Description
The Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) opened in 1990 in an Edward Larabee Barnes-designed facility intended as a venue for traveling blockbuster exhibitions. Following the completion of a 2005 strategic plan, KMA redirected its collecting and programming to embrace and celebrate the art and visual culture of the Southern Appalachians and East Tennessee.
KMA now seeks funding to reconceive and significantly expand the 2008 installation “Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee,” its flagship permanent exhibition featuring two centuries of art by East Tennessee artists. The key goal of this iteration is a more inclusive cultural narrative demonstrating that the region is and has long been diverse, nuanced, and connected. KMA considers the installation essential to its leadership role in educating a regional community about its artistic legacy, and actively supporting its continued cultural development.
The museum’s director, David Butler, states, “We embark on this project with the deep conviction that, as a vehicle for community self-examination and self-knowledge, it has the potential to change the way an increasingly diverse community thinks of itself. Collective self-image and shared sense of possibilities (or lack thereof) have historically been determining factors in the community’s ability to succeed. After decades of growth, change, prosperity, influxes of newcomers, and resistance from long-settled populations, these forces continue to clash as Knoxville and environs make decisions about the region’s future direction.”
Gallery narratives will address the region’s first community of professional artists and their dialogue with the broader currents of American art; shifting concepts of regional identity; the careers of African American Knoxville artists and brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney; the impact of Modernism and social change; and works by visionary Black artist Bessie Harvey. The project also includes the production of an accompanying catalogue, the KMA’s first collection handbook, with contributions by a diverse roster of art and regional historians.
A project advisory committee comprised of museum stakeholders, content experts, and partner organizations including the Beck Cultural Exchange Center (Knoxville’s African American history museum), Knoxville History Project, and University of Tennessee Humanities Center, will review plans for the installation, interpretive and educational materials, and programming, and help the KMA connect to and engage with diverse audiences. The new installation’s more inclusive narrative will inform KMA’s programmatic and curricular offerings, including teaching materials available on the KMA website.
