Student Art Competition 2018 Tenn Valley Fair Entry Form

Exhibition Notes

Higher Ground Gallery Guide

Grand Ambitions

While East Tennessee'south primeval inhabitants produced works of art for millennia, it was during the tardily nineteenth century that the area's customs of professional artists— both trained and untrained—reached a critical mass. This development reflected the prosperity fueled by booming local industries such as marble quarrying, mineral mining, and lumbering. Railroads linking East Tennessee to other urban centers sparked further growth. Knoxville before long emerged as the hub of economic and artistic activeness inside the region.

Born in Scotland, James Cameron was i of the first professional painters in E Tennessee, earning a reputation for detailed portraits, and panoramic landscapes reflecting nature's dazzler invaded by settlement. Lloyd Branson returned from studies in Europe in 1878 and became a guiding force for art in Knoxville, both every bit teacher and creative person. Afterward studying with Branson, Catherine Wiley mastered impressionism while pursuing art preparation in New York, and introduced the style to artists and patrons post-obit her return to Knoxville. Often portraying the domestic world of women and children, Wiley's luminous canvases became increasingly bold and expressive until her career was cut short by an undisclosed mental illness in 1926. Charles Krutch, dubbed the "Corot of the South" for his soft, atmospheric style, was among the primeval local artists to train his brush on the Smokies. From the 1890s until the last years of his life, he traveled deep into the mountains and captured their everchanging character in scores of oil and watercolor paintings.

Branson, Wiley, and Krutch banded together with other local artists and patrons to form the Nicholson Art League (1906- 1923), and organized large-scale fine art exhibitions for three major cultural expositions held at Knoxville'due south Chilhowee Park: the Appalachian Expositions of 1910 and 1911, and the National Conservation Exposition of 1913. Each of these exhibitions included of import regional artists' works along with those by dozens of internationally known American artists.

Tennessee Marble
The Tennessee marble industry began during the late 1830's with the discovery of major veins in Hawkins County. Effectually 1850, Tennessee marble was discovered in Knox and Blount Counties where, with greater access to rail, the stone industry took off. Past the 1880s, Knoxville became known as "The Marble City," and its extensive quarries supplied rock used throughout the region and in the construction of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., New York'southward country capitol, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, New York's Grand Central Station, and the New York Public Library's famous stone lions. The Knoxville Museum of Art is likewise clad in pink Tennessee marble.

Despite its name, Tennessee marble is not a true marble due to its sedimentary structure and lesser hardness that are more akin to limestone. Withal, its high density, low porosity, water resistance, and range of colour contribute to its distinguished history as a highly bonny building material.

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Boosted Resources

Steve Cotham on Catherine Wiley Lecture Lecture 05/12/2013

Steve Cotham on Lloyd Branson Lecture 05/12/2013

Jack Neely - Dine and Find Lecture 04/12/2013

Lure of the Smokies

Many artists from outside E Tennessee came to the area between 1920 and 1950 in order to capture the wild dazzler of the Smoky Mountains. The Smokies had long been inaccessible to all but the most intrepid, merely intensive logging and the postal service-World War I development of mountainside resorts opened roads and trails for visitors. This period of artistic interest in the Smokies coincides with efforts to preserve this unique wilderness expanse, which culminated in the creation of the Groovy Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.

Ansel Adams, best known for his epic images of Yosemite and other western landmarks, visited the Smokies in 1948 and produced blackness and white photographs that capture the expanse'south lush terrain. Twenty years later, color landscape photography pioneer Eliot Porter's dye transfer prints of the park generated widespread attention later existence featured in the acclaimed monograph Appalachian Wilderness.

Rudolph Ingerle, Louis Jones, and other mural painters from around the state often spent summers in East Tennessee, journeying deep into the Smokies to make sketches. Jones, a native of Pennsylvania, was so entranced by the area that he permanently settled in Gatlinburg and connected to pigment mountain scenes until his death in 1958. Louisiana artist Will Henry Stevens made extended pilgrimages to the Smoky Mountains throughout his career and captured every nuance of the area's natural dazzler in delicately abstracted works.

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Irresolute Fortunes, Changing Scenes

By the mid-1920s, Knoxville's once thriving art scene had begun to stagnate as the city's economic potential failed to materialize and local attitudes grew more conservative. Furthermore, Lloyd Branson's decease in 1925 and Catherine Wiley'due south institutionalization in 1926 led to a void in artistic leadership. Young artists often ended that their best chance for creative success was to relocate permanently to major fine art centers. Born in Knoxville in 1901 to a Methodist Episcopalian minister, Beauford Delaney and his younger blood brother Joseph demonstrated early artistic talent. Their parents supported the brothers' artistic aspirations, and Beauford's talents came to the attention of painter Lloyd Branson, who served as an early mentor. Facing the additional hurdle of racism, the brothers left Knoxville in the mid-1920s to pursue their art careers in larger arenas, but followed very dissimilar artistic paths. Later studying in Boston, Beauford chose New York and later Paris as the ideal settings for his experiments with expressive abstraction. He attracted a host of distinguished friends including Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Willem de Kooning, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, and Louis Armstrong. He became known for his radiant portraits and landscapes in which he explored colour—luminous color—applied with explosive brushwork. Visible references to the outside world began to fade as the artist sought what he believed were the healing powers of lite equally embodied in the vivid hues of his palette.

Joseph Delaney, on the other manus, headed for Chicago earlier settling in New York, where he established himself equally a tireless and prolific painter of Manhattan's urban scene. Over the span of his sixty-year career, Joseph displayed a remarkable ability to convey a vibrant modernistic world in transition while representing an unvarnished tape of his energetic painterly process. He returned to Knoxville to visit his family over the years and somewhen moved back to his hometown in 1986. The Knoxville Museum of Fine art has worked diligently to call attention to the artistic accomplishments of both brothers by hosting or organizing such exhibitions every bit Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris (2005), Beauford Delaney: Gathering Light (2017), Joseph Delaney: On the Move (2018), and Beauford Delaney & James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door (2020). The KMA owns the world's largest and most comprehensive institutional collection of Beauford Delaney's work, and an extensive option of paintings and drawings by Joseph Delaney.

Charles Griffin Farr grew up in Knoxville, just left for New York by 1931 and eventually settled in San Francisco. In that location, he enjoyed a long career as an influential art teacher and devoted realist painter during an era in which brainchild dominated the art earth. A immature Charles Rain left Knoxville for Nebraska with his mother after his parents divorced and never returned. He studied in Europe before moving to New York, where he established himself as a magic realist painter of boggling skill and vision. Knoxville native Edward Hurst was an art prodigy who pursued art training with George Luks at New York's renowned Fine art Students League even before graduating from high school. Although Hurst returned to Knoxville frequently to display his elegant order portraits and precisely crafted still lifes, he spent much of his life mingling with wealthy clientele near his studios in New York and London.

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Boosted Resources

Frederick Moffatt - Dine and Discover Lecture

Post-State of war Revival

By the tardily 1940s, a rebellious generation of young artists devised a assuming new approach to painting—Abstract Expressionism—that became the leading international fashion. The highly spontaneous method fulfilled artists' desire to express the human status beyond the visible world in a visual language that was intuitive and unhindered. The style took agree in East Tennessee during the early on 1950s shortly after the arrival of C. Kermit "Buck" Ewing every bit the first caput of the University of Tennessee's fine art section. He recruited a group of progressive artists— well-nigh notably Carl Sublett, Walter Stevens, and Robert Birdwell—who exhibited actively in Knoxville as well as other cities throughout the Southeast. They proved highly influential equally artists besides every bit teachers.

While Sublett and Stevens shared an sectional interest in the mural equally a point of reference for their abstractions, Birdwell and Ewing often found inspiration in urban settings and the homo figure. Sometimes they exhibited as a foursome and other times equally the "Knoxville 7" with fellow painters Joanne Higgs Ross, Richard Clarke, and sculptor Philip Nichols. Each artist maintained an individual style and utilized varying degrees of abstraction. Together, they produced what are probable the first abstruse works in Tennessee and helped constitute a foothold for
mod fine art in the region.

This period of cultural renewal accelerated as Knoxville gained a more secure economical footing. In 1961 the Knoxville Museum of Art'south predecessor, the Dulin Gallery of Art, opened on Kingston Superhighway every bit the expanse's dedicated venue for the display and drove of fine art. The Dulin became known for its national works on paper competitions, and its ready of nine early miniature rooms created by renowned miniaturist Mrs. James Ward Thorne (on brandish on ground flooring).

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Greenwood Mural

Introduction

During a career that spanned forty years, New York creative person Marion Greenwood created paintings, drawings, and prints that championed the lives of indigenous people she encountered during travels to Republic of haiti, Republic of india, Africa, United mexican states, and other far-flung locales. In 1954, she came to Knoxville when the University of Tennessee commissioned her to create a landscape for the new Carolyn P. Brown University Heart ballroom. The resulting piece of work,The History of Tennessee, stands as Due east Tennessee'south largest, most important, and about controversial figural mural painting. Greenwood was selected by a search commission headed by fine art department chairman C. Kermit "Buck" Ewing, and was offered a one-year teaching assignment likewise. After because many themes for the mural, Greenwood decided her work would pay tribute to the state's musical heritage. She worked on the landscape largely at nighttime, and recruited university students and faculty as models for many of the 28 figures that would exist featured in the completed work. By day, Greenwood taught art and traveled across the state to become ideas for the mural, visiting moonshine suppliers in the e and dockworkers in the west.

The "Singing Mural" Narrative

Painted on a continuous xxx-pes length of canvas, Greenwood'due south limerick illustrates the distinctive music of the state'due south chief divisions—the delta dejection of Westward Tennessee, country music of Middle Tennessee, and religious music of East Tennessee. On the left, Memphis Beale Street jazz musicians play for dancers on a background of riverboats and the booming cotton industry. To their right, a fieldworker sings to a young girl as he rests with his cotton sack. In Middle Tennessee, a country square trip the light fantastic takes place in a barn amid bundles of drying tobacco and stalks of sorghum. Standing to the right, the landscape depicts East Tennessee basket weaving and cotton spinning. A young male child plays the harmonica while a mother covers her child with a homemade quilt. At the stop of the mural, surrounded past mountain laurel and rhododendron, a group sings hymns in front of a clapboard church.

The completed "Singing Mural," as information technology was commonly known, was unveiled in the University Center'due south ballroom on June v, 1955 before a commencement oversupply of 300 or so people. Records indicate information technology was well received by university representatives, and Greenwood considered information technology to be her best piece of work in the United States. The mural remained on view for 15 years without objection. During those years, however, former UT president Andy Holt establish it to be a distracting backdrop for his speeches, and had a drapery placed in forepart of the mural before each of his addresses.

Vandalism, Controversy, and Covering the Mural

Greenwood's decision to include African Americans in a mural defended to the history of Tennessee was a progressive and daring move during the 1950s Jim Crow era. Notwithstanding, the world changed rapidly in the following two decades and what was almost certainly a assuming insistence on diversity and inclusion came to be seen every bit something quite dissimilar by a new generation. By the 1970s, among the political unrest sweeping through American colleges and universities, Greenwood's mural came to be regarded as a blatant symbol of racism by many students in UT's civil rights organizations. As the just work of art on campus depicting people of color, its images of what appeared to exist happy blackness folk singing and playing jazz instruments were seen as a abrupt reminder of Jim Crow and a blow to African-American dignity and self worth.

In the grade of educatee unrest in the bound of 1970, the mural was vandalized past unknown parties. The painting was restored, and kept under guard. Responding to the threat of vandalism and growing criticism about the depiction of African-Americans in the mural, in 1972 a wall was congenital in front end of it andThe History of Tennessee disappeared from public view for more than more than three decades.

Uncovering and Restoration

Although information technology was hidden abroad for a generation, Greenwood's mural and the controversy surrounding it were never completely forgotten. In 2006, following a successful two-yr try by a team of UT students and administrators, the landscape was uncovered for public viewing for the start time in several decades. In 2008, planning began for a new, larger student eye on campus, and by 2010 it was announced that the Carolyn P. Brown Memorial University Center would be razed. Discussions ensued about safely removing Greenwood's mural, and identifying a location for its long-term brandish. In 2013, a national conservation house was hired to make clean the mural, remove it from the cinderblock wall of the Academy Center, and place information technology on a special apparatus designed to store the mural safely until a permanent domicile could be identified. Since the new university eye design contained no suitable space for the mural, administrators explored off-campus display options and approached the KMA equally an ideal venue. In 2014, shortly after the mural was featured in a special display at the University'south Downtown Gallery, the academy and the KMA reached an agreement through which the university retains buying of the mural, only has placed information technology in the KMA's care on long-term loan. This insures that visitors for years to come up will have admission to the landscape and can assess its history, significance, and pregnant, and view it in the context of contemporary artistic developments in Knoxville and the region.

The Artist

Greenwood was born in Brooklyn on April 6, 1909. Considered a child prodigy, she left high school at 15 afterwards winning a scholarship to report at New York'southward Art Students League, which at that time was ane of the most progressive art schools in America. One of her mentors at the league was John Sloan, whose paintings of city scenes reflected his belief that daily life should inspire works of art.

Greenwood traveled to the Southwest to written report and to paint pictures of the local Native Americans. From at that place, in 1932, she went to Mexico, where she began to paint murals depicting the life of everyday people. Diego Rivera, caput of the Mexican authorities's mural programme, noticed her work and hired her to piece of work on a massive mural project in the center of United mexican states City. Greenwood's section of that mural, a militant depiction of the exploitation of rural agronomical workers, was widely admired throughout Mexico, and she became something of a local icon. Back in the Usa, Greenwood received several New Deal commissions, among them a mural for a postal service office in Crossville, Tennessee, that endorsed the Tennessee Valley Authorization, andPattern for Living (1940), frescos (since painted over) for a housing project in Brooklyn, New York.

Although Greenwood had largely abandoned murals for easel painting past 1945, her themes remained the same. As she explained in aNew York Earth Telegram article in Nov 1944, her interest was not in "fussing with cute and fancy nudes and pretty-pretty things," but rather in depicting "the life of America, whether it be manufacture, farming or just plain people." Greenwood did paint ii murals after the war: the start,The History of Tennessee (1954-55); the second,Tribute to Women (1965), created at Syracuse University, was dedicated to women throughout the globe.

Greenwood's work earned her many honors and awards, including second prize at the Carnegie Institute exhibition of 1944 for the paintingMississippi Girl (1943); the National Association of Women Artists' Grumbacker Prize (1959); and election to the National Academy of Design (1959). She spent the last decades of her life primarily in New York City and at an art colony in Woodstock, New York. Greenwood died in 1970 from injuries suffered in an car blow.

The KMA wishes to acknowledge Fred Moffatt, Jack Neely, and Greenwood biographer Carol Kort for providing the source cloth for this text.

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Danny Lyon: Knoxville, 1967

Danny Lyon is considered one of America'south almost original and influential documentary photographers, and is known for the extraordinary lengths to which he goes to immerse himself in his subject. He was jailed while marching confronting segregation during the civil rights move, rode with the notorious Chicago Outlaws as a full-fledged member for a twelvemonth, and spent 14 months photographing life on death row inside the Texas prison house arrangement. His goal, he said, was "to destroy Life magazine"— to nowadays powerful, authentic alternatives to the hollow pictures and stories permeating mass media in America.

These photographs stalk from Lyon'south brief stopover in Knoxville in late August of 1967 in order to visit the babyhood home of writer James Agee. He admired Agee's brutally candid and descriptive work, particularly his collaboration with lensman Walker Evans in Let U.s.a. Now Praise Famous Men. As Lyon explained, "Agee's writing had a more than profound effect on me at the time than Evans's photographs…Agee had an unshakeable belief in documentary photography and picture as a powerful musical instrument of truth."

When Lyon arrived at the location of Agee's home near the intersection of Highland Avenue and 15th Street in the Fort Sanders neighborhood, he was dismayed to find that the writer's residence had been demolished and replaced by the James Agee Apartments, which he described equally "similar some kind of perverse tombstone for this great human." Instead of getting back in his car and driving on to Galveston, Lyon was compelled to stay and explore Agee's hometown. He photographed the streets of Fort Sanders, downtown Knoxville, carnival workers ("carnies") at the Tennessee Valley Fair, and a local drag strip. Lyon was so inspired he made a journal entry explaining that "I have photographed every 24-hour interval and every mean solar day washed more…by Labor Mean solar day weekend I had exposed 14 rolls of 35 mm Tri-X…the most I've done in such a short period (five days)."

Lyon'southward images offer a compelling and candid view of a Southern city during a time of social and economic unrest, and attest to his ability to go an insider in whatsoever setting he encountered. The gelatin silver prints on view were produced by Lyon and printer Chuck Kelton as office of a ane-of-a-kind portfolio made especially for the Knoxville Museum of Fine art'due south collection. As Lyon observed, "It's been a long time. I am glad these pictures have come home."

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Sponsors of Higher Ground

Presenting Sponsor of Higher Footing

Ann and Steve Bailey

Sponsors of Higher Basis

AHB Foundation

Barbara and Steve Apking

Aslan Foundation

Barbara and Bernie Bernstein

David Butler and Ted Smith

Maria Birgit Clark and Ashley Capps

City of Knoxville

Clayton Family Foundation

Michell and Jim Clayton

KMA Collectors Circle

Annie and David Colquitt

Barbara and Jeffrey Crist

Jan and David Dugger

Due east Tennessee Foundation

Karen and James Everett

Gild of the KMA

Teresa and Hunter Harrison

Kitsy and Lou Hartley

Crissy and Beak Haslam

Natalie and Jim Haslam

Lane Hays

Richard Jansen

Molly and Bob Joy

Vicki Kinser

Knox County Government

Carol and Stephen Krauss

The Lederer Family unit

Lindsay and Jim* McDonough

Sylvia and Jan Peters

Frank and Virginia Rogers Foundation

Elisabeth and Bill Rukeyser

Joseph Sullivan, III*

Tennessee Arts Commission

Nancy and Charlie Wagner

Friends of Higher Ground

Pandy Anderson

Andrea Cartwright and Alan Solomon

Norma and Joseph Cook

Emily and David Cox

Brenda and Robert Madigan

Ragan Melton

Beth and Beak Neilson

Pam and Jeff Peters

Alexandra Rosen and Donald Cooney

Jimmy Smith

L. Caesar Stair, Iv

Leslie and John Testerman

John Z. C. Thomas

Merikay Waldvogel and Jerry Ledbetter

*Deceased

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Additional Resources

johnsonhoudishon.blogspot.com

Source: https://knoxart.org/exhibitions/higher-ground-a-century-of-visual-art-in-east-tennessee/

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