Educator Resources
EAST TENNESSEE REGIONAL STUDENT ART EXHIBITION
Welcome to the 20th Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, presented by the Knoxville Museum of Art. The ETRSAE showcases the strength and diversity of art education programs in East Tennessee, celebrates talented middle and high school students, and supports arts education. This annual exhibition provides the opportunity for students to participate in a juried exhibition and to have their artworks displayed in a professional art museum environment. We are so delighted by the quality of the artworks, the dedication of the teachers, and the commitment of the museum staff to establish a museum/school tradition for our community.
Public, private, and home schools in grades 6–12 in 32 East Tennessee counties are invited to submit up to 15 artworks per teacher. Categories for the competition include ceramic, drawing, video production, mixed media, painting, computer graphics, sculpture, digital or traditional photography, and printmaking. Each participating school is represented by one work of art.
The Best-in-Show winner receives a Purchase Award of $500, and the artwork becomes a permanent part of the collection of Mr. James Dodson, on loan to the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Education Collection. The Best-in-Middle School winner receives $250. The teacher of the student who is selected as this year’s Best-in-Show and Best in Middle School will receive a $100 Art Educator Award from the Knoxville Museum of Art. Each student in the exhibition receives a certificate of participation. The “Best” in each of the 10 categories receives a cash award and a museum family membership.
As part of the 20th Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition, we will have a special exhibition of the Best in Show works of the past exhibitions from the personal collection of Jim Dodson.
Art2Go Travel Cases – call for availability
Meet the Masters
Arts-Based Data Visualization Project
The Arts-Based Data Visualization Project is a STEAM project. It is intended to inspire and support Grade 4-8 students’ data visualizations across arts and STEM learning contexts. It draws upon the work of contemporary artists, who engage with data in fresh and innovative ways: embracing nontraditional materials, immersive qualities, and visual metaphor to contextualize data. These artists’ data visualizations can serve as inspiration for students’ own data sensemaking and endeavors to communicate information and ideas to the public.
Learn more: cehhs.utk.edu/tpte/arts-based-data-visualization-project
Beauford Delaney Lesson Plan
Knoxville-born Beauford Delaney is widely considered to be among the greatest American modern painters of the 20th 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.
Click on the video link below to see how students will use a variety of art-making techniques, materials, and processes to create a self-portrait that reflects the style of Beauford Delaney.
Yaddo, 1950
Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and went on to become one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. His extraordinary talent was recognized early by Lloyd Branson (1853–1925), Knoxville’s first full-time professional artist, who mentored both Beauford and his brother, Joseph. In 1929, Delaney moved to New York City, where he became part of a vibrant artistic and literary circle that included Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller. Among his closest relationships was his lifelong friendship with writer James Baldwin, whose presence and ideas deeply shaped Delaney’s life and work.
Yaddo was created during a residency at the renowned artists’ retreat north of New York City, which Delaney attended at Baldwin’s encouragement. The pastel composition captures the interior of the retreat’s greenhouse, transforming it into a luminous sanctuary of light, structure, and quiet contemplation.
Image: Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris), Yaddo, 1950, pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art, 2017 purchase with funds provided by the Rachael Patterson Young Art Acquisition Reserve
Charlie Parker Yardbird, 1958
Click on the video link below to see an art project inspired by the painting Charlie Parker Yardbird (1958) by Beauford Delaney. Delaney was one of several prominent modern artists interested in combining color and pattern to suggest the sensory experience of sound.
Image: Beauford Delaney, Charlie Parker Yardbird, 1958, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (100.3 x 74.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James F. Dicke Family, 2013.89.3
Untitled (Abstract Circles) circa 1956
Click on the video link below for the latest project inspired by Beauford Delaney’s Untitled (Abstract Circles). This piece expresses the artist’s new objective by way of exuberant, densely layered loops of pastel color that pirouette across the surface and appear to spin outward beyond its borders. The image’s iridescent hues may have been inspired by the stained glass windows Delaney observed at the Chartres Cathedral.
Image: Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris), Untitled (Abstract Circles), circa 1956, pastel and mixed media on paper, Knoxville Museum of Art, 2018 Delaney purchase
Charles Krutch
Click on the video link below for the latest project inspired by artist Charles Krutch. Regarded as one of East Tennessee’s first painters to specialize in scenes of the Smoky Mountains, Krutch earned the nickname “Corot of the South” for his soft, atmospheric watercolor and oil landscape paintings of the mountain range that served as his sole focus.
Image: Charles Krutch (South Carolina 1849-1934 Knoxville), Untitled (Chimney Tops), late 1920s, watercolor on paper, 13 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art, 2008 bequest of the estate of Frank B. Galyon
CATHERINE WILEY
Catherine Wiley (Coal Creek [now Rocky Top], Tennessee 1879-1958 Norristown, Pennsylvania) was one of the most active, accomplished, and influential artists in Knoxville during the early twentieth century. She taught art at the University of Tennessee, helped organize area art exhibitions, and was a driving force in the Nicholson Art League, a prominent local art association. She returned to Knoxville following her studies in New York and brought with her a mastery of Impressionism. Wiley specialized in scenes of women amid their daily lives rendered in thick, brightly colored pigment. Morning features a more expressive variety of brushwork often seen in her late paintings. Wiley’s work is represented in museum collections around the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her promising career ended in 1926 when she was confined to a psychiatric hospital where she was without access to her studio supplies. The exact nature of the artist’s illness remains unconfirmed.
Image: Catherine Wiley (Coal Creek [now Rocky Top], Tennessee 1879-1958 Norristown, Pennsylvania), Morning, 1921, oil on canvas, 47 x 41 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art, 1972 gift of the Women’s Committee of the Dulin Gallery
FRANK STELLA
Click on the video link below for the latest project inspired by internationally renowned artist Frank Stella’s “Circuit” series, which he produced during the early 1980s. The artist assembled and painted salvaged metal scraps left over from earlier art projects to create a groundbreaking synthesis of painting and sculpture.
Image: Frank Stella (Malden, Massachusetts, 1936-2024 New York), Shards II, 1982, acrylic and oil stick on etched, cut and assembled aluminum, 40 x 45 x 6 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art, 2014 gift of June and Rob Heller
STUART NETSKY
This project is inspired by Hard, Fast and Beautiful which is part of Stuart Netsky’s series of abstract paintings on aluminum. Netsky pours enamel sign paint on a smooth metal surface, creating rich, colorful planes of color swirling together. You can do your own version of this beautiful painting with simple materials at home.
Image: Stuart Netsky (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1956; lives and works in Philadelphia), Hard, Fast and Beautiful, 2005, sign enamel paint and resin on aluminum, 60 x 60 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art, 2006 purchase with funds provided by the KMA Collectors Circle in memory of Betsy Worden