Knoxville Museum of Art

Knoxville Museum of Art

Established	1961
Location	1050 World’s Fair Park, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Director	David L. Butler
Website	www.knoxart.org

The Knoxville Museum of Art is a Contemporary Art museum located at 1050 World's Fair Park in Knoxville, Tennessee. The KMA is committed to developing exhibitions by emerging artists of national and international reputation.

History

The museum was founded by Mary Katherine Dulin Folger in 1961 as the Dulin Gallery of Art. The gallery was housed in the H.L. Dulin House at 3100 Kingston Pike. The Dulin House was designed in 1915 by prominent architect John Russell Pope in the Neoclassical Revival style. The museum merged with the Knoxville Art Center in 1962, and the name was changed in 1987 to the Knoxville Museum of Art, the same year that the museum moved to the Candy Factory building at the site of the 1982 World's Fair.

The present 53,200-square-foot (4,940 m²) museum building was completed in 1990 following an $11 million community fundraising campaign. The steel and concrete building, designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, has an exterior skin of Tennessee pink marble. The building is named for Jim Clayton, who was the largest donor to its construction.

The museum includes five galleries, as well as a Sculpture Terrace, and two large outdoor garden areas.

Architect

Edward Larrabee Barnes is one of the greatest modernists in American architecture history. He was born in 1915, Chicago, Illinois, the son of Cecil Barnes, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard, and Margaret Ayer Barns, a successful writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Years of Grace” in 1931. He studied English, art history, and history of architecture in Harvard. After one year teaching in Milton Academy, he returned to the school and studied architecture in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the school, he was influenced as a modernist under the leadership of two German immigrant architects, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. After travelling in Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, he moved to New York to start his practice. His work ranged widely between residential, commercial, educational, and cultural projects. The style of his work can be described as pure modernist. He often used simple and geometrical forms to approach in his project. His selflessness led him to build projects that corresponded to site and context, client preferences, user friendliness, and he often achieved a good balance in the limited budget and various regulations. The quality of his work contributed to the development of American modern architecture. He died in Cupertino, California, 2004, at 89 years.

Representative work

• Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine 1958–61
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 1966–71
• Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana 1969
• Smart Museum, Chicago, 1974
• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas 1978–83
• 590 Madison Avenue (former IBM Building), New York City, 1983
• Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 1990

Collection

The Museum collection consists of work primarily from the 20th and 21st century. Included in the collection are many well-known artists, including Charles Burchfield, Gordon Cheung, Robert Longo, Loretta Lux, William Morris, Ulf Puder, Hiraki Sawa, Kenneth Snelson, Robert Stackhouse, and Anne Wilson. The museum is also committed to the preservation and development of Arts in East Tennessee. The collection holds examples of work by many of East Tennessee's greatest artists, including Lloyd Branson, Catherine Wiley, Joseph Delaney, Walter Hollis Stevens, Richard Jolley, and Bessie Harvey.

The museum has a collection of nine Thorne Miniature Rooms. The rooms are notable miniatures, designed by Narcissa Niblack Thorne. The largest collection of Thorne Miniature Rooms is located at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2009, the museum announced plans for the permanent installation of a sculpture in glass to be created by artist Richard Jolley. The sculpture will cover the museum's Great Hall, an area 100 feet long by 40 feet wide, making it one of the nations largest artworks made of glass. The sculpture is still in it's early stages of design. No date has been set for completion.

Exhibitions

In 2008, the museum opened Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee, the KMA's first-ever permanent installation, incorporating works from the museum’s own holdings as well as loans from other institutions and collectors. The exhibition documents the art history of East Tennessee and it's many "connections to the larger currents of American art are largely unknown, and certainly underappreciated." Artists include Catherine Wiley, Lloyd Branson, Joseph Delaney, Beauford Delaney, and Bessie Harvey.

The KMA has a commitment to the development and exhibition of new work by contemporary artists. Past exhibitions at the Museum have featured solo exhibitions by contemporary artists such as Anne Wilson, Jun Kaneko, Candida Höfer, Jim Campbell, Anton Vidokle, Johanna Billing and Chuck Close.

The Museum also has an ongoing interest in the creation of first solo museum shows for promising new artists. As part of this ongoing series, KMA has been host to solo exhibitions by artists such as Tam Van Tran, Clare Rojas, Seonna Hong, and Tomory Dodge.

Images

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References

• Knoxville: Fifty Landmarks. (Knoxville: The Knoxville Heritage Committee of the Junior League of Knoxville, 1976).

External links

• Knoxville Museum of Art
• Knoxville Museum of Art, Videos
• Knoxville Museum of Art on Facebook
• Knoxville Museum of Art on Twitter
• Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture