Knoxville Museum of Art (2/19/2022)

Saturday, February 19, 2022
We are completing our "round trip" by heading east then north, with a midday stop at the Knoxville Museum of Art, another reciprocal museum through Tyler Arboretum membership, but free anyway.

Knoxville Museum of Art (founded 1961) is now located
overlooking the site of the 1982 World's Fair, as
seen by the view of the Sunsphere on the right

The museum is housed in the Clayton Building (1990,
by Edward Larrabee Barnes) that is sheathed in locally-
quarried pink Tennessee marble (KSS)

The main exhibition: Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D Schnitzer and His Family Foundation:

Self Portraits (2006, by Hung Liu) left top: Official Portraits:
Citizen, left bottom: Official Portraits: Immigrant,
and right: Official Portraits: Proletarian (KSS)

Crossing the River: Chasing (2003, by Hung Liu) )KSS)

I am Large, I Contain Multitudes (2009, by Dinh Q Lê); the
title comes from the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself (KSS)

I am Large, I Contain Multitudes closeup
of the mirrors and doodads

Mistaken Identities (2005, by Roger Shimomura) from left
to right: For Hatate Family, For Masso Mori, and 
For Dorothea Lange (KSS)

Mistaken Identities: for Dorothea Lange is
one of Roger Shimomura's ukiyo-e style
adaptations of photographs from the WWII
Japanese internment camps that were
censored and kept hidden from the public; here
the internees wore name tags like luggage tags

Aggregation 10 #2 (2010, by Kwang Young Chun) is
made up of tiny parcels wrapped in book pages, like the
packages in which apothecaries sold herbal medicines
when Chun was a child in East Asia

Aggregation 10 #2 detail shows layers of the past
like fossils in stratified rocks

Tiny Rooms and Tender Promises (2016, by
Jacob Hashimoto), "a whimsical chaos"

The Cross (1997, by Dinh Q Lê)
combines Buddhism with Christianity

Downstairs in the Great Hall is the installation called Cycle of Life: Within the Power of Dreams and the Wonder of Infinity (2009-2014, by local artist Richard Jolley). It is one of the largest figurative glass-and-steel assemblages in the world, and required an infrastructure strong enough to support the weight.

Metaphysical, serpentine strands of pale blue spheres
helps represent the heavens

Primordial is a moonlit forest of poplars, indigenous to
East Tennesee, Emergence of man and woman, and
Flight representing the path to adulthood

Universe in the heavens is a constellation

fronted by another Metaphyiscal in the heavens, there is
Desire signifying the generative force of life,
The Tree of Life, and Contemplation represents
the introspection of the final stages of life

General view of The Cycle of Life (KSS)

Exhibit: Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream: Based on a photo of an empty column in Birr, a town in Ireland, where a statue of the Duke of Cumberland (who defeated the Scots at Culloden in 1746) was toppled in 1915 when the Irish were asserting their independence from England. In 2021, the town of Birr invited collage artists from 11 countries to use the photo to imagine a monument that reflects a world where all people enjoy safety, security, well-being and dignity. One example:

Leap of Faith (2021, by Danielle Cole
of Canada) as a tribute to women

Exhibit: Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass:

Trophy (2000, by William Morris, who
was formerly the chief glassblower for
Dale Chihuly) (KSS)

Untitled (1981, by Dalibor Tichý) with
extremely delicate tendrils

Thorne Miniature Rooms (1930s-1940s, by
Mrs James Ward Thorne): English Dining Room
of the late 18C (KSS)

Victorian Parlor (c 1850)

View of the site of the 1982 World's Fair from the museum

Third floor exhibit: Currents: Recent Art from East Tennessee and Beyond:

Green Picture in My Meadow (1971, by Jim Dine) (KSS)

Siting (2003, by Charlotta Westergren), the artist is known
for using non-traditional materials and here she presents
a view of an icy landscape inspired by her Nordic heritage

Siting detail shows the use of large sequins

Cajón Desastre (2018, by Antonio Santin) is an
oil on canvas trompe l'oeil/illusion of three
dimensions, of an unrolled carpet

Cajón Desastre detail shows the oil paint looks like
masses of colored threads

Third floor exhibit: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee:

Smoky Mountains, Tennessee (1938, by Fritzi Brod
of Czechoslovakia, who immigrated to the United States
in 1924) reflects European modernism

Street in Knoxville (1947, by Charles Griffin Farr) (KSS)

Seven Sisters of the World (late 1980s, by Bessie Harvey,
a self-taught artist) using roots, branches, paint, fabric
and embellishments

We walked over to the World's Fair Park,
site of the 1982 World's Fair

The Sunsphere, a 266-foot/81-meter tall
hexagonal steel truss structure topped by a
75-foot/23-meter tall gold-colored glass
sphere, the symbol of the 1982 World's Fair,
and is now a symbol for Knoxville, TN

The Tennessee Amphitheater, another structure
left from the 1982 World's Fair

In the lobby of the Knoxville Convention Center, we found
what is billed as the world's largest Rubik's Cube,
the cube puzzle that was introduced at the 1982
World's Fair in the Hungary pavilion; however, we were
disappointed to find it was only a representational
sculpture and not a true Rubik's Cube (1974, by Ernő Rubik)

Next: Roanoke, VA.