Calendar of Events

Join us on First Friday from 5-8PM for the Opening Reception of "Voices of Appalachia and Selected Works" by Brian Melton. The exhibition offers a true glimpse into the heart of this region through the hands of someone who calls it home. Portraits of Appalachian icons like the legendary coach Pat Summitt, the Heartland Series’ Bill Landry, John Henry, Sequoyah, and Davy Crockett hang alongside tropes like the old-timer, volunteer, midwife, coal miner, longhunter, fiddler, farmer, pastor, and teacher.

The exhibition includes 15 wall-mounted cottonwood bark sculptures alongside several large-scale free-standing sculptures, woodblock prints, and a recreation of Melton’s studio.

Masks are required, regardless of vaccination status.
Gallery Hours: M-F 10AM-5PM
Dogwood Arts, 123 W. Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN 37902. Information: 865-637-4561, www.dogwoodarts.com

Tri-Star Arts announces a new exhibition in their Golden Chain Gallery project space located at the historic Candoro Marble Building. Emotional Architecture, composed of 5 new paintings by Zahar Vaks (Brooklyn, NY) opens on Friday, November 5, and will run through Saturday, December 11, 2021. This site-specific exhibition has been installed within the unusual architectural space of a steep wooden stairwell. A public reception will be held on Friday, November 5 from 5:00- 8:00 pm with the artist in attendance.

These exhibitions will be open to the public alongside iconic spaces within the Candoro Marble Building (located in the Vestal neighborhood of Knoxville). The use of masks and social distancing is encouraged.

Candoro Marble Building, 4450 Candora Drive, Knoxville, TN 37920. Hours: Tue-Sat 11-5. Information: https://tristararts.org/visit

The public is invited to the opening reception of the Art Guild at Fairfield Glade’s annual People’s Choice Art Show. This free event will take place on Friday, November 5, 2021 from 5-7 p.m. at the Art Center, 451 Lakeview Dr. in Fairfield Glade. All in attendance can view a wide variety of show entries and cast their ballots for their favorite artworks. If unable to attend the reception, the public can come during regular hours between November 6 through the 25 to vote. Atlas Real Estate of Crossville, Tennessee is sponsoring this event.
Wine and non-alcoholic beverages will be served during the November 5th opening reception. Attendees are encouraged to wear masks and practice social distancing.

Cash prizes will be awarded to first through fifth place winners at the awards ceremony on December 3, 2021. The popular tradition of handmade award ribbons will continue, thanks to a committee of talented Art Guild artists who create the ribbons. Each ribbon will be a treasured small piece of art for the winning artists.

Hours: Mon-Sat 9 AM - 4 PM. Art Guild at Fairfield Glade at the Plateau Creative Arts Center, 451 Lakeview Drive, Fairfield Glade, TN 38558. Information: 931-707-7249, www.artguildfairfieldglade.net

NOVEMBER Featured Artists
Roger Hankins – Oil Painting
Jennifer Lindsay – Beaded Jewelry

First Friday Reception: November 5, 5:30 – 9:00 pm

Roger Hankins, Oil Painter
Roger Hankins, born in Shreveport, LA, after World War II, is the sixth generation of family in Greene County, TN. He trained as an architect at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and graduated with honors in 1970. His architectural experiences included teaching at the School of Architecture, working in New York City, and partnering design build construction and private consulting. Good design brought within designated budgets were his goal and trademark. In the mid 1990’s Roger turned his attention to fine crafts, where he once again excelled in design and building. His architectural birdhouses were exhibited and sought after by collectors attending fine art and craft shows nationwide, including The Smithsonian Craft Show. His work was accepted into the highly regarded Southern Highlands Craft Guild. Pursuing his love of oil painting, he took private classes under a noted local artist and returned to university to earn a minor in fine art. Roger’s distinctive brush work and compositional excellence make his oil painting highly sought to grace the walls of homes and businesses through out the region.

Jennifer Lindsay, Beaded Jewelry
Artist Jennifer Lindsay fashions unique, one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces using various beading techniques and imported seed beads, focal beads, semi-precious stones or crystals. She says that she gets her inspiration “from everywhere-architecture, gardens and historical customs.”

Closed on Thanksgiving Day; open Mondays in November.

Art Market Gallery, 422 S. Gay St, Knoxville, TN 37902. Hours: M-Sa 11-6, Su 1-6. Information: 865-525-5265, www.artmarketgallery.net, www.Facebook.com/ArtMarketGallery

Awaken Coffee will host an opening reception for artists Allen Minecci Friday, Nov. 5, from 6-8 pm.

“Being lost has been a theme for my life, on multiple levels. I bring that energy into my art by making things I’ve never seen before but like to imagine existing somewhere out there in the infinite expanse of everything. On one level, I make art to bridge the gap between our limited 3D worldview and the multi-D reality in which we exist.” -Allen

Please join us for some amazing art, light refreshments, and of course great coffee!

Awaken Coffee, 125 W Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN 37902. Info: 865-951-0427 or https://www.facebook.com/awakencoffeeoldcity/

The gallery will be closed on November 25 and 26 for Thanksgiving.
Reception: Friday, November 5, 5-8pm

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, JAMES LITTLE (b. 1952) received a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art (1974) and then an MFA from Syracuse University (1976). Since the 1970s, the work of James Little has been extensively exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Among his awards and honors, Little has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. In 2016, Little was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create public artwork for the Long Island Rail Road’s new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station.

Masks are required at the UT Downtown Gallery. Thank you for helping to keep our community safe!

Open Wednesday - Friday 11am - 6pm and Saturdays from 10am - 3pm. UT Downtown Gallery, 106 S. Gay St, Knoxville, TN 37902. Information: 865-673-0802, http://web.utk.edu/~downtown

Bennett is proud to present Marga Hayes McBride’s Portrayals and Scott Duce’s Blue Smoke, a showcase of new work by Marga Hayes McBride and Scott Duce.

Marga Hayes McBride is a multi-media artist based in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied visual arts at the University of Tennessee and the Mesa Community College in Arizona. Marga has worked for various galleries throughout Tennessee as Gallery Assistant, Manager, and Director. Marga’s dedication to the art world in Tennessee is evident in her body of work, which spans multiple decades and contains themes of memory, spirituality, and nature. Marga’s art has brought her to exhibitions across the country, including installations at children’s’ hospitals in Arizona and Tennessee.

Blue Smoke presents Scott Duce’s work. Scott is a landscape painter based in New York. He has had nine previous solo exhibitions here at Bennett and we are proud to welcome him back. Scott studied fine arts at the University of Utah and Boston University. Scott’s work has challenged and reimagined classical landscape painting through his work with light, nature, and perspective. Scott’s international recognition has brought his work to various galleries across Europe, the United States, and South America. His work is also present in many collections across the world.

Bennett is a Knoxville institution founded in 1976 that operates at the intersection of fine art and interior design. Bennett is committed to the integration of art and life, and to the art world of East Tennessee. For further information, press, or sales inquiries please contact the Managing Director, Robert Shipley, at roberts@bennettgalleries.com, or the Gallery Associate, Clara Souvignier, at claras@bennettgalleries.com.

Bennett: 5308 Kingston Pike, Knoxville, TN 37919. Hours: M-Sa 10-5:30. Information: 865-584-6791, https://bennetthome.com/

A free reception with the artists will take place on Friday, November 5, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features local musicians Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca.

Shaping Maternal Lineage showcases my newest painted paper collage work. Having worked as a collage artist for years, this collection of cut paper work reveals a significant shift in my process and the resulting artwork. From my initial thoughts conceptualizing this show, I let the imagery reveal itself to me, instead of seeking out a theme or subject matter to focus on. Listening to that imagery, and therefore letting my intuition guide me, I became surrounded by a trove of lush velvety green, bright florals, and obscure kitchen tools. At first it seemed the connecting thread of this imagery was my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, but a deeper examination of these images that kept appearing revealed a deeper connection with my own mother’s kitchen, and a realization of the beauty and love passed down through simple, often uncelebrated, habits: trimming stems at the sink for the large vase filled perennially with cut flowers, lining the window sills with African violets, and meticulously chopping, sifting, grating, stirring, and perfecting each savory and sweet offering of nourishment.

After receiving degrees in English Literature and Art History, a love of storytelling and visual imagery led Lesley Eaton to pursue an MFA in illustration from Savannah College of Art and Design. After a brief detour through Georgia, she returned to Tennessee and has called Knoxville home for the past fourteen years. She has worked as an illustrator and collage artist and has recently begun exploring paint as a more expressive medium. However, she is always called back to painting and cutting up papers and considers collage a second language. She is drawn to the intuitiveness of moving cutout shapes around a canvas and loves the juxtaposition of expressively painted paper with sharp crisp edges of cut paper. Lesley and her husband have taken on their largest creative endeavor to date and are finishing up restoring a 178-year-old home in East TN while raising their four children, all of whom have been proficient with scissors from a young age. When she’s not creating, playing, or driving carpool, she likes to dream about their one-day garden and get her feet in a cold mountain stream as often as possible.

www.lesleyeaton.com
Instagram: @lesleyeatonart

Lesley Eaton’s collage work is featured as part of the Kolaj LIVE Knoxville, November 5-7, based at the Knoxville Museum of Art. This weekend-long event brings together artists, curators, and writers for a weekend of collage making, slideshows, exhibition visits, and storytelling that deepens our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. www.kolajinstitute.org/kolaj-live-knoxville.html

The exhibitions are on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. Please note, the Emporium will be closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27, for the holidays. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

A free reception with the artists will take place on Friday, November 5, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features local musicians Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca.

Olive Oliver seeks to explore the depths of abstract landscape painting. He uses an expressive style that involves bold colors, detailed lines, and texture. The subject he expounds upon is nature, specifically pertaining to the beauty of Tennessee landscapes and other places with awe-inspiring elevations and majestic valleys. His color choice draws from his own ancestral history: he is African American, and his ancestors have historical ties to the Congo, Benin Togo and the Ivory Coast, as well as parts of Eastern Europe and Ireland. Although he has not traveled to those places, he appreciates all the experiences that have brought him to this day and age, displaying a knowledge of self that is visible in each painting.

Olive Oliver is a self-taught abstract artist from Nashville, Tennessee. He is 28 years old and approaching his third year of painting. He is currently a resident of Knoxville, having moved here to experience the beauty of East Tennessee.

www.hymynameisoliveoliver.com
www.facebook.com/hymynameisoliveoliver

The exhibitions are on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. Please note, the Emporium will be closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27, for the holidays. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

A free reception with the artists will take place on Friday, November 5, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features local musicians Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca.

Martyn Strange (b. 1992) is a multimedia artist, musician, and writer who works primarily in painting, drawing, and prose writing. He has self-produced three albums of music under various monikers and has performed with numerous bands all over the U.S. He has also self-published three volumes of poetry as well as an illustrated zine, and has written several treatments and scripts for film and television. His first show of paintings opened at Bloom in Bristol, TN in May 2021.

My work examines the expanding relationships among celebrity, technology, social media, and advertising. It explores how certain images, phrases, colors, and ideas stay in our minds, often on a loop. Aesthetically, this is achieved through a pop art lens, in a style I have self-dubbed “New American Pop”, which reflects the flat, plastic sea of content that surrounds us day to day and embeds itself in our consciousness via social media and the internet. The images are replicated from print ads, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google searches. The phrases paired with them come from a variety of places: song lyrics, overheard conversation, commonly repeated sayings, or internet slang. The words are meant to represent the dissonance in the messaging of advertising and its repetitive nature, as well as impose new meanings on the images. My work is very much informed by the history of pop art and references the likes of Warhol, Ruscha, and Rauschenberg. I use primarily acrylics and gouache on primed wooden panels.

Instagram: @iammartynstrange

The exhibitions are on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. Please note, the Emporium will be closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27, for the holidays. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

A free reception with the artists will take place on Friday, November 5, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features local musicians Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca.

The Arts & Culture Alliance presents an exhibit of painting, photography, woodwork, forged metal, jewelry, sculpture, and more by 20 of the individual artists who are recipients of an FY22 Ann and Steve Bailey Opportunity Grant.
Artists in the exhibition include: Sarazen AnYin, Julie Belcher, Mike C. Berry, Karen Bertollini, Yvonne Dalschen, Amy Evans, Abby Fisher, Betsy Hobkirk, Risa Hricovsky, Linda King, Kathleen A. Kinney, Andreas Koschan, Megan Lingerfelt, Sarah Moore, Brigid Oesterling, Roberta Smashey, Alex Smith, Ben Smith, Joanna Warren and Brandon Woods.
In addition, the First Friday reception features music by Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca, who are also Bailey Opportunity grantees.

For more information these artists, please visit www.knoxalliance.com/baileyartists.

A part of the Arts & Heritage Fund, the Bailey Opportunity Grants provide financial and technical support to individual artists and small, professionally-oriented arts and culture organizations. The grants are designed to spur continued artistic and administrative growth in innovative, entrepreneurial artists and organizations at any stage in their development. Throughout the next eight months, the 31 individual artists will utilize their collective $100,000 for local, regional, and national workshops, studio time, technical equipment, and more.

The exhibitions are on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. Please note, the Emporium will be closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27, for the holidays. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

A free reception with the artists will take place on Friday, November 5, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features local musicians Abby Fisher, Nicholas Eric Horner, Domino Ensemble, Frou-Frou Foxes, and Tinca Tinca.

Three Women! is a new exhibition featuring work by three local artists who have long been friends, supporting one another as they each explored and grew their individual creative expression. The women all share the same spiritual path and, to one extent or another, also embrace a similar underlying visual consciousness which has led them to explore imagery that includes unique alternative perspectives. Marcia Athens embraces her internal dialogue which then arrives as vibrant imagery that invites the viewer to look within; Anne Kinggard sees unique connections between improbable objects, sometimes whimsical, causing the viewer to reconsider their own viewpoint; and Lennie Robertson sees the constant changing world and the small beauties that most frequently miss.

Marcia Athens
I work for the thrill of capturing an enchanting visual setting without the familiar locating markers. For me, it is the moment when we arrive at the extreme edges of awareness that the mystery and excitement of creating emerges. Through the intuitive process of moving paint and cold wax, planes and backdrops appear and disappear. It is in this place of both above and below that I intuitively find my way to a captured, enigmatic, sense of place.
All works have been painted in 2020 and 2021 during the Covid isolation and are oil and cold wax on wooden cradled panels.
www.marciaathens.com

Anne Kinggard
When I began to establish myself as a serious artist in the 1970's, I did a series of pieces that incorporated Florida skies and cloud formations approached from a very atypical perspective, not traditional realism. Ultimately I was labeled a Mystical Realist by art critics and my fellow artists alike. My work on that series evolved into various iterations that have continued to inform my pictorial content from a unique and different perspective for the past 50+ years.
For this exhibit, I decided to revisit the "sky" as the primary focus in a series of paintings. There is not an intent to embrace the standard traditional blue sky, but rather, my skies are torn, taped, folded, zipped, layered, occasionally moody, dark, and in one instance extraterrestrial. My fascination with paper airplanes reintroduces itself and becomes a primary image in several paintings, as do clothes pins and clocks.
www.annekinggard.com

Lennie Robertson
I traveled for two weeks with a photographer friend this summer through Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, and Kentucky before returning to Tennessee, and most images in the show are from these travels. My images are focused on small segments of the natural and man-made pieces of our world as they degrade and change. Rust always catches my eye.
I am drawn to the art created by the inherently changing qualities of human-made objects. Capturing the imperfect and delicate magic which occurs as nature slowly remakes and breaks down human creations. My photographic imagery therefore finds its greatest expression in the timelessness found in all things. To a certain extent, my photography reflects the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi – nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
www.lennierobertson.com

The exhibitions are on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. Please note, the Emporium will be closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27, for the holidays. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.