Have You Seen It? Knoxville's forgotten art collection

I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned an artist to someone who isn’t familiar with his or her work and said, “They have work in the Convention Center Collection.” The response is always total confusion. The person can figure out which building I am referring to, but has no idea about any of the art in it.

The grand opening of the new Knoxville Convention Center was in October 2002. The building was a rarity in Knoxville; finished on schedule, on budget, with part of that budget including $1 million to procure contemporary art. There was a national call for artists to submit proposals, and a local jury of art professionals convened to decide who made the cut. A good deal of the collection ended up being not only regional, but also local. There was a lot of coverage about the Center’s art collection when it first opened, but it is amazing how few people even in the arts community have seen it.

A brochure is available for visitors to facilitate a self-guided tour of the 50 works on display by 38 artists. The jewel of the collection is “Ala” by Venetian artist Lino Tagliapietra, one of the world’s most eminent living glass artists, whose work is represented in museum collections throughout the world. The piece is a grouping of blown-glass birds suspended from the ceiling. They are delicately lined with coloration and abstractly shaped. The ambient window light plays with their shadows, adding more solidity to their gossamer presence.

The largest piece in the Center is “Ramsey Cascade” by Watertown, Mass., artist Mike Mandel. Originally a photographer, Mandel has been transferring digitally reduced photographic images into large-scale tile mosaics in public building spaces for almost a decade. Each tile in the two-story image of a woman dwarfed by cascades of luminous water represents a pixel from the original photo.

Like the pieces described above, most of the work was produced with the large, airy building in mind. There are diptychs, triptychs and multi-paneled work. The scale is large — the largest and loudest being Maryville College professor Carl Gombert’s series of six gigantic faces, “Spectrum.” The face series utilizes the entire color spectrum as it sweeps down the length of the West Concourse. Red, yellow, orange, green, blue and purple people with random facial expressions are backed and framed with their complimentary colors. The imagery is hilarious and his technique brutally flawless.

Two other works incorporating powerful use of color are Morristown artist Virginia Derryberry’s “Flood Tide” and “Pandora’s Boxes” installation, and Asheville fiber artist Chad Alice Hagen’s “Collection Series.” Derryberry’s “Flood Tide’ shows houses and boats rendered with Fisher Price simplicity floating amidst trees in an endless sea of water. “Pandora’s Box” is a grouping of smaller paintings, depicting the same houses and boats dealing with fire and explosions. Each painting has a corresponding group of symbols next to it, stamped in velvet.

Hagen’s series of seven felt wall hangings evokes a more primitive time when felt was used for dwelling walls and people collected stones, sticks and other organic matter to use for decoration. Each felt hanging has a carefully sewn design of stones, sticks or gourd fragments.

Atlanta’s Radcliff Bailey’s triptych on wood panels, “Untitled,” is meant to explore interconnections in the lives of African Americans. He has enlarged to greater-than-life-size a 19th century photo of a family member, and juxtaposed the image with a pinhole camera photo of the moon on one side and an abstract painting on the other with branching swirls that seem to evoke blood vessels
and organs.

Some of the other local and regional artists included are Jean Hess, Christine Patterson, Richard Jolley, Julie Warren Conn, Paul Menchhofer, Andrew Saftel, Richard Painter, Ron Williams, Marga Hayes Ingram, the late Carl Sublett,Betsey Worden and Bessie Harvey.

The only drawback with the Convention Center Collection is that art was never taken into consideration when the lighting was designed. The fisheye cans in the ceiling are aimed at the floor. It has always seemed to me that it would be fairly easy to replace specific fisheyes with directional spots where they are needed to properly illuminate both the art on the walls and the sculpture. Correct lighting for art is critical in that it illuminates without glare and acts as a directional signal. I’m hoping there will be future plans to correct
this oversight.