Calendar of Events

Please join me Fridays-Sundays Jan 14-Feb 19 to celebrate dance in Knoxville. All local dancers are invited regardless of their photographs being exhibited to join an interactive piece by bringing a pair of your pointe or ballet shoes (any age) - and sign them becoming a part of the exhibit and story of dance.
FIRST FRIDAY: Feb 4 from 5-9,
CLOSING DATE : Feb 18 from 5-9.

Open Fridays 5-9, Saturdays 1-5 and Sundays by appointment
Robin Easter Design in Old City - 132 W Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN 37902
https://www.facebook.com/events/1132937377511194

"Denise Burge: Recent Work” will be on display in the College’s Bagwell Center for Media and Art Gallery, 10915 Hardin Valley Road, Knoxville, through Feb. 4. Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

Burge received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1991 and has been a professor at University of Cincinnati in Ohio since 1992. She works in a variety of media including painting, film, installation and quilt making.

"Her work is beautiful and unsettling, using images of lush beach landscapes that are completely devoid of people," said Pellissippi State Professor Herb Rieth. "I described the work in our faculty meeting on Monday as 'a Destin spring break party where a neutron bomb went off.'"

"I am interested in the romance that we attach to natural space, an illusion onto which we project our desires and fears," Burge writes on her website. "Imagery of the tropical is usually glamorous, a sort of air-brushed cultural fantasy of profusion and sensuality. I like to expose its more corporeal reality, depicting vernacular tropical living spaces that one finds a few blocks back from the beachfront."

Burge has received multiple Ohio Arts Council Awards for Individual Artists and has carried out residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California; and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. In 2004 she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Visual Art.

Burge’s exhibit is the first offering in The Arts at Pellissippi State for spring 2022. The Arts at Pellissippi State includes visual arts exhibits as well as theatre and music performances, all of which are open to the public. For a complete list of this semester’s events, visit www.pstcc.edu/arts.

Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja (Look at the Land That I Have Travelled)
January 14 - May 7, 2022

During his lifetime, Shane Pickett (1957–2010) was acclaimed as one of Western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists.

Featuring 29 works from the most radical and significant phase of his career, Djinong Djina Boodja (Look at the Land that I Have Traveled) is the first major exhibition of Pickett’s work in the US. Pickett’s paintings capture the transformations of the country near Perth in the south-west of Australia in ever-changing and innovative ways. Over the course of his three-decade career, Pickett developed a new visual language to represent the cornerstones of the culture of his Nyoongar people: the pathways of ancestors, traditional healing practices and places, and especially the six seasons used by the Nyoongar to divide the year.

Djinong Djina Boodja (Look at the Land that I Have Traveled) shows the developments in the last decade of Pickett’s career, as his work transformed from figurative landscape painting into a ground breaking and expressive form of gestural abstraction. It was during this period that Pickett achieved his greatest acclaim, with his works being exhibited across Australia and acquired by major institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. The 29 works in the exhibition present a snapshot of these experiments, as Pickett explores the complex connections between the earth, creation, and spirituality that are united in the Aboriginal concept of “Dreaming.”

Pickett described his paintings as ‘windows into the Dreaming’, and the strength of his culture is delivered through his work with breathtaking lyrical intensity. His paintings show the persistence and adaptability of Aboriginal ways of seeing the country in the face of colonisation. Shane Pickett’s Nyoongar name, Meeyakba, or ‘soft light of the moon,’ captures the spirit of an artist who set a beacon for those who follow him. One of the great innovators of Australian landscape painting, he is remembered as one of the pre-eminent Aboriginal Australian artists of his time.

McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1327 Circle Park Dr on the UT campus, Knoxville, TN 37996. Information: 865-974-2144

Available through Facebook, via a link from our website under “Events”, or by calling the Art Center with your bids.

Oak Ridge Art Center, 201 Badger Avenue, Oak Ridge, TN 37830. Hours: Tu-F 9-5, Sa-M 1-4. Information: 865-482-1441, www.oakridgeartcenter.org

Ahoy, readers! Mayor Glenn Jacobs is inviting you to set sail on our 2022 reading challenge, Oceans of Possibilities, with a goal to read ONE MILLION HOURS! This year, we've broken our million-hour goal into three nautical challenges. You can participate in any one of the challenges, or all three.

Anchors aweigh! Set sail with us. By reading and logging your hours, you'll be part of Read City's quest to be the best-read community in America. It's more than a feel-good slogan. In an effort to support our schools, we are encouraging our children and their families to make reading a top priority. Currently, only 40% of Knox County students are reading on grade level at the end of third grade. Our community can help.

Got a Beanstack tracker app account? It's simple to join the next challenge--just click on Anchors Aweigh.

Don't have a Beanstack account yet? Also simple. With your library card, you can register for a free account and get started logging.

You can also drop by any library and pick up a navigation map with activities or try out our sailor hat craft.

It's 2022 and time for another reading adventure. I'm excited to set sail on our Anchors Aweigh challenge, and I hope you'll join us. When we read together, we're sending a strong message to our community that we value reading. If you can read with a child, that's even better, but all reading counts. It's easy to be a part of Read City. Just download the Beanstack tracker app or drop by any Knox County Public Library location to pick up a tracker map. Earn great prizes. Read and log 45 hours (that's about 20 minutes a day) to earn sea-worthy prizes! https://www.knoxlib.org/calendar-programs/read-city-oceans-possibilities

Exhibition on Display: January 10th - February 25th

"Close to Home" featuring work by Michelle Barillaro & Vickie Bradshaw. Stop by M-F from 10AM-5PM to see the show! 123 W Jackson Avenue, Knoxville, TN 37902. The First Friday reception will be Friday, February 4th from 5-8PM.

Regular Gallery Hours: M-F 10AM-5PM

About the Artists:
Vickie J Bradshaw is a Southern Appalachian based artist who has been making art for the last thirty years across a variety of mediums. As a teacher at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, she is currently teaching metals classes as well as working with torched fired enamels. She is especially interested in mixed-media art and the functionality of found objects. She received her BFA from Memphis College of Arts.

Michelle Barillaro is an abstract painter based in Knoxville, TN. She works with a wide variety of mediums and enjoys discovering new ways to bring her work to life.

Dogwood Arts, 123 W. Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN 37902. Information: 865-637-4561, www.dogwoodarts.com

The artists represented in this exhibit are:
o Paige Braddock (BFA ’85)
o Peter Cotroneo (MFA ’16)
o Brandon McBath (BFA ’16)
o Alex Cline (BFA ’13)
o Mary Climes (MFA ‘21)
o Joel Trussell (BFA ’98)
o Emmy Lingscheit (MFA ’12)
o Guen Montgomery (MFA ’12)
o Marshall Ramsey (HCB ’91)
o Ed Gamble 1971-72
o James Greene (MFA ‘06)
o Danny Wilson (BFA '84)

The Student Union Gallery is located on the first floor of UT's Student Union. Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. There is no admission charge.

JANUARY 9 – MARCH 4, 2022 | GEOFFREY A. WOLPERT GALLERY
Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts is proud to feature works by this year’s Winter Pentaculum Studio Coordinators; Adam Atkinson, Suzi Banks Baum, Brandon Donahue, Jason Schneider, Max Seinfeld, and Rena Wood. Also included in this exhibition is slide show featuring the work of participating invited artists, and a collection of writers’ short stories, poems, and essays. This colorful exhibition represents the spectrum of work created in a variety of media supported in the studios at here at Arrowmont.

https://www.arrowmont.org/pentaculum-winter_2022/
Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, 556 Parkway, Gatlinburg, TN 37738. Information: 865-436-5860, https://www.arrowmont.org

Half-price adult admission every Wed in Jan & Feb!

Museum of Appalachia, 2819 Andersonville Hwy., Clinton, TN 37716 (16 miles north of Knoxville at I-75, exit 122, then one mile east). Open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Information: 865-494-7680, www.museumofappalachia.org

No BPS will occur Jan 25-29 - please come back Feb 1 for more great music!

The WDVX Blue Plate Special® is a live performance radio show held at noon, with your host Red Hickey, Monday through Thursday at the Knoxville Visitor Center. On Fridays WDVX takes the Blue Plate Special to Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria for “The Big Plate”, then back to the Visitor Center on Saturday with your host Evie Andrus.

It’s always free to join in, so please don’t be shy. Make yourself at home as part of the WDVX family. From blues to bluegrass, country to Celtic, folk to funk, rockabilly to hillbilly, local to international, it all part of the live music experience on the WDVX Blue Plate Special. You’re welcome to bring your lunch.

Just like at your favorite meat n’ three, the WDVX Blue Plate Special® is served up piping hot. This fresh and free daily helping of live music during the lunchtime hour that features performers from all over the world and right here in Knoxville has put WDVX on the map as East Tennessee’s Own community supported radio.

Previous performing artists include Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, The Avett Brothers, Old Crowe Medicine Show, Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, Jim Lauderdale, Marty Stuart, Nickel Creek, Red Stick Ramblers, Rodney Crowell, String Cheese Incident, The Del McCoury Band, Tim O’Brien, Yonder Mountain String Band, David Grisman, Claire Lynch Band, Brett Dennen, Tommy Emmanuel, Uncle Earl, The Infamous Stringdusters, the Jerry Douglas Band, Joan Osborne, John Oats, Mary Gauthier, Darrell Scott, and many many more! There’s plenty of great music to go around! http://wdvx.com/program/blue-plate-special/

Free 2-hour visitor parking located next door to the Knoxville Visitor Center. One Vision Plaza, 301 S. Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37902. Info: 865-544-1029, http://www.wdvx.com

JANUARY 04, 2022 - FEBRUARY 19, 2022
An Exhibition of International Collage Artists
Monuments are ubiquitous on the landscape. Common and omnipresent, they blend into the background and go unnoticed until someone points them out. In recent years, monuments have become flashpoints of cultural controversy. It wasn’t that these monuments weren’t being seen, it’s that some people in the community weren’t hearing what others in the community were saying about them.

In 1747, a sandstone column was erected in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland and topped with a statue of the Duke of Cumberland who just the year before brutally defeated the Scots at Culloden. The column and its statue was an act of imperialism, a message to the Irish people that a similar fate awaited them should they, too, resist English rule. In 1915, Birr Town Council voted to remove the statue. The Council’s action came during a period when the people of Ireland were asserting their independence from England. The column has stood empty ever since.

In 2021, at the invitation of the citizens of Birr, curator Ric Kasini Kadour invited eighteen collage artists from eleven countries to use an image by Robert French (1841-1917), The Square, Parsonstown, from the Lawrence Photograph Collection to imagine a monument that speaks to a world where all people enjoy safety, security, well-being, and dignity on their own terms. The collage prints debuted during the 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival, where the project was recognized with a National Heritage Award.

The exhibition of these works in the American South changes the context of the project from one rooted in British imperialism to an opportunity to reflect upon the role monuments can play in historical revisionism, in particular as we work to undo the legacy of slavery and the use of Confederate monuments to distort history and intimidate the descendants of enslaved people. That important civic conversation has focused on whether monuments should stay or be removed. We hope this exhibition invites a different conversation: What role do we want monuments to play in our community? What shared ideas or collective memories do we want future generations to celebrate? And ultimately, how can we build communities where all people enjoy safety, security, well-being, and dignity on their own terms. https://knoxart.org/kma_events/empty-columns-are-a-place-to-dream/

Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World's Fair Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37916. Tuesday-Saturday 10 am-5pm, Sunday 1-5 pm, closed Mondays. Information: 865-525-6101, https://knoxart.org/

Artwork by:

Kim Kimmons, Watercolors of Western Art
Ralph Parson, Wood Turning
Audrey Yates, Pottery

Westminster Presbyterian Church’s Schilling Gallery
6500 Northshore Drive, Knoxville, TN
865-584-3957
Hours: Monday thru Thursday, 9 AM to 4 PM and Friday, 9 AM - noon