Calendar of Events

The Arts & Culture Alliance is pleased to present five new exhibitions at the Emporium Center in downtown Knoxville from March 3 – April 1, 2023. A free gathering with the artists will take place on Friday, March 3, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features live music inside the Emporium by Wendel Werner. Most of the works will be for sale and may be purchased through the close of the exhibition by visiting in person or the online shop at https://www.knoxalliance.store.

This new exhibition features contemporary and modern painting using different techniques of letting the movement of paints create every piece. All works are presented on gesso wood panels with acrylic paint and finished with resin to enhance the colors.

Farhad Naimy trained first professionally as an engineer and later brought his passion for architecture, design and creative use of space to his custom-built, multimillion-dollar homes that now span across the landscape in San Francisco and other cities throughout the Pacific Northwest. His love of the Eastern Tennessee mountains and his family brought him back to Knoxville where he pulls from his international experiences of a lifetime to create art. Naimy is captivated with fluid art because of his deep connection to nature and color. In both there are infinite variety, and like love, infinite expressions. With his paintings themselves, viewers feel them more than are able to explain them. No matter how many techniques he masters or how many visions he creates, there is always an element of chance, change and surprise in Naimy’s work. The chemistry in life and in art is unexplainable but experienced through our senses.

Instagram @fluidartbyfarhad

The exhibitions will be on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Thursday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Friday 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM (except Fri Mar 17), and Saturday 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

The Arts & Culture Alliance is pleased to present five new exhibitions at the Emporium Center in downtown Knoxville from March 3 – April 1, 2023. A free gathering with the artists will take place on Friday, March 3, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features live music inside the Emporium by Wendel Werner. Most of the works will be for sale and may be purchased through the close of the exhibition by visiting in person or the online shop at https://www.knoxalliance.store.

This new exhibition features a curated collection of quilts from members of Knoxville Modern Quilt Guild and showcases modern elements such as bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, expansive negative space, and alternate grid work.

This Knoxville branch of the Modern Quilt Guild has a mission to support and encourage the growth and development of modern quilting through art, education, and community. The Knoxville Modern Quilt Guild is for residents in and around Knoxville who have an interest in modern design and quilting. The Guild provides members with a community where modern quilters can meet, share ideas and create in an environment that encourages creativity and acceptance. One of the original founders of the Modern Quilt Guild, Alissa Haight-Carlton, organized the first modern quilt guild meeting in January 2010. The Guild meets monthly and welcomes new members.

Instagram @knoxmqg | https://www.Knoxvillemqg.com

The exhibitions will be on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Thursday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Friday 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM (except Fri Mar 17), and Saturday 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

The Arts & Culture Alliance is pleased to present five new exhibitions at the Emporium Center in downtown Knoxville from March 3 – April 1, 2023. A free gathering with the artists will take place on Friday, March 3, from 5:00-9:00 PM and features live music inside the Emporium by Wendel Werner. Most of the works will be for sale and may be purchased through the close of the exhibition by visiting in person or the online shop at https://www.knoxalliance.store.

This exhibition offers a window into a little-known part of Tennessee history. Founded in 1908 by Thaddeus Evergood, Circus Orbis was a regional circus based in Jacksboro, Tennessee that performed in the American South and Midwest for more than 20 years. Curated by Beauvais Lyons, the exhibition includes a selection of lithographs, printed ephemera (including pop-up books and a paper puppet theatre), as well as facsimiles of painted banners. To provide a historic context for the circus, the exhibition includes a series of historic photographs made by Adam Hartstone-Rose from the 1920s and a sampling of circus music. Circus Orbis was well known for several female performers, including Augustina “The Bearded Lady,” and Lysippe, “The Amazon Queen,” both of whom challenged common representations of women from this era. Circus Orbis gave its final performance on Friday July 26, 1929, when the “Splendorium,” the Circus Orbis “Show Palace,” was destroyed in a fire during an afternoon performance at the Paducah, Kentucky fairgrounds. With the crash of the stock market three months later, Evergood was not able to find investors to help him to reestablish the circus. It remains as a unique part of Tennessee history.

Circus Orbis - See to Believe is curated by Beauvais Lyons, who is both Director of the Hokes Archives, as well as a Chancellor’s Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee. Lyons has organized more than 80 exhibitions that have travelled across the United States as well as abroad. The Hokes Archives includes collections of archaeology, medical arts, folk art, zoology, and circus history. Works from the Hokes Archives have been placed in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

https://art.utk.edu/printmaking/lyons

The exhibitions will be on display at the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, in downtown Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday-Thursday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Friday 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM (except Fri Mar 17), and Saturday 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM. For more information, please see www.knoxalliance.com or call (865) 523-7543.

Tri-Star Arts is pleased to announce the artist roster, curators, and highlight weekend dates for the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR, opening January 27, 2023 and on view through May 7, 2023. The recent changes and movements in the world inform our vision and the galvanizing spirit that centers on the rich history of the arts in Tennessee as a means to engage excellence in contemporary art.

Visual art offers a tool towards a common language fostering dialogue across communities, around the state, the country and internationally. The Tennessee Triennial serves as an experience to help us process this moment and propel us forward. It is a geographically fluid conversation that engages people of all ages and backgrounds.

The Tennessee Triennial has chosen a statewide model that is set apart and unprecedented. Curators from institutions in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga have been invited to respond to the theme of RE-PAIR, authored by Consulting Curator, Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons. This horizontal approach allows for each curator to be active in selecting participating artists. The Tennessee Triennial is a collective endeavor that emphasizes Tennessee’s contemporary art community while including national and international perspectives.

The participating venues along with their curators and artists may be found at https://www.tennesseetriennial.org/

KNOXVILLE
Big Ears Festival (Curator: Rachel Milford)
Lonnie Holley
Knoxville Museum of Art (Curators: Kelsie Conley and Stephen Wicks)
Willie Cole
Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn
Bessie Harvey
Lonnie Holley
Kahlil Robert Irving
Suzanne Jackson
Mary Laube
Annabeth Marks
Rosemary Mayer
Althea Murphy-Price
Betye Saar
Faith Wilding
Tri-Star Arts (Curator: Brian R. Jobe)
Kenturah Davis
Rubens Ghenov
Hank Willis Thomas

The inaugural Tennessee Triennial is a unified multi-site, multi-city exhibition that promotes contemporary visual art as a tool to foster constructive dialogue across communities, the state, the country, and internationally. The 2023 theme and core concept of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial is “RE-PAIR,” set forth by Consulting Curator María Magdalena Campos-Pons as the guiding curatorial concept for all exhibiting venues participating in the Tennessee Triennial.

Responding to the Triennial RE-PAIR theme about art designed “To heal, suture, and recompose fractured bodies”, “re-pair, patch, rebuild spirits, bodies, cities, political institutions, economic relationships,” the Knoxville Museum of Art presents works emphasizing the transformative power of art to propose new solutions to recent global discord.

The KMA’s Triennial presentation features a thought-provoking selection of objects created by a diverse, intergenerational slate of 13 international artists from across the U.S.: Willie Cole, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Suzanne Jackson, Mary Laube, Annabeth Marks, Rosemary Mayer, Althea Murphy-Price, Betye Saar, and Faith Wilding.

The exhibited works address a broad range of conceptual concerns ranging from the intersection of the personal and the political, to environmental, cultural, and spiritual. They express artists’ deep interest in material as a means of interpreting and amplifying these concerns. They are touched and pressed, deconstructed, constructed and made anew. They embody histories that sensitively embrace contradiction and complication, and that challenge diverse audiences to look both forward and backwards towards “new sites of encounters with yet undefined edges, borders and territories” in search of RE-PAIR.

A major statewide contemporary art event organized by Tri-Star Arts. Consulting Curator: María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World's Fair Park, Knoxville, TN 37916. Hours: Tu-Sa 10-5, Su 1-5. Information: 865-525-6101, www.knoxart.org

The McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture is proud to announce the special exhibition, The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments and Stonework, in partnership with Cheekwood Estate & Gardens. The exhibition is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Division of Diversity and Engagement and will run from January 13 to May 14, 2023.

The exhibition reexamines and recontextualizes the life and work of African American artist William Edmondson (1874–1951). Edmondson is the most significant sculptor to emerge from Tennessee during the 1930s and 40s and remains one of the leading American artists of the twentieth century.

This is the first large-scale museum exhibition of the artist’s career in over twenty years. During Edmondson’s life, he was well known for his yard art, including whimsical birdbaths, fanciful "critters," sculptures of everyday people, and grave markers he carved for African American families.
https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/2022/12/13/mcclung-museum-to-feature-one-of-the-most-significant-collections-of-tennessee-artist-william-edmondson-in-new-exhibition/

McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1327 Circle Park Dr on the UT campus, Knoxville, TN 37996. Information: 865-974-2144. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday 12–4 p.m.

The Featured section of the gallery changes every month for First Friday, and the Marketplace works rotate. The Arrowmont Gallery is the first permanent off-campus exhibition space for the School.

110 South Gay Street, Knoxville Tennessee 37902. Current hours: Fri 5-9 PM, Sat-Sun 12-5 PM.

https://www.arrowmont.org/arrowmont-gallery/ or contact Gallery Manager Heather F. Wetzel with questions at hwetzel@arrowmont.org.

Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of one of the country’s most renowned printers-publishers. Founded in 1970 by Jack Lemon, Landfall Press played a key role in expanding the geography of the American postwar print renaissance. In the late 1950s and 1960s, new printmaking workshops, including Universal Limited Art Editions, Tamarind Lithography Workshop, and Gemini G.E.L., opened on the East and West Coasts. Jack Lemon helped bring this printmaking revival to the Midwest. He learned lithography at the Kansas City Art Institute, then later established and directed lithography workshops there in 1965 and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1968. He opened Landfall Press in Chicago, effectively creating a new hub for printmaking that attracted artists from around the country.

Landfall Press is known for its outstanding innovation and exacting technical standards. It specializes in lithography but has also produced etchings, woodcuts, books, and multiples that have often redefined what a print can be. As a publisher, Lemon has collaborated with a diverse range of international artists, introducing many of them to the process of printmaking. 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.

Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World's Fair Park, Knoxville, TN 37916. Hours: Tu-Sa 10-5, Su 1-5. Information: 865-525-6101, www.knoxart.org. Admission and parking are free.

DECK THE HALLS... The KMA's Thorne Rooms are all decorated for the holiday season! After Thanksgiving, Knoxville Museum of Art pulls out the tinsel and trimmings to get our collection of Thorne Rooms ready for the most wonderful time of the year! Thank you to East Tennessee miniature artisans and Thorne Room experts Annelle Ferguson and Jolie Gaston for making it all possible. On view through December 30.

The Thorne Rooms were developed in the 1930s and 40s by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, Chicago, IL, who loved dollhouses as a child. After extensive travels in Europe where she collected miniature furniture and accessories, Mrs. Thorne had over two dozen miniature rooms created by cabinetmakers from her own drawings. They were made in a scale of one inch to one foot. She painted and stained woodwork, papered walls, and made textiles for the rooms. Read more: https://knoxart.org/exhibitions/thorne-rooms/

Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World's Fair Park, Knoxville, TN 37916. Hours: Tu-Sa 10-5, Su 1-5. Information: 865-525-6101, www.knoxart.org. Admission and parking are free.

Our relationship to moving images is constantly evolving. Amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, for example, our use of–and reliance on–streaming services to access Hollywood blockbusters not only changed how we watch movies but also disrupted traditional models for financing and distributing such productions.

How did our relationship with moving images begin? What technological and cultural events sparked our interest in motion pictures as entertainment? And what role has East Tennessee and its people had in moviemaking?

Lights! Camera! East Tennessee!, a new feature exhibition at the East Tennessee History Center, answers these questions by chronicling Knoxville’s contributions to film from the promotion of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1895 to its use as a location for major productions currently in development. At the heart of the story is 35 mm film, shown both in urban theaters and suburban cineplexes and shot by itinerant filmmakers, documentarians, industrial filmmakers, and news reporters. Multiple screens featuring highlights from these genres anchor the exhibition.

Equally intriguing are the stories of how Knoxvillians made Hollywood history. Learn about Clarence Brown, a graduate of Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, who became one of MGM’s most prominent directors. And see why James Agee, known to us today as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, was better known as a film critic and screenwriter during his life.

Lights! Camera! East Tennessee! will also spotlight the numerous actors from across East Tennessee who became Hollywood A-listers and the variety of films that were shot in East Tennessee, including A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970) and That Evening Sun (2009), both of which premiered in Knoxville.

East Tennessee Historical Society, 601 S. Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37902. Museum hours: M-F 9-4, Sa 10-4, Su 1-5. Information: 865-215-8824, www.eastTNhistory.org/lights-camera