Calendar of Events

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/

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.

Join us in celebrating El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) with local artist Héctor Saldivar at Casa HoLa during our November First Friday event inside the Emporium for the Arts, November 5th, 5pm-9pm!

El Día de los Muertos is a celebration that has been practiced for thousands of years in which families and communities gather to honor those who have passed away.

Modern-day Día de los Muertos celebrations derive from a combination of indigenous and Catholic traditions and take place from November 1st through November 2nd. Typically, families gather to create ofrendas, or altars, honoring their lost loved ones with various objects of significance, visit their grave sites, share stories and memories of the departed, and host a meal together to connect with their lost ones, families, and communities.

During our Day of the Dead celebration, Mr. Saldivar's collection of clay and papier-mache calaveras (skulls) and catrines (skeletons) will be on display, the winners of the UT Spanish Students' altar decorating contest will be presented, and tamales, sugar skulls, and pan de muerto will be on sale. A free and educational art activity for children will be available during First Friday and throughout the month of November. The exhibit will be made available online at www.holahoralatina.org.

Casa HoLa is located inside the Emporium for the Arts on the bottom floor in Suite 112 at 100 S. Gay St., Knoxville, TN 37902. Current office hours are weekdays from 9am – 5pm. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @HoLaHoraLatina and Twitter @CasaHoLa for updates on upcoming exhibits.

A group show, Greetings From Vestal, composed of multimedia works by the Tri-Star Arts studio artists working in the Candoro Marble Building – featuring Rachel Sevier Dallery, Casey Fletcher, Jillian Hirsch, Risa Hricovsky, Jing Qin, and Alissa Walls – remains on view in the Main Gallery and will run through Saturday, November 20, 2021. A public reception will also be held on Friday, November 5 from 5:00- 8:00 pm with all artist studios open to visitors.

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

http://www.klockmillerart.com
I am a chromesthete which means I see a vast array of real colors in my mind when I listen to music. I like to think of it as my own personal light show. My goal for each portrait is to let you glimpse music and musicians the way I do. There is a kinship between color and music – both can say what words can not.

I paint in shadowed hues using the grisaille technique. After sketching out my musician in a grayscale underpainting, I add opaque and translucent acrylic colors according to what I see when I listen to their music. They come together like puzzle pieces on my canvas. I DO NOT use editing software or trace my portraits. They are hand drawn according to their highlights and shadows.

I began painting for others in 2017 as an outlet to share all the mesmerizing colors I see. While I can remember the lyrics to almost any song I’ve ever heard, I am most fascinated by the people who pen them.

My 10+ years as a journalist and graphic artist left me with a great understanding of design principles as they relate to color.

I think Wassily Kandinsky said it best: “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and … stop thinking. Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

John C. Hodges Library, 1015 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville, TN 37996

On display in the indoor art hallway (just past the lobby as you enter the visitor’s center).

From November 19th-28th , you can walk the Universal trail to view an outdoor art exhibition as well.

Reception to celebrate both indoor & outdoor portions of the show will be held on Sunday, Nov 21st
at Ijams Nature Center from 3-5 pm

Ijams Nature Center
2915 Island Home Ave, Knoxville, TN 37920
https://www.a1labarts.com/event/ingressegress-an-a1labarts-exhibition-at-ijams-nature-center/

Homecoming Reception: Saturday, October 30, 9:30 AM - 12 PM

New and recent artwork in a variety of media by our current C-N Art Department faculty members: Lisa Flanary, Heather Hartman Folks, Gretchen Long, Julie Rabun, and David Underwood.

Omega Gallery at Carson-Newman University, Warren Art Building, corner of Branner & Ken Sparks Way, Jefferson City, TN 37760. Gallery hours: M-F 8-4. Information: 865-471-4985, www.cn.edu