UT School of Art Faculty Exhibition

Much of the work done by faculty members at the University of Tennessee may never reach the eyes of students or the wider public. There are occasional exceptions—William Bass’ popular book on forensics and the school’s Body Farm, Death’s Acre, and Michael Zemel’s controversial claim that dairy intake stimulates weight loss—but, to a great extent, much of what’s done at the school stays locked away in academia.

UT’s art and design faculty members, however, display their work every year, and this year’s UT School of Art Faculty Exhibition (Oct. 23-Dec. 15 at the school’s Ewing Gallery) is pure pleasure. Among the works this year are the rich and atmospheric landscapes produced by Marcia Goldenstein and Tom Reisling. For the show, Goldenstein will produce several tiny canvases with small sections of sky and land with various lighting and tile an entire wall with them. Her more recent paintings involve artificial lighting at night. Reisling’s landscapes are large scale and dynamic, with large gestures instead of detail; they invite the viewer inside them.

Film art professor Norman Magden merges complicated choreography, dance, and monochromatic costumes into abstract formations of rhythm and pattern. Jered Sprecher, professor of drawing and painting, produces graphically minimal paintings of fragments of cultural images. Michael Braake’s intensely pigmented paintings combine unconventional materials, such as toy building blocks and resin. David Wilson uses the gallery walls themselves to produce his massive drawings. Sally Brogden is a ceramics sculptor whose simple, clean structures resemble segments of commercial packaging. Jason Brown’s environmental sculptures and installations involve everything from steel to nylon in simple shapes and bright colors.

Beauvais Lyons, professor of printmaking, is perhaps the great showman of the department. He produces entire exhibits based on a specific premise, one that is almost always a farce. A recent project, “The Spelvin Collection,” involved a pair of fictional outsider art collectors from Lenoir City. Lyons contrived both the biographies and work of all the artists in the collection, ranging from an abandoned bride who produced portraits on black velvet, inspired by photos of brides in the newspaper, to a man who found God while eating at a Waffle House and started creating art by writing scripture on the insides of empty cereal boxes. The works Lyons chose for the faculty exhibit are bizarre medical prints from the (fictional) Hokes Archives.  

In addition to work from the fine arts department, the exhibit will also include work from the graphic design department, ranging from Web packaging and book design to the bright and witty work of assistant professor Wade Lough, who’s had work published in Print and American Illustrator.

Some art schools and educators maintain that professors should never show their work to students to prevent undue influence or imitation. (I went to such a school and to this day have no clue what kind of work any of my professors did.) Magden, however, says that UT’s teaching method instructs students to find inspirational source material and to think about representing that influence in their own way.

One of the great assets of a faculty exhibit is the opportunity for professors who are also active, working artists to actually display their work locally. Many of the school’s faculty members routinely show their work outside of Knoxville, and, though some of the work in this show has been made specifically for the exhibition, other pieces have been shown in several other locations. The show will also display the great diversity of work produced by the faculty. “There is no dominant ‘style’ here within the school, and this will be echoed in the exhibition,” Sprecher says. “I think this is a great strength that students can learn from such a broad-based faculty within the school of art.”

Goldenstein is also quick to point out that the department’s professors are not so much art teachers but artists who also teach.  “It’s important that they see us as professional artists,” she says. “And we would like the entire community to know that Knoxville has an amazing, productive, and skilled art faculty at UT who not only teach but show their work internationally, nationally, and regionally. It’s important to emphasize that UT is a research institution and that our activities in painting, sculpture, ceramics, and media constitute a very high level of professionalism. A faculty exhibition showcases the kind of research and recognition that are not only required by the school administration but, more importantly, are particularly noteworthy in the professional art world.”

Lyons says students are a unique audience to this enterprise—they’ll finally see their teachers through their art rather than their teaching. It will give other students an introduction to the faculty they might work with in the future.

“If my professors didn’t participate in making work, their value in terms of input would be diminished,” says Michael Giles, a candidate for an MFA in painting. “Not to say that getting input from non-artists—historians, philosophers, etc.—isn’t helpful, but when you’re talking one-on-one with an artist, there’s a different level of familiarity involved and a different dialogue that one expects. That dialogue with an artist is expected to be formed from the practice of art-making.”

Recent graduate Mellissa Hoesman Johnson sees the exhibit from a time-line perspective. “As artists and students, it’s important to understand how we all fit into the world of art,” she says. “Our work reflects what we experienced in our time. We’re influenced as students today much like our professors were influenced during their college education.  Most of my professors at UT were earning their degrees and trying to jump-start their professional careers during the ’60s and ’70s. I think that it’s totally interesting that their work still reflects this very nihilistic era.”