KMA Celebrates a Diverse Visual Culture

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The Sunsphere at Knoxville’s World’s Fair Park became the iconic symbol from the 1982 exposition, and the star of the city skyline. After the World’s Fair closed, the City of Knoxville offered a tract of land for a new art museum in the shadows of the Sunsphere between downtown and the University of Tennessee. The parcel had been the location of the Japanese Pavilion during the successful exposition.

An ambitious community effort raised $11 million to construct a new, state-of-the-art building designed by renowned architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. In March 1990, the Knoxville Museum of Art opened in its current 53,200-square-foot facility. The exterior of the four-story steel and concrete building is sheathed in locally quarried pink Tennessee marble. In the decades since the museum opened, its programming has evolved to become increasingly focused on the rich culture, old and new, of Southern Appalachia.

Known locally as KMA, the museum features artists from the East Tennessee region.

“The KMA is a welcoming, visually engaging environment in which viewers can explore East Tennessee’s compelling visual arts legacy and its connections to global art currents,” says KMA Curator Stephen Wicks.

A permanent exhibit titled Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee highlights the works of noted artists such as Lloyd Branson, Catherine Wiley and Beauford Delaney, as well as major artists from outside the region who produced significant work here. Another permanent exhibit is part of the museum’s effort to introduce new art and ideas. 

The KMA’s predecessor, the Dulin Gallery of Art, opened in 1961 in the elegant Dulin House, located in a residential neighborhood on the west side of Knoxville. Here, the institution evolved more outwardly focused and education-oriented, where a community-rooted organization first took shape. By the early 1980s, it was evident that, to reach out and serve a growing and increasingly diverse community, the Dulin would have to expand or move its operations to more accessible and spacious quarters.  

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The museum supplements and complements its core permanent installations with a lively schedule of temporary exhibitions that explore aspects of regional culture and its relation to national and international artistic developments. The KMA’s permanent and temporary exhibitions are supported by a full menu of educational programming, including school tours, workshops, outreach programs, lectures, concerts, and family activities. More than 70,000 people visit annually. Outreach to area schools, particularly those in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, reaches another 10,000 young people annually.

The KMA permanent collection includes 19 black-and-white prints representing some of the most striking Depression-era images by famed photographer and writer Eudora Welty. She took the photographs in the 1930s during her assignment with the WPA in Mississippi, and they were assembled in a unique limited-edition portfolio published by the Palamon Press in 1980.

Welty’s highly acclaimed pictures first drew national attention with the 1971 publication of One Time, One Place, a collection of her photographs of Mississippi in the 1930s. Subsequently, she was invited to lecture at the Museum of Modern Art on her photography.

Welty later gained fame as a writer and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

In 1991, David Lovett of Knoxville donated this portfolio of Welty’s photographs  to the Knoxville Museum of Art.

A major renovation

At a cost of almost $6 million, the museum underwent a comprehensive, top-to-bottom restoration in 2014 in preparation for the largest figural glass installation in the world by acclaimed Knoxville artist Richard Jolley, Cycle of Life: Within the Power of Dreams and the Wonder of Infinity. This affirms the KMA’s commitment to the art and artists of our region. 

The campaign also supported endowment enhancement and the establishment of a dedicated art acquisition fund. That served as the nucleus for a major fundraising effort to purchase a group of paintings in 2018 from the Beauford Delaney estate. The museum now boasts the most extensive public collection of this important African American artist’s work.

Knoxville native Beauford Delaney is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford’s younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter.

Many of the museum’s Delaney works were shown for the first time in 2020 in Beauford Delaney & James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, a groundbreaking exhibition examining Delaney’s development through the lens of his friendship with Baldwin.

Through the Unusual Door drew national attention to the KMA’s Delaney holdings, affirmed the validity of the museum’s strategic focus on East Tennessee artists, and broadcast to the world the global significance of East Tennessee’s visual arts legacy to the world.

On view through November 22 is Jo Sandman/TRACES. An exhibition organized by the Black Mountain College Museum Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina, TRACES represents a survey of Sandman’s career that attests to her curiosity expressed through her experimental sculpture, installation, and photography. At Black Mountain College, during the summer of 1951, she studied painting with Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn. Sandman went on to develop and maintain a studio practice exploring painting, drawing, experimental sculpture, installation, and photography for more than sixty years.

Thorne Miniature Rooms, a group of nine period rooms created by renowned miniaturist Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930s, are installed in a special gallery on the museum’s lower level.

On the grounds, visitors will find a selection of sculptures by Kenneth Snelson, Bill Barrett, Julie Warren, Karen LaMonte, George Rickey, and others that populate the museum’s South Garden, the Rob and June Heller Garden, and the Land Family Sculpture Garden.

“We continue to be amazed by the remarkable artistic talent produced by this region and are proud to have developed world-class collections by masters such as Beauford and Joseph Delaney, and Catherine Wiley, among others,” Wicks said. “As we celebrate their stories, we also seek to extend our artistic program into broader territory in the coming years to activate powerful new connections with the wider world.”

Go visit

Knoxville Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sundays from 1 pm to 5 pm. Admission is always free, a core institutional value that creates a friendly exchange at the front door and helps communicate that everyone is welcome. Free parking is available. knoxart.org.

Upcoming expositions

  • 19th Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition: November 29-January 12, 2025. This collaborative project with the East Tennessee Art Education Association is designed to gather the best student work in grades 6-12 from a 32-county region; winners are eligible for $1,000,000 in scholarships to national art schools. Organized by the KMA.
  • States of Becoming: January 31-April 27, 2025. States of Becoming examines the dynamic forces of relocation, resettling, and assimilation that shape the artistic practices of a group of contemporary artists of African descent working in the United States. The exhibition is inspired by curator Fitsum Shebeshe’s 2016 move from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Baltimore and subsequent firsthand experience with cultural assimilation. Organized by Independent Curators International.
  • Electricity for All: May 16-August 17, 2025. Electricity for All examines the complex relationship between technology, information, and power through the historical framework of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a key New Deal initiative from the 1930s that introduced electricity to the Tennessee River Valley. The featured artists provide diverse perspectives on the social implications of technological advances, questioning the lost histories and the new narratives that emerged. Organized by the KMA.

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