Celebrate Summer with the Knoxville Museum of Art at Family Fun Day

The Knoxville Museum of Art invites children and parents to celebrate summer at Family Fun Day on Saturday, July 26 from 11am to 3pm. All events at Family Fun Day are free thanks to the generous sponsorship of Anderson News, LLC, First Tennessee Bank and Regal Entertainment Group/Regal Foundation.

Children of all ages have the opportunity to create art at one of the many art-making booths inspired by the current exhibits. Families can tap their feet to one of the many musical and entertainment acts that are performing all day, as well as listen to the gallery talks given by the docent guides.

Artist and Middle School Art Instructor Michael Weininger will demonstrate the art of mixed-media collage while artist and educator Heather Brack will demonstrate mixed-media painting. Spinning wool will be demonstrated by Carmen Bonnell.

Children can find inspiration in the Higher Ground exhibit and paint in the style of Beauford Delaney. Quilters from the Smoky Mountain Quilt Guild of Tennessee will provide materials and direction for kids to make ornaments out of fabric in the style of the museum’s Gee’s Bend quilt exhibition.

The Hominy Mamas as well as the LoneTones will be entertaining throughout the day with face painting by Faces Gone Wild. Refreshments will be for sale.

The Knoxville Museum of Art offers a big exhibition of small works with its Size Matters: XS – Recent Small-Scale Paintings from March 28 – August 24, 2008.The exhibition includes 42 works by some of America’s most important painters including Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Justin Allen, and Francis Alÿs.The miniature proportions of the works in Size Matters: XS represent a new interest among contemporary artists in exploring the expressive possibilities of small-scale painting. Abstraction, figuration, photo-realism, and caricature are just a few of the art historical genres reinterpreted by artists in the exhibition.

Size Matters: XS – Recent Small-Scale Painting is organized by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA), Peekskill, New York.

Ongoing exhibition beginning June 27, 2008

The Knoxville Museum of Art will open Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee, a new permanent installation of works from its collection celebrating the art and artists of Knoxville and the surrounding region. The fascinating and complex story of our area’s rich artistic heritage and its connections to the larger currents of American art are largely unknown, and certainly underappreciated. Highlights of the new installation include important works by Catherine Wiley and Lloyd Branson, pioneering artists who introduced Knoxville audiences to Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and other international art movements of their day; Joseph and Beauford Delaney, two of America’s most significant African-American artists; and works from the 1950s and 1960s by the Knoxville Seven, a group of progressive artists connected to the University of Tennessee who transformed and energized the area’s artistic climate. Art from more recent decades includes mixed-media objects by visionary sculptor Bessie Harvey along with a selection of works by leading area artists whose creations represent the quality and diversity of art-making in the region today.

July 10 - September 21, 2008

Mary Lee Bendolph’s extraordinary talent first garnered national attention when her work was featured among that of other quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the 2002 blockbuster exhibition and book The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the abstract quilts from this tiny, isolated African American community prompted a rethinking of commonly accepted artistic categories.

The focused exhibition, Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts and Beyond, and its accompanying full-color, scholarly catalogue, examine Bendolph’s inspiration and creative process, as well as her profound connection to the cultural practices and expressive traditions from which her work arises. Twelve dramatically designed, richly colored, improvisational quilts created by Mary Lee Bendolph and her family members—her mother Aolar Mosely, her daughter Essie B. Pettway, and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph—are presented alongside complex and evocative found object sculptures by noted African American self-taught artist Thornton Dial and visionary “yard art” artist Lonnie Holley. Both of these Alabama-based artists have been influenced by the quilts and the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend. Intaglio prints by Mary Lee Bendolph and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph, along with documentary films about all of the artists provide further context for their creative exchange. As the deep social and aesthetic networks of these six artists intersect, they give rise to new pathways of artistic influence, resulting in a powerful mixture of communal and individual creative energies.