivating modernism in East Tennessee during the 1950s and 1960s. C. Kermit “Buck” Ewing (1910–1976), arrived from Pittsburgh to head the University of Tennessee’s new art department. Ewing recruited a group of progressive younger artists—initially Carl Sublett (1919–2008), Walter Hollis “Holly” Stevens (1927–1980), and Robert Birdwell (1924–2016)—each of whom experimented with contemporary modes, and produced what are likely the first abstract art works in East Tennessee. They eventually became known as “The Knoxville 7” with the recruitment of like-minded artists Joanna Higgs [later Ross] (b. 1934), Richard Clarke (1923–1997), and sculptor Philip Nichols (1931–2019).
Bessie Harvey
Bessie Harvey, chronologically the latest section, is dedicated to the self-taught visionary artist based in Alcoa, who achieved widespread national recognition for her spiritually charged creations at the end of her life, late in the twentieth century. Bessie Harvey (1929–1994) used little more than roots, sticks, shells, and paint to assemble a diverse cast of spirited figures—biblical characters, African ancestors, mythological creatures—infused with uplifting messages of human perseverance and divine compassion.
SPONSORS OF HIGHER GROUND
We gratefully acknowledge the many contributions made to support Higher Ground in honor of KMA Executive Director David L. Butler’s tenure (2006-2023).
Mr. & Mrs. Stephen W. Bailey
Ms. Martha E. Begalla
Melissa & Randy Burleson
Mr. & Mrs. Robert Heller
Molly & Bob Joy
The Estate of Daniel McGehee
The Estate of William S. Rukeyser
The Estate of Sarah Stowers
Mr. & Mrs. Charles A. Wagner III
Ms. Melanie C. Wood
All Occasions Party Rentals
The Brewington Family
Stephanie & John Case, Case Auctions
Mary Hale Corkran
Mr. Louis Gauci & Mrs. Kathy Franzel-Gauci
The Guild of the KMA
Ms. Alexandra Rosen & Mr. Donald Cooney
KMA Art House
Ms. Sandi Burdick & Mr. Tom Boyd
Ms. C. Gayle Burnett & Mr. John Atchley
Dr. & Mrs. David A. Cox
Ms. Lane Hays
Dr. & Mrs. Russ Johnston
Mr. & Mrs. James Jones
Ms. Vicki Kinser
The Lederer Family
McCarty Holsaple McCarty
Mrs. Lindsay Y. McDonough and Mr. Robert S. Young
Dr. Kimbro Maguire and Dr. Penny Lynch
Ms. Susana Navarro
Beth and Bill Neilson
Townes L. Osborn and Robert Marquis
Mr. and Mrs. Jan Peters
Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Samples
Mr. and Mrs. L. Caesar Stair III
Mr. John Z.C. Thomas
Ms. Jackie Wilson
Mr. and Mrs. W. Robert Alcorn, Jr.
Ms. Pandy Anderson
Mr. and Mrs. Steve Apking
Mr. and Mrs. Gary Bentley
Mrs. Barbara Bernstein
Mr. and Mrs. Al Blakley
Mr. and Mrs. Morgan Bromley
Mr. Ken Cagle and Mr. Ben Keyser
Dr. Alan Solomon and Ms. Andrea Cartwright
Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson Chapman
Mr. and Mrs. Dan Chips
Mr. and Mrs. Geoff de Rohan
Dr. and Mrs. R. Kent Farris
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas G. Ford
Ms. Susan French
Ms. Jenny Glover
Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Hartley
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hawthorne
Ms. Cathy Hill
Ms. Suzanne Jack and Mr. Tom Scott
Mr. Richard Jansen–Monaco
Mr. and Mrs. Garrett Jernigan
Knoxville Design Collective
Ms. Maribel W. Koella and Mr. Chuck Jones
Mr. and Mrs. Larry Leibowitz
Ms. Sheryl Linck and Mr. Garry Conklin
Dr. and Mrs. Reinhold Mann
Carole and Bob Martin
Dr. Angela Masini and Mr. Terry Grove
MoxCar Marketing + Communications
Ms. Allison Page and Mr. Connor Coffey
Mr. and Mrs. Ken Parent
Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Park
Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey D. Peters
Mr. Todd Richesin and Mr. Bobby Brown
Dr. Bernard S. Rosenblatt
Patricia and Alan Rutenberg
Ms. Susan Seymour
Tommy and Tiffany Siler
Mr. James F. Smith, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Steer
Ms. Merikay Waldvogel and Mr. Jerry Ledbetter
Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Wolpert
ADDITIONAL SPONSORS
