| Opened in 1990, the Knoxville Museum of Art presents 10 to 12 exhibitions each year, featuring emerging artists and designers, its permanent collection and traveling exhibitions. Other activities at the museum include a semi-weekly classic film series, a weekly concert series, family-friendly days, as well as ongoing art classes, seminars and lectures. With 53,200 total square feet, the KMA boasts 12,700 square feet of exhibition space in five galleries, as well as an auditorium, entertainment space, museum shop and landscaped gardens. Eminent museum architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed the museum building, constructed of Tennessee pink marble. |  |
Knoxville Museum of Art – Scott McNutt
Opened in 1990, the Knoxville Museum of Art presents 10 to 12 exhibitions each year, featuring emerging artists and designers, its permanent collection and traveling exhibitions. Other activities at the museum include a semi-weekly classic film series, a weekly concert series, family-friendly days, as well as ongoing art classes, seminars and lectures.
With 53,200 total square feet, the KMA boasts 12,700 square feet of exhibition space in five galleries, as well as an auditorium, entertainment space, museum shop and landscaped gardens. Eminent museum architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed the museum building, constructed of Tennessee pink marble.
"Our SubUrban gallery is devoted to the work of emerging artists, often giving these artists their first solo museum exhibition and catalogue," explains KMA Curator Dana Self. "In Design Lab, the museum focuses on how design impacts our lives through clothing, advertising, graphic design, architecture and other avenues." Self adds that the museum offers gallery talks by most of these artists, affording the public face time with contemporary artists.
Previous shows at KMA have included exhibitions of contemporary artists’ works, such as the sound environments of Jean-Pierre Gauthier, glass installations by Dale Chihuly and photographs by Sarah Hobbs. But, the museum has also showcased exhibitions of such household names as Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin and M.C. Escher.
Upcoming shows are Seaman Schipps, “A Century of New York Jewelry Design;” Stephen Burks, “Readymade Objects;” from Oct. 2 to Jan. 28, 2007; and Seonna Hong, from Nov. 17 to Mar. 11, 2007.
Current shows include a rotating exhibition from the museum’s permanent collection, which emphasizes Western artists from the 20th century with pieces from the likes of Bessie Harvey, Red Grooms, Joseph Delaney, Pablo Picasso and Lisa Norton. “Shoot the Family,” with works by various artists, explores "the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, focusing on artists’ portrayal of members of their own families" through Sept. 3. A show by Tomory Dodge runs through Nov. 5 in the SubUrban gallery. Dodge’s massive paintings make landscapes out of everyday objects, minus a human presence, inviting the viewer to speculate on circumstances leading up to the depicted tableau.
Yee-Haw Industries’ “Art for the People” may be the museum’s most intriguing current exhibition. Yee-Haw is a nationally renowned, Knoxville-based, letterpress print shop and design studio. The affable, Southern-fried geniuses behind the studio are 42 year-old Julie Belcher and 43 year-old Kevin Bradley.
The exhibition features not only Yee-Haw’s finished products, but also displays the vintage tools, such as the woodblocks, type, gouging knifes, composition sticks and all other implements required to carve imagery, to set type and to print materials on the manually powered equipment. Preliminary sketches and intermediary products are also on display, as well as a video documenting the process through which the artists practice their craft.
“Art for the People” is an apt title. Through the repeated use of recognizable images taken from other media, primitive figures reproduced from woodblock, basic colors and familiar block type, the Yee-Haw artists manage to create new pieces with a whimsical, old-timey feel. Call it modern folk art drawn from collective memories of an American past that never quite existed.
The works exhibited range from a stand-alone, six and a half foot tall advertisement for Southeastern Championship Wrestling to assemblages of dozens of postcard-like pieces, with numerous posters for concerts, art shows, beer festivals and every other expression of typical Americana.
