Emporium Center
May 3
The Arts & Culture Alliance is pleased to present five new exhibitions at the Emporium Center in downtown Knoxville from May 3-31. Most of the works on exhibition will be for sale and may be purchased by visiting in person or the online shop at KnoxAlliance.store.
Tennessee Watercolor Society: Biennial Juried Exhibition in the Lower Gallery
Tennessee Watercolor Society (TnWS), a statewide artists’ organization, will showcase 50 original watercolor paintings selected by distinguished juror Don Andrews. While the paintings include a wide variety of styles and subject matter, all are completed using a watermedia on paper, which is the founding requirement of all entries into the prestigious Biennial Exhibition.
TnWS has more than 250 members throughout Tennessee encompassing five regions centered around the principal cities of Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and the Tri-Cities. The biennial exhibition locations are rotated around the state. At the close of the 2024 exhibition in Knoxville, 30 paintings will be selected by the juror to travel to other art venues around the state for the remainder of the year. The traveling exhibit has been funded by a grant from the Lyndhurst Foundation since 2014.
Juror Don Andrews of Austin, Texas, is an accomplished watercolor artist and book author who has garnered numerous national and international awards and published several books on watercolor methods. Highly coveted prizes will be awarded during the annual TnWS Membership Meeting on May 18, including a $2,000 cash award for Best of Show.
Virginia Derryberry: Private Domain and Lisa Kurtz: Earth and Fire in the Upper Gallery
Virginia Derryberry: Private Domain
Artist statement: The large scale figure narrative paintings in this most recent series of paintings blend elements from mythology and alchemy, the forerunner of modern science. Among the Greek and Roman myths that inspire me are The Seven Virtues, Naiads, and Mercury As Messenger. In all my “re-enactments,” I place the characters in contemporary clothing and scenarios. The intent is to suggest multiple interpretations rather than create straightforward illustration of a specific narrative, a fitting choice in that alchemy and mythology by nature are about the process of transformation. Passages of volumetric rendering set next to more abstract, painterly areas, result in the creation of a virtual, shifting world where nothing is quite what it seems. During the past few years, these paintings have become more complex and have begun to incorporate multiple canvases, as well as fabric, embroidery, and found objects as a way to expand the idea of traditional narrative. Suggesting Renaissance altarpiece panels or graphic novels, these images imply a conversation between fact and illusion and pull the viewer in to ask questions about what is being revealed and what is being concealed.
Derryberry’s work is shown regularly in solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and has been written about in an extensive list of publications, including exhibition catalogs, New American Paintings magazine, and Oxford American magazine. Her drawings and paintings are in numerous private and public collections, including the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Asheville Art Museum, Tennessee State Museum, State of West Virginia permanent collection, and Morris Museum of Art. Two public art installations include 16 paintings at the Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport and a 10-piece multi-panel painting at the Knoxville Convention Center.
Lisa Kurtz: Earth and Fire
Artist statement: As a clay artist and a maker of pottery, I strive for the human connection between my work and the user of my pieces: If I make a handle that beckons you to pick it up and fits so comfortably in your hands you want to use it every morning, or a bowl that you want to serve food in at every family celebration, then I feel successful. I often use scraps of old fabric salvaged from my mother and grandmother’s houses to impress textures into my clay work, connecting to the many generations of my family. Textures and colors in water, sand, shells, rocks, sea birds, and marine creatures also inform my work in clay and my glazes. I mix all my own glazes and enjoy tweaking them to emphasize the textures and designs that I put on my pieces. I throw and hand build and often combine the two methods to create my pottery. I welcome happy accidents that occur while working in the medium and in the firing processes, which has led me to explore different types of firing such as soda firing, wood firing, pit firing, and electric firing. The pieces in this exhibition were chosen for the atmospheric effects obtained in the kiln that show through on the clay and/or glazes.
Kurtz has lived in Knoxville for nearly 30 years. She received a master’s degree in Ceramics from the University of Louisville and there began her pottery business, Highland Pottery, in the eclectic Highlands neighborhood. She has taught at community colleges in Tennessee and at art centers in both Kentucky and Tennessee. Currently, she teaches functional ceramics classes at the Oak Ridge Art Center and recently taught a community clay class at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She has been an active member of several professional juried guilds, artist associations, and boards, including the Kentucky Crafts Guild, Foothills Craft Guild, Kentucky Department of the Arts Marketing Program, Arts & Culture Alliance, New Prospect Craft Center, Tennessee Craft, Knoxville Museum of Art, Art Market Gallery and Terra Madre: Women in Clay. Her clay work has exhibited and sold in galleries and shops across the U.S. and in national and regional juried fine art shows and craft fairs.
Rulla Habiby: Happiness in the Atrium
Rulla Habiby is a multi-media artist, painting in abstract and figurative styles, working with concrete and various clays, and using experience with graphic design in her works. Her paintings are characterized by bold and dramatic colors, combined into a fluid harmony. She was born and raised in the city of Haifa, Israel, and moved with her family to Knoxville more than 20 years ago.
Early in life, Habiby showed a passion and talent for painting and strives to paint her life onto the canvas. Her unique background brings together the East and the West into a dazzling blend of her colors, feelings, and soul.
CT Kellar: Paper Work on the North Wall
CT Kellar was born the son of a Southern Baptist minister and counts as his heritage the red dirt and green pines of the Sierra foothills. Wanderlust has led him to live on a boat in Monterey Bay, a repurposed orphanage in Northern California, a restored Victorian in Juneau, Alaska, and now in his current art-filled bungalow in Knoxville. Kellar has reinvented himself multiple times, on both the professional front as sportswriter, house painter, high-tech sales guy, and social worker, as well as creatively as frontman for an indie rock band, poet, playwright, and currently: collage artist.
Artist statement: Servitude to the muse is nothing new for me, but working as a visual artist was not something I had done until 2022. Two things happened that lit my creative fuse: I watched a documentary about collage artist Lance Letscher, and I moved to Juneau, Alaska. The lack of sunshine there due to the weather and the shortness of days became a bit debilitating. The idea of assembling elements of color without being constrained by form or direction was an immediate mood lifter. Snow, rain, and darkness become much more bearable when caught up in the work of creating pieces leaning heavily on primary colors. While I now live in Knoxville, my immersion in this medium has continued. The satisfaction I gain from making art owes much to randomness, spontaneity, and surprise.
M. Kobe & Dongyi Wu: Alternating Remnants in the Display Case
M. Kobe is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She earned an MFA in Painting from Boston University, a BFA in Painting, and a BA in Art History from Louisiana State University. Kobe is a storyteller and multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with textiles, found natural materials, and lucky objects. Drawing upon her experiences growing up in the American South, her work contends with the religious mythologies of her upbringing, superstition, notions of home, and cultural inheritance. Kobe is currently an Artist in Residence at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and was recently a resident at Azule.
Artist statement: As an artist from the American South, primarily Louisiana and North Carolina, I make work that is informed by my own natural history and questions what it means to live in these regions now. Building off the myths of my religious upbringing, folk tales taught in elementary school, and my love for country music, I navigate these superstitions and examine what it means to write my own. The art objects I make, tapestries and sculptures, are embedded with found natural or “lucky” materials and imbued with personal narrative. I am learning what it means to love a place that can be hard to love, to love a landscape that loves me back. I make my work with gratitude and admiration and as a critical yet redemptive response to the complicated places I call home.
Dongyi Wu was born and raised in China. She is a contemporary jewelry artist and is currently an Artist in Residence at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She received her master’s degree in Metal and Jewelry Design from Rochester Institute of Technology, a bachelor’s degree in Jewelry Art Design from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology in China, and a dual degree in Fashion and Engineering from the same undergraduate school in China. Wu has shown nationally and internationally and recently presented her sixth solo exhibition at the Clamp Light Studios & Gallery in San Antonio, Texas. Her works have been featured in many publications, such as Chinese Contemporary Jewelry Design and New Brooches: 400+ Contemporary Jewellery Designs. Her work is permanently collected by Le Arti Orafe Jewellery School & Academy in Florence.
Artist statement: My works span across contemporary jewelry, body jewelry, fashion art, sculpture, and conceptual installation, and contemporary jewelry is the primary medium of my current artistic research. I treat jewelry as a tool to explore the relationship between human bodies and their surrounding spaces, as well as a visual language that is delivered to others without real words. I liken myself to a storyteller who narrates stories that seem to be trivial and common but express strong and genuine emotions. I categorize materials according to their colors/shapes/texture and spend time exploring the connections between the selected materials and my personal experiences/preferences. In this case, all the materials that appear in my work speak of my personality and feelings.
The exhibitions will be on display at the Emporium Center, located at 100 S. Gay Street in Knoxville. The Emporium is open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm, Saturday (May 4 & 11) from 10 am to 1 pm, and Friday, May 10 from 5 to 7 pm for a Gallery 1010 opening. For more information, call 865-523-7543 or visit KnoxAlliance.com.