Calendar of Events

Join us on March 1st from 5 PM to 9 PM for the Astrid Galindo Student Art Show/Competition, featuring the creativity of talented local young artists ages 15 to 20. During the evening exhibit on Friday, attendees will have the opportunity to cast their votes for their favorite artwork. The top three winners will receive cash prizes.

https://holahoralatina.org/current-exhibit/
https://www.facebook.com/events/390518603341651/

HoLa Hora Latina, 100 S. Gay Street, Suite 112, Knoxville, TN 37902. Information: 865-335-3358, www.holahoralatina.org

Dubbed “the assembly-line Picasso” by Time magazine, Steve Keene’s vibrant and engaging paintings emerge from a punk-rock ethos that upends the usual conventions of the art world. Working from his Brooklyn studio, Keene creates 50+ paintings each day, producing over 300,000 pieces during a career that now spans more than 30 years.

The revolutionary Steve Keene will join the Big Ears Festival (Mar 21-24) with a live, experiential painting performance. Keene will have a pop-up studio, RED Gallery in Knoxville’s historic Old City, for people to watch him create dozens of pieces at a time, with his iconic process, usually painted in series of four- or six-of-a-kind. He utilizes quick-drying acrylic paints and a screen-printing technique of moving from broad swaths of color and gradually moving to the more detailed work.

As a prelude to Steve Keene’s live painting appearance at Big Ears, the festival is presenting the debut of The Hirschhorn Collection's “Paintings by Steve Keene.” This expansive exhibition of some of his rarer works will open on March 1 and continue through March 29 in at the RED Gallery, located on Jackson Ave in Knoxville’s Old City.

Make sure to visit the gallery during your stay to watch him work!

RED Gallery, 130 W. Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN 37902. Information: 865-524-0146 or https://www.facebook.com/REDgalleryKNOX/

ARTXTRAVAGANZA is Webb School’s annual art sale that showcases original artworks by nearly 65 acclaimed artists and offers affordable works for everyone – from fine art, handcrafted jewelry, and pottery to glassworks, sculptures, and metal art.

This three-day event is held on the Webb School of Knoxville campus in West Knoxville. Now in its 22nd year, ArtXtravaganza has become one of the premier art shows in the Southeast, and has helped to further the careers of prominent artists.

ArtXtravaganza showcases the amazing range and diversity of artistic talent in the region and beyond, and helps establish Knoxville as a community aligned with the arts. Also on exhibit are works by Webb Lower, Middle, and Upper School students.

Each year, ArtXtravaganza hosts a featured artist. This year’s featured artists are Jessica Ramsey, artist and owner of Jessica Ramsey Art & Murals in Knoxville, and Nashville-based jewelry designer Tony Perrin, founder of Lock & Key Design.

Friday, March 1: 2 p.m.-7 p.m., plus Kickoff Reception, 5 p.m.-7 p.m. (open to all)
Saturday, March 2: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Sunday, March 3: 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

Follow the signs to the Lee Athletic Center on the Webb School of Knoxville campus. https://www.webbschool.org/artxtravaganza

Love and Torment
Curated works of art, poetry and prose from the most recent issue

Gallery 1010, 100 S. Gay Street, Suite 114, Knoxville, TN 37902. Hours: Reception Fri 5-7 PM, Sat 10 AM – 1 PM, or by appointment. Information: https://gallery1010.utk.edu/

The Foothills Craft Guild office will be open for First Friday with featured glass and jewelry artist, Renee Mathies. Foothills board member, Amelia Galvas, will also be on hand to answer any questions from visitors.

At the Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, Suite 113. Foothills Craft Guild: 865-470-0669, www.foothillscraftguild.org

Copper, wood and even salvaged plastic waste come together in a new art exhibition exploring the natural world at Pellissippi State Community College. The Ashton Ludden Exhibit is on display at the Bagwell Center for Media and Arts Gallery until March 1. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and the gallery, located on the college’s Hardin Valley Campus, is free and open to the public.

“My work considers our relationship with wildlife as the natural world becomes estranged through human’s perpetual desire for rapid expansion,” said Ludden, the founder, co-owner, director and active artist of Relay Ridge Collaborative Artist Space in north Knoxville. “My work evokes a renewal of attentiveness toward our direct and indirect impacts on the wild and aims to rejuvenate a passion for conserving wild spaces.”

Ludden uses processes such as hand-engraving, printmaking, murals, ceramics and weaving in her works on display. The labor-intensive process forces her to slow down, meditate and focus as she creates, she said. Through her work, she works to find “ways to connect us to distant species and environmental concerns across the world, transforming our hopeful – yet seemingly futile – attempts in saving the natural world into something just as beautiful.” Outside of her studio practice, Ludden, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Tennessee, teaches printmaking at Knoxville’s Community School of the Arts, Governor’s School for the Arts, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Relay Ridge, and is currently teaching screenprinting at the University of Tennessee. You can learn more about her at www.ashtonludden.com or find her on Instagram @ashton_ludden.

For a list of Pellissippi State’s upcoming exhibitions in the Bagwell Gallery this spring, visit www.pstcc.edu/arts.
Pellissippi State | 10915 Hardin Valley Road, Knoxville, TN 37933

Work by eight of the region's most prominent Black artists are on display through March 9th. Opening reception is this Saturday, February 3, 1:00 - 4:00. Many of the artists will be in attendance and light Hors D'oeuvres and refreshments will be served. Please join us for this wonderful show!

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

February – March 2024

Sonia Jackson Summers received her Bachelors in College Scholars: Illustration and Writing from The University of Tennessee in 2008. During her time at the University of Tennessee, Sonia cartooned for “The Daily Beacon.”

In 2011, Sonia married and relocated to her husband’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and during that time Sonia was commissioned to participate in Vulcan Park and Museum’s public art project called “Vulcans on Parade.” Sonia’s painted Vulcan statues stand on display in two downtown Birmingham businesses. Sonia has work in the permanent collection of The Joy Gallery in Homewood, Alabama and rotating art at the Blue Phrog Gallery in Montevallo, Alabama.

Since moving back to Knoxville with her husband and kids in 2019, Sonia has broadened her scope to include painting en plein air (live on-site landscape painting), as well as competitive sidewalk chalk art/“Madonnari” festivals and sidewalk chalk art commissions, in addition to her fine art, illustration, and murals. Sonia has a deep appreciation for Impressionism, focusing on bridging the relationship between observation and interpretation, impressionistic capabilities of skill and realistic reaction in rendering. Sonia enjoys public art such as murals and sidewalk chalk for their ability to make art accessible to everyone.

In 2023 Sonia accepted the Fine Arts Teaching position at Chesterton Academy, a new classical high school in Knoxville. She also teaches recreational art classes at Painting with a Twist in Farragut.

Sonia’s art can be seen in sidewalk chalk/madonnari festivals, such as the Dogwood Arts Chalk Walk, through exhibitions with both the Arts and Culture Alliance and Dogwood Arts, and she currently has a mural featured by Dogwood Arts in Strong Alley in downtown Knoxville.

https://knoxbijou.org/community-outreach-2/art-gallery/

MAIN GALLERY
Reception Feb. 2, 5-8 PM
https://andrewscottross.com/home.html
https://tristararts.org/the-gallery/f/a-drawing-of-a-lion-shaped-by-fear

Tri-Star Arts at Candoro Marble Building, 4450 Candora Drive, Knoxville, TN 37920. Hours: Tu-Sa 11-5. Information: https://tristararts.org/visit

First Friday February 2nd 6-9pm at Relay Ridge

-Jenn Kaplan "No Sudden Movements" opening gallery reception
-Open Artist Studios
-Printmaking demos/artist features in the printshop

Jennifer Kaplan invites participants to slow down and listen to the nuances of verbal and nonverbal communication. This show emphasizes the isolated gestures of touch through a progression blend of functional and figurative forms, giving shape to that which exists inside us and has been shapeless. Clay has the capacity to communicate what cannot be said, what is unspeakable, where words fail.

“Where I End and You Begin” are a series of entangled bodies which follow the gestural action of hands folding into one another, signing in motions of tenderness, reception, and formal fluidity. These tangled masses are finished in waxes and chalk, raw and bright, or crater glazes, molten and encrusted, with blurred edges, to amplify the soft strength of vulnerable participation within a community.

Everything is connected and survival is en masse. Hope lives not in isolation but through the potential of collaborative movement. Jennifer’s ceramic practice acts as a filter for understanding cycles of grief and regrowth, encouraging the potential within collaborative action and mutual aid.

We invite you to engage your senses in the relational works but please, be gentle.

Relay Ridge, 4124 McKinley St, Knoxville. https://relayridge.org/ and https://www.instagram.com/relay_ridge/

Featuring all media – including oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, drawings, sculpture in any medium, jewelry, collage, printmaking, photography and digital media.

Reception will be from 6:30pm – 8:00pm and awards will be announced on Friday, Feb 2 at 7:00pm.

Hours: Tuesday - Thursday, 10 AM - 4 PM
Phone (865) 357-2787
Email: fcacinfo@gmail.com
The Fountain City Art Center, 213 Hotel Road, Knoxville, TN 37918

Artist Carmen Winant’s large-scale collages and installations illuminate the often-invisible experiences of women, as well as feminist strategies for survival, revolt, and self-determination. She explores these themes through objects drawn from and inspired by the archives of Women in Transition (WIT) and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV).

“I am a photographer who no longer makes her own images. My work revisits and recontextualizes the feminist histories that preceded my own, reaching backward as an attempt to understand the space between our lived experiences, and the larger, if nuanced and sometimes contradictory, aims of women’s liberation. As such the found photographs that run throughout my work — integrated into books, installations, billboards, or discrete objects — are not evidence of a history, but in fact its very living residue. These projects, all of which work to unravel foreclosed histories, often take the form of ad hoc archives and pay particular interest to women’s power, pleasure, labor, and self-actualization. Lately I’ve turned towards imagination, optimism, and joy as shared, necessary tools of the artist and the revolutionary.” —Carmen Winant (December 2020)

Content warning: please be advised that this exhibition contains adult content, including depictions and descriptions of domestic violence.

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.