Past Exhibitions
Thorne Rooms
Thorne Rooms
The Knoxville Museum of Art's Thorne Rooms are among America's most well-known miniature diorama groups.
Jane Cassidy Drink Up the Moon
Jane Cassidy Drink Up the Moon
A unique video projection installation by multi-disciplinary artist Jane Cassidy.
Courtney Egan: Eco Tone with Natori Green
Courtney Egan: Eco Tone with Natori Green
Courtney Egan’s projection-based sculptural installations mix botanical themes with shards of technology.
Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR
Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR
Tennessee's first statewide contemporary art event with a core-theme of "RE-PAIR". The KMA's Triennial presentation will feature a thought-provoking selection of objects created by a diverse, intergenerational slate of 12 international, national, and local artists.
Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking
Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking
This exhibition celebrates the history of Landfall Press, one of America’s leading printmaking workshops. Landfall operated out of Chicago for thirty-five years and, in 2004, relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it continues to serve new generations. The featured selection of approximately 40 prints represents the broad spectrum of distinguished artists who have collaborated with Landfall, and the dynamic range of innovative printmaking approaches for which the legendary workshop is known.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2022
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2022
This annual exhibition presented by the Knoxville Museum of Art is designed to gather the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region and have their artworks displayed in a professional art museum environment.
Radcliffe Bailey: Passages
Radcliffe Bailey: Passages
Working primarily between the mediums of sculpture and painting, noted contemporary artist Radcliffe Bailey (born 1968) incorporates found objects and photographs into richly layered and textured compositions that address history, ancestry, migration, and collective memory.
Currents: Women Artists from the KMA Collection
Currents: Women Artists from the KMA Collection
This exhibition, a special edition of the installation "Currents: Recent Art from East Tennessee and Beyond", celebrates the creative achievements of contemporary women artists from the U.S. and abroad as represented in the Knoxville Museum of Art.
Women Artists: Highlights from the Hunter Museum of American Art
Women Artists: Highlights from the Hunter Museum of American Art
This exhibition celebrates the creative achievements of contemporary women artists from the U.S. and abroad as represented in the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga.
Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Drawn from the multifaceted collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, "Global Asias" examines the cosmopolitan, playful and subtly subversive characteristics of contemporary Asian and Asian American art. The exhibition highlights the work of sixteen artists of Asian heritage who draw on a rich array of motifs, techniques, and cultural motivations to construct diverse “Asias” in a modern global context. Among the artists included are Kwang-Yun Chun, Dinq Q. Le, Jun Kaneko, Hung Liu, Takashi Murakami, Do Ho Suh, and Barbara Takenaga.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2021
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2021
This annual exhibition presented by the Knoxville Museum of Art is designed to gather the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region and have their artworks displayed in a professional art museum environment.
Under Construction: Collage from The Mint Museum
Under Construction: Collage from The Mint Museum
Featuring nearly 70 works by more than 30 international artists, Under Construction explores the growth and impact of the collage technique from the 1950s to the present.
A View of the City: Knoxville
A View of the City: Knoxville
A View of the City features more than 20 paintings and works on paper of Knoxville and vicinity by artists from East Tennessee and beyond representing the city and outlying areas during and after the 1940s.
Undercurrents: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art
Undercurrents: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art
More than 20 paintings and works on paper representing the exciting growth in the KMA’s contemporary collection through museum purchases and donations from artists and collectors far and wide.
A Lasting Imprint: Rendering Rhythm and Motion in the Art of Black Mountain College
A Lasting Imprint: Rendering Rhythm and Motion in the Art of Black Mountain College
Drawn from the extensive holdings of the Asheville Art Museum, A Lasting Imprint will feature a selection of more than 50 prints, textiles, drawings, paintings and sculptures reflecting time-based themes of movement and music by some of the most adventurous and influential artists associated with Black Mountain College.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2020
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2020
This collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association is designed to gather the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region.
Homegrown
Homegrown
Homegrown is a site-specific outdoor installation by designers Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann that examines potential applications for Tennessee’s invasive plant species as productive building materials. Exhibition will be in the KMA South Garden.
Sculptural Objects from the KMA Collection
Sculptural Objects from the KMA Collection
A diverse selection of sculptural works, many small in scale, from the KMA collection. Some were acquired years ago and have been displayed many times, while others have rarely been shown or were recently acquired.
Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door
Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door
Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door includes 50+ paintings, works on paper, and unpublished archival material which examines the 38-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris) and writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2019
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2019
The East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition offers middle and high school students from around East Tennessee the opportunity to participate in a juried exhibition and to display their talents and be honored for their accomplishments in a professional art museum environment.
Whistler & Company: The Etching Revival
Whistler & Company: The Etching Revival
Expatriate American artist, James Abbot McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) played an essential role in the etching revival of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition "Whistler & Company" includes nearly a dozen works by Whistler accompanied by more than 50 etchings by some of his most accomplished American and European contemporaries.
Design By Time
Design By Time
Design by Time is the first exhibition to identify and bring together works from known and emerging designers, in the US and abroad, whose interest is in expressing the passage of time, a visual expression of life, through the design of objects. It represents the notion of the dynamic passage of time and how it can be expressed by a variety of design objects including textiles, carpets, ceramics, lighting fixtures, vessels, clocks, and furniture.
Lure of the Object: Art from the June and Rob Heller Collection
Lure of the Object: Art from the June and Rob Heller Collection
This exhibition includes a diverse selection of sculpture and paintings from a couple who are among Knoxville’s most active, adventurous, and philanthropic art collectors. Contemporary glass is a particular area of focus, and the exhibition includes works by William Morris, Bertil Vallien, Oben Abright, Dante Marioni, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Michael Janis, and Therman Statom. Complementing sculptural works are paintings by Jim Dine, Frank Stella, Christo, and Paul Jenkins. Organized by the KMA.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2018
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2018
This collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association is designed to gather the best student work grades 6-12 from a 32-county region; award winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.
Joseph Delaney: On The Move
Joseph Delaney: On The Move
Born in Knoxville to a minister-father, Joseph Delaney (1904-1991) and his brother Beauford (1901-1979) learned to draw on Sunday school cards at church and took art lessons with distinguished local artist Lloyd Branson. Both brothers set out on their own in the 1920s, with Joseph settling in New York by 1930. There he studied with regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at New York’s Art Students League with a group of classmates that included Jackson Pollock. Delaney spent the next 56 years painting portraits, figure studies, and lively scenes of urban life in lower Manhattan. On the Move will include key works from major segments of Delaney’s career designed to represent the winding path of his artistic journey. A small selection of the artist’s drawings, letters, and poetry will also be included to shed light on aspects of his inner life and creativity. Organized by the KMA.
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection
Featuring more than 40 paintings from the extensive holdings of the Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina, this exhibition examines the history of the Impressionist movement and its influence on art created in and about the American South. Artists represented in the exhibition include Kate Freeman Clark, Elliott Daingerfield, Gilbert Gaul, Alfred Hutty, Rudolph Ingerle, Willie Betty Newman, Alice Huger Smith, William Posey Silva, and Catherine Wiley—several of whom were active in East Tennessee. Organized by the Johnson Collection.
Press Ahead: Contemporary Prints Gifted by Helen and Russell Novak
Press Ahead: Contemporary Prints Gifted by Helen and Russell Novak
In 2015, Chicago collectors Helen and Russell Novak made the single largest and most important gift of art to the KMA’s contemporary print collection in the museum’s history. Press Ahead: Contemporary Prints Gifted by Helen and Russell Novak represents the official unveiling of this remarkable gift. The exhibition features 38 works by leading contemporary artists from around the world including Roger Brown, John Buck, Christo, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Sol LeWitt, and Barbara Takenaga William T. Wiley, and by younger artists such as Brad Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Tom Huck, Jiha Moon, and Hans Schabus. Some artists are leading printmakers while others work primarily in other media, but became interested in collaborating with master printers in order to realize their ideas in print-based formats. The KMA’s selection includes great examples of each artist’s work, prints produced in small editions, and those representing a broad range of printmaking tech...
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2017
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2017
The Knoxville Museum of Art and the Tennessee Art Education Association present the East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition. The East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition is open to students in grades 6-12, attending public, private, or home schools in 32 counties across East Tennessee. The best-in-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. Since 2005, the East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition has presented the work of nearly 4,000 students who have competed for a total of $7 million in scholarships made available to eligible juniors and seniors by colleges and universities from around the nation. This event is made possible by the generosity of presenting sponsor Regal Entertainment Group with additional sponsorship from Home Federal Bank, Pharma Packaging Solutions, Emerson Process Management, and Ann and Steve...
American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists’ Colony
American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists' Colony
This exhibition examines the key role played by artist colonies around the country in the development of American Impressionism. It features more than 50 oil paintings and works on paper dating from the 1880s through the 1940s by leading artists of the movement such as William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Julian Alden Weir, John Twachtman, Chauncey Ryder, Frank W. Benson, William Paxton along with expatriate artists such as Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent.
Gathering Light: Works by Beauford Delaney from the KMA Collection
Gathering Light: Works by Beauford Delaney from the KMA Collection
Gathering Light celebrates the Knoxville Museum of Art’s progress in building a representative collection of works by Knoxville-born Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), considered by many to be among the greatest American abstract painters of the twentieth century. Despite battling poverty, prejudice, and mental illness, Delaney achieved an international reputation for his portraits, scenes of city life, and free-form abstractions marked by intense colors, bold contours, and expressive surfaces. Gathering Light is part of a larger effort to bring long-overdue attention to Delaney’s legacy in his hometown.
Virtual Views: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation
Virtual Views: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation
Drawn from the extensive Chicago-based collection of Carl and Marilynn Thoma, Virtual Views explores the growing importance of electronic new media in contemporary art as seen in the work of artists who are pioneers in the use of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), LCD (liquid crystal display), and computer-driven imagery.
Jered Sprecher: Outside In
Jered Sprecher: Outside In
Knoxville-based artist Jered Sprecher (born Lincoln, Nebraska 1976) is among a generation of contemporary painters exploring anew the creative territory between figuration and abstraction. He describes himself as a “hunter and gatherer” who draws inspiration from an eclectic array of image sources including graffiti, architecture, cut gemstones, family photographs, and ancient frescoes. From these sources, the artist generates a broad spectrum of creative ideas and compositional possibilities that fuel his studio practice.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2016
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2016
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 32-county region; award winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.
Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South from the Johnson Collection
Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South from the Johnson Collection
Romantic Spirits features more than 30 nineteenth century masterworks from the renowned Spartanburg, South Carolina-based collection. The paintings present an evocative glimpse into nineteenth-century Southern life, and reveal the importance of oral tradition and “a sense of place” in the development of the Romantic Movement in the South. The exhibition seeks to present a balanced view of how Romanticism evolved in the North and the South, the genre’s ties to Europe, and how culture, customs, education, and travel influenced each artist. It also reveals connections between featured painters and their contemporaries, specifically authors and poets such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among others.
FULL STOP: Tom Burckhardt
FULL STOP: Tom Burckhardt
FULL STOP is an elaborate 9 x 18 x 18-foot installation fabricated entirely of cardboard and ink by New York-based contemporary painter Tom Burckhardt. It takes the form of a mythical modern artist’s studio, complete with hundreds of tools, paint brushes and other supplies each constructed with great care. FULL STOP examines the artist’s inner sanctum, and explores notions of creativity, inspiration, and the lives of individuals who helped shape the art world of today. Organized by the Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio.
Contemporary Focus 2016: John Douglas Powers
Contemporary Focus 2016: John Douglas Powers
This annual exhibition is designed to represent the most adventurous work being made by emerging artists living and working in East Tennessee. This year’s exhibition features Artist John Douglas Powers. Drawing from areas as diverse as natural history, architecture and the history of technology, John Douglas Powers investigates the intersection of cinema, engineering, computation, music and physical space. By employing motion and sound in his work, he incorporates the passage of time as a compositional element in an attempt to examine abstract and often intangible topics such as memory, thought, emotion, and language.
Knoxville Seven
Knoxville Seven
This exhibition examines an influential group of progressive artists in Knoxville who energized East Tennessee’s art scene between 1955 and 1965. The group included C. Kermit “Buck” Ewing, Carl Sublett, Walter Stevens, Robert Birdwell Joanne Higgs, Richard Clarke, and Philip Nichols. While Sublett and Stevens shared an exclusive interest in the landscape as a point of reference for their abstractions, Birdwell and Ewing often found inspiration in urban settings and the human figure. Sometimes they exhibited as a foursome and other times as the “Knoxville Seven” with Higgs, Clarke and Nichols. Each maintained an individual style and utilized varying degrees of abstraction. Together, they together produced what are likely the first abstract paintings in Tennessee and helped establish a foothold for modern art in the region. Organized by the KMA.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2015
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2015
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 32-county region; award winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.
The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation
The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation
The Paternal Suit consists of over 100 paintings, prints, and objects created by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist F. Scott Hess, presented as legitimate historical artifacts, and supported by photographs, documents, and historical ephemera. Each object and artwork bears a fictitious artist’s name and detailed provenance and has been executed in the style of the century from which it supposedly originates. Sculpture, ceramics, furniture, toys, newspaper clippings, historic photographs, guns, and costumes advance an elaborate storyline whose subtext is the seven-year old artist’s abandonment by his own father after a parental divorce. Through the prism of his ancestry, Hess examines the impact of false history and deception within each generation and throughout society as a whole, and questions the authority of these perceived “truths.” Organized by the Halsey Institute, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston School of the Arts.
Evan Roth: Intellectual Property Donor
Evan Roth: Intellectual Property Donor
Intellectual Property Donor is the first major U.S. one-person presentation of the artist’s pioneering, multi-faceted and interactive installations, custom software, prints, sculptures and websites. Roth, a self-professed “hacktivist” artist, is interested in uses of technology in popular culture and the urban environment. He playfully transforms existing information systems into public, often political, statements. Blurring the line between artist and hacker, the exhibition challenges gallery visitors to consider how everyday life intersects with virtual reality and how viral media can become high art. Organized by Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
LIFT: Contemporary Printmaking in the Third Dimension
LIFT: Contemporary Printmaking in the Third Dimension
This exhibition examines the work of established and emerging international contemporary artists who use a variety of strategies to bring a sculptural dimension to printmaking. Some achieve this by using centuries-old methods while others take advantage of cutting-edge digital tools. These include low relief printing or embossing, printing on mold-cast paper forms, post-print cutting, scoring, folding, etc., art installations that use repeated print elements, relief printing through repeated print runs to accumulate layers of material, and printing out imagery that is applied to 3D forms. The featured artists are Enrique Chagoya, Lesley Dill, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Gober, Red Grooms, Hideki Kimura, Nicola Lopez, Oscar Munoz, Leslie Mutchler, Marilene Oliver, Dieter Roth, Graciela Sacco, and Jonathan Stanish. Organized by the KMA and presented in conjunction with the Printmaking Program, School of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contemporary Focus 2015
Contemporary Focus 2015
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2014
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2014
The Tennessee Art Education Association is please to continue its partnership with the Knoxville Museum of Art to present the Ninth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, featuring artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. This competition provides the opportunity for students to participate in a juried exhibition and to have their artworks displayed in a professional art museum environment. The student art exhibition provides an excellent competitive arena for young artists.
This World Is Not My Home
This World Is Not My Home
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.
Leonardo Silaghi: 3 Paintings
Leonardo Silaghi: 3 Paintings
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.
Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass
Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass
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.
Sight and Feeling: Photographs by Ansel Adams
Sight and Feeling: Photographs by Ansel Adams
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.
Contemporary Focus 2014
Contemporary Focus 2014
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2013
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2013
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.
Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper
Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper
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.
Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art
Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2012
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2012
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 2012
Contemporary Focus 2012
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.
Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go
Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go
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.
Beverly Semmes: Starcraft
Beverly Semmes: Starcraft
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.
Streetwise: Masters of 60’s Photography
Streetwise: Masters of 60's Photography
This exhibition highlights the work of a group of eight American photographers who focused their lenses on rapid social and political changes that transformed their nation during the turbulent 1960’s. The featured images present a realistic, sometimes dire, view of America ranging from the “outlaw culture” of bikers and chain gangs, Boston’s red light district known as the Combat Zone, Black Panthers; the gritty streets and neighborhoods of New York, the politically charged South, and fringe communities and sub-cultures around the country.
Several Silences
Several Silences
Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence – meditative, ambient, memorial, etc. – calling attention to the rarity of the absence of sound in our growing “culture of distraction.” Works range from Ryan Gander’s 100 laser-etched glass spheres to Gran Fury’s neon sculpture to Troy Brauntuch’s shadowy drawings on cotton. Organized by the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago.
Horizons
Horizons
Horizons is an installation by noted Icelandic artist Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir (pronounced Stay-nun Thorens-daughter). The exhibition includes 12 androgynous, life-sized iron figures in the KMA’s South Garden. Each is unique in pose and expression, and has a polished glass band inserted in its torso. The artist explains this juxtaposition of glass and iron, “The color of the iron signifies their primal quality—as if they are emerging from the earth” while “Glass as a material has a lot of different connotations. It can be fragile, yet dangerous. It can be translucent, or solid . . . It's like water, but also like air.”
Liquid Light: Watercolors from the KMA Collection
Liquid Light: Watercolors from the KMA Collection
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2011
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2011
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.
After the Fall
After the Fall
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.
FAX
FAX
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.
Contemporary Focus 2011 John Bissonette, Brian Jobe, and Greg Pond
Contemporary Focus 2011 John Bissonette, Brian Jobe, and Greg Pond
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.
Kwang-Young Chun Aggregations, New Work
Kwang-Young Chun Aggregations, New Work
Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun began work on his series of Aggregations in the 1990s. Today, he is recognized internationally for these sculptural forms.
Anne Wilson: Local Industry
Anne Wilson: Local Industry
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)
Ai Weiwei Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE)
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.
Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments
Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments
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.
Peter Sarkisian: Video Works, 1996 – 2008
Peter Sarkisian: Video Works, 1996 – 2008
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2010
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2010
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.
David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
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.
Contemporary Focus 2010: Emily Ward Bevins, Nick DeFord, Evan Meaney
Contemporary Focus 2010: Emily Ward Bevins, Nick DeFord, Evan Meaney
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.
Jane South: Shifting Structures
Jane South: Shifting Structures
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.
Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South
Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South
Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period.
Uncertain Terrain: Selections from the KMA Collection
Uncertain Terrain: Selections from the KMA Collection
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.
BLOOM: Brown + Scofield
BLOOM: Brown + Scofield
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.
Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave
Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave
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.
Bill FitzGibbons: Knoxville Colorline
Bill FitzGibbons: Knoxville Colorline
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.
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2009
East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition 2009
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.
Threads of Perception: Devorah Sperber
Threads of Perception: Devorah Sperber
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.”
Anton Vidokle: Exhibition as School
Anton Vidokle: Exhibition as School
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
Contemporary Focus 2009: Hunt Clark, Patricia Tinajero, David Wolff
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
Arms, Legs, Feet, Heart & Soul: The Cumberland Furniture Guild
This exhibition celebrates the surprising variety and rich talents of the finest furniture makers currently residing in Middle and East Tennessee.
Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation
Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation
Drawn from the rich archive at the John Kobal Foundation in London, this exhibition focuses on the stars, the sets, and the scenes created by the film industry and memorialized by the most important photographers who worked in Hollywood from 1920 to 1960.
Josh Simpson: A Visionary Journey in Glass
Josh Simpson: A Visionary Journey in Glass
Josh Simpson: A Visionary Journey in Glass follows the career arc of this self-taught master from his early traditional pieces to the spectacular tour-de-force multi-layered works of the present.
On a Mission: KMA Collectors Circle Acquisitions
On a Mission: KMA Collectors Circle Acquisitions
On a Mission represents the first-ever display of the more than 20 works acquired for KMA by the museum’s Collectors Circle.
Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art
Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art
Tradition/Innovation focuses national attention on the creative contributions of master craftspeople and traditional artists in the South.
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts and Beyond
Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts and Beyond
Mary Lee Bendolph’s extraordinary talent first garnered national attention when her work was featured among that of other quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the 2002 blockbuster exhibition and book The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the abstract quilts from this tiny, isolated African American community prompted a rethinking of commonly accepted artistic categories.