Views from the Outside

Whenever I meet someone who’s here from a bigger city with a more recognized arts community, the first thing I want to know is how he or she views Knoxville. The conventional wisdom is that East Tennessee is provincial. But what stands out locally to new transplants? Do they have ideas that they hope can be implemented here?

Joe Letitia is a native of the northeast and a Yale MFA recipient. He’d also been a studio assistant for Chuck Close in New York for almost seven years when he came to Knoxville in 1996 to serve as an artist in residence at the University of Tennessee for a semester. During the course of his indenture, Letitia met a local woman, got married, and decided to stay. He now teaches art at Webb School.

What convinced Letitia to stick around Knoxville after starting his career in an art community as intense as New York? For one thing, he now has more freedom to explore and create in the natural direction he wished to follow, having widened his distance from the rigid constraints imposed by a brutally competitive gallery system. For another, he no longer wonders if people visiting his studio are interested in his art instead of the potential contacts he could provide.

He also enjoys teaching and has appreciates the Knoxville Museum of Art’s renewed interest in young local artists, highlighted by KMA’s December exhibit of works by East Tennessee students. Webb’s artist-in-residence program has kept Letitia in touch with artists in larger cities, and he’s planning a solo exhibit at Cynthia Broan Gallery in New York this spring.

There are things Letitia would like to see happen in Knoxville: He notes that New York has been creative about using abandoned spaces, such as the old P.S.1, as laboratories for local experimental art. The developing art corridor that drifts down Gay Street through the Old City and up Central Street has plenty of room for expansion into abandoned locations, he says including the old Dogwood Elementary School, empty gas stations, and other now-vacant buildings that could house studio and gallery spaces. Letitia also thinks downtown locations for Knoxville’s two large A-list galleries, Hanson and Bennett, if feasible, would be a boon to the downtown arts community.

Knoxville is also now home to Allen Cox who relocated here five years ago when his wife was recruited to become the head of UT’s audiology and speech pathology department. Cox is a native of Oregon and received an MFA from the University of Oregon. He’s an established abstract painter both in the Pacific Northwest and in New Zealand. He’s exhibited his work in Portland, Ore., for more than 20 years and witnessed firsthand the rapid development of that city’s arts community from a handful of galleries with random social events to a major force in the city’s cultural life, with thousands of people attending monthly First Thursday art events.

Since he’s been in Knoxville, Cox has seen similar stirrings here, with the recent explosion of First Fridays. He enjoys the exchange of ideas with artists in other communities through opportunities nurtured by the UT Art Department’s Visiting Artist Program and exhibits sponsored by UT, KMA, and the Art Gallery of Knoxville. He does, however, miss one particular program from Portland: the Oregon Biennial, sponsored every two years since 1949 by the Portland Art Museum. Biennials help set standards for regional art, and there isn’t anything of that caliber held in this area, he says. (The establishment of the first Tennessee Biennial in Clarksville last year means Middle Tennessee may now own this exhibition title, if not the concept.)

One of the difficulties Cox has found in Knoxville has been the lack of large-scale studio space available for artists who don’t work in their homes. With all the empty industrial properties in the area, he wishes it were easier to find inexpensive spaces with such all-important studio necessities as good natural light, open floor plans, high ceilings, and oversized doors. His studio is presently in a warehouse building a few blocks from the Old City, where he depends on artificial lighting. Cox produces 40 to 45 paintings a year, many of which are represented locally by Bennett Gallery, with the rest going to other galleries in Oregon, California, and New Zealand.

Leticia and Cox have no plans for leaving Knoxville anytime soon, so their presence will continue to enrich and contribute to the continuing development of the serious visual art community in this city.