Carl Sublett: Godfather of the Punks

Modest painter, professor leaves DIY legacy

Nighttime on the long drive to Nashville: One by one, the car headlights turned off, their drivers digging the beauty of the full moon flaring down on the forested, mountain panorama of the Cumberland Plateau.

This motorcade of old station wagons loaded with art for exhibitions in the state capital had no need for artificial illumination. They were the Knoxville Seven (some of them, anyway), a group of progressive artists, staging one of their hit-and-run excursions, using their own resources to drag Knoxville into the light of the modern era of art. Building on a long tradition of Appalachian do-it-yourself spirit, they also set a precedent for today’s generation of guerrilla artists, flouting authority, hanging art in alleys and staging absurd theater in vacant buildings.

It was the early ’60s. Like the beatniks and hippies yet to come, like the punks of the ’80s and like today’s cynical, street-wise postmoderns, the Seven did not suffer the status quo humbly. They were abstract expressionists in the South, after all. In 1963, around the same time as the stunt on the road to Nashville, Walter “Holly” Stevens threw together an assortment of debris to display at the upcoming Dogwood Arts Festival, an act which outraged the local press. It was part of the Seven’s protest against the complacency reinforced by Look magazine naming Knoxville an “All-American” city that year.

Stevens died in 1980. Already gone four years was Kermit C. “Buck” Ewing, whose theatrical style of raising money for the impoverished University of Tennessee Fine Arts Department he headed was the catalyst for the short-lived group. Early this year saw the passing of another nuclear member of this dwindling crew, when Carl Sublett died Jan. 24, 11 days before his 89th birthday. Sublett, who had been Ewing’s right hand man during many an administrative battle on behalf of the art department, mentored his son, Eric Sublett, a long-time agitator among Knoxville’s creative community and a painter and videographer of distinction. The younger Sublett was also a benefactor to Knoxville’s leading singer-poet, RB Morris.

“When he opened Sublett Gallery in the 11th Street Artists Colony on the World’s Fair site, he helped usher in a whole new generation of artists that have remained a vital part of the scene,” says Morris, who was sort of the artist-in-residence of the gallery that Eric managed. Sublett Gallery, where many “underground” art events were held, existed only a handful of years. An espresso house inherited the location, retaining a hint of the old ambiance.

Besides Sublett, the Seven included bigger-than-life UT art department head Ewing, Richard Clarke, Stevens and Joanna Higgs. Robert (Bob) Birdwell, currently living in Powell, and Phillip Nichols of Florida, father of well-known local musician “Smokin’” Dave Nichols, are the last survivors of the group. Nichols, the only sculptor in the group, was such a latecomer that he refers to it as “the Knoxville Six.”

“I think the Knoxville Seven thing was a tongue-in-cheek protest on the lack of places to show and the dearth of people that actually knew anything about the sensibilities of artists. What we have now would have astounded those guys. Back then, the Dogwood Arts Festival was really the only show in town and was forever being chaired by people with very little (arts) experience. The Seven were serious artists, the best around, and they were loading those station wagons full of interesting art and going to any art fair around. Someone in the group would win the prize, more often than not,” Sublett says, remembering riding along for that mystical, moonlit caravan. “I was just 12, and for a bright-eyed, swivel-headed kid, it was a magical moment.”

Carl Sublett came from hardheaded Kentucky Huguenots. His father, Tandy Taylor Sublett, was a blacksmith, toolmaker and electrician in the coalmines. Even in that hardscrabble context, Carl managed to go through life being somewhat coddled by the women in his life. He was an only child, his mother doting on him as much as possible during the Depression. His father’s make-do spirit was passed along to Carl, setting the groundwork for the ethos that would propel him to worldly renown as an artist. While working as a draftsman in the Hartford, Conn., aircraft industry, Carl met and fell in love with a co-worker, Helen Davis, from an old Maine family. It was through her that the Kentucky boy would establish a lifelong love of the Maine coast that would figure so prominently in his work as a professional artist.