The Knoxville Museum of Art opened 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.

The New York artist puts a new spin on the history of Western art, using digital technology to recreate and reinterpret familiar masterpieces.

Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, Devorah Sperber deconstructs familiar images to address the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see. “As a visual artist,” she says, “I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic than the act of seeing—how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.”

Sperber’s work is based on the technology of mechanical reproduction and how it alters images and the scale of artworks as they exist in “the mind’s eye.” Using ordinary spools of thread, she creates pixilated, inverted images of well-known masterpieces including famous paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci and Jan Van Eyck, which appear as colorful abstractions to the naked eye. When viewed through optical devices, however, the works becomes immediately recognizable.

Sperber has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries around the world, and is represented in a number of private and public collections in the United States. To see more of her work go to www.devorahsperber.com.

A members-only exhibition preview party and opportunity to meet the artist takes place Thursday, October 29 at 5:30–7:30pm. Additionally, the public is invited to a lecture by Sperber will be held at the University of Tennessee Wednesday, October 28 at 7pm in the Art & Architecture building in room 109. Sponsors for this exhibition include the University of Tennessee Visual Arts Committee. Media sponsors include AT&T Real Yellow Pages, digital media graphix, Method Bureau, and WBIR.

Wind/Rewind/Weave investigates the process of craft and textile production through three separate works: Rewinds, Local Industry and Wind-Up: Walking the Warp.

Rewinds is the premier showing of an installation of glass bobbins, a “deconstructed carpet” of glass stretching 12 feet long. This work stems from Wilson’s artist residency at the Pilchuk Glass School, and at two subsequent residencies at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.

Local Industry, designed by the artist specifically for the KMA, invites museum visitors to consider textile production by spending time winding bobbins of thread. Inside, rows of hand bobbin winders recall the group dynamics of a textile factory. The wound bobbins will be used by a group of experienced weavers to make a single bolt of cloth on a loom set up in the gallery.

Wind-Up: Walking the Warp is a video documenting a group performance January 20-25, 2008, at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago in which 10 participants perform the rhythmic act of building a 40-yard weaving warp on a 17' x 7' frame.

• Exhibition related events:
  
  
  • A members-only preview party is scheduled for Thursday, January 21 from 5:30 – 7:30pm.
    
    
  • A discussion with the artist is set for Saturday, January 23 at 3pm and is free and open to the public.

Anne Wilson, a Chicago-based visual artist and head of the fiber program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, creates sculpture, drawings, video animations, and installations that explore themes of time, loss, private and social rituals. Her work rests at the forefront of artwork connecting conceptualism and handiwork, activism and aesthetics. Through a diverse range of source materials and production methods, Wilson’s practice extends the relational in terms of labor, collaboration, and identity construction. Her work has been exhibited around the world.

Presenting sponsor for the exhibition is Jupiter Entertainment. Additional sponsors include Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass; Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts; the University of Tennessee Visual Arts Committee; and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

For more information about the exhibition and the artist, go to http://www.windrewindweave.com.