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Local historian Neely and KMA curator Wicks describe 100 years of the visual arts in East Tennessee

A scene from the Knoxville Museum of Art’s permanent exhibit, ‘Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee.’ The exhibit was first opened in 2008, but was renovated and re-opened alongside an accompanying catalog co-written by Jack Neely and Steven Wicks in 2023.
Kelsie Conley
/
Knoxville Museum of Art
A scene from the Knoxville Museum of Art’s permanent exhibit, ‘Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee.’ The exhibit was first opened in 2008, but was renovated and re-opened alongside an accompanying catalog co-written by Jack Neely and Steven Wicks in 2023.

This is an excerpt of a conversation between local historian Jack Neely, Knoxville Museum of Art Curator Stephen Wicks and WUOT Reporter Pierce Gentry recorded on September 10, 2024. The event which this conversation references took place on September 12, 2024.

Pierce Gentry: Gentlemen, thank you both so much for joining me today. We’re here to discuss a project which I believe you’ve both been working on for quite a while, known as Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee, both the exhibit, and the book, which was published last year, I believe. How did you two first start working together? How did you meet, and how did you begin to collaborate on this book?

Jack Neely: Gosh we met a long time ago, 20 or 30 years ago, something like that. Stephen’s been the curator at the KMA for a long time. When did you start, Stephen?

Stephen Wicks: I started straight out of graduate school in 1990, shortly after the museum's doors had opened. We had a terrific director who recently retired, David Butler, and one of the things that David did was encourage the museum's identity to be rooted in local soil as much as possible. And so that led to the Higher Ground mandate.

It was a lot of fun over the years, working to identify artists that we weren't aware of who had connections to Knoxville. And then Jack and I would talk about particular pieces by certain artists that we thought were just so emblematic of Knoxville. And many of these were on loan to us, and eventually, some of these we were able to acquire.

Gentry: Can you talk to me a little bit about the history of the exhibit, and then how you came to want to develop a catalog – a book – devoted to it?

Wicks: One of the things that happened after we opened Higher Ground in 2008 was we got this groundswell of interest locally, and beyond. There were a lot of donations, a lot of people helping us purchase works of art. And these helped us form this growing story.

And I want to say between 2008 when Higher Ground first opened, and the new Higher Ground opening in 2023, we acquired 200+ works of art that related to Higher Ground. And that really became a major incentive for us to put a book out there on the table, and think about developing a publication devoted to higher ground.

And so we just went back and forth. Jack was involved in the dialog, and we shaped what's close to a 300 page book. And it's not, by any means, the end of the story. It's really just chapter one.

Gentry: Could we move a little broader into that? Can we discuss the larger history of the visual arts in East Tennessee and Knoxville? I feel like it's not something that the average visitor, or even citizen, ties to this area. So I'm curious to know what that looks like and how significant it is to our history.

Neely: Yeah, I got to know about local art. I knew just a few things before I began working as a journalist – having to start working as a journalist for Metro Pulse about the same time that KMA opened – and this was kind of an opening for me to learn about people like Katherine Wiley and Buford Delaney, who I really didn't know that much about.

But I'd begun exploring these, some of these subjects for my column in Metro Pulse, and got interested in them one after another, and it's just been like a dream come true to see Higher Ground open; Both the original one and the much expanded recent one.

You're right that Knoxville is not – has not – been famous for the visual arts in the same way that it's been famous, at least in a culty sort of way, with literature and music, especially country music, over the years. It's almost like the visual arts were sort of an afterthought in most people's minds. And when we had an exhibit, it was an exhibit of someone nationally famous.

But it began to change when people started to realize how rich and interesting and connected the arts are here. Before we even had art galleries, people were experiencing art at fairs, at carnivals, at expositions. Before the whole era that we had anything that was dignified with the title of ‘art gallery’ in town, you know, sometimes it was art, you know, displayed in the streets of Gay Street especially, or at Chilhowee Park.

Of course, the Smokies are well known as a place for people to go up and paint landscapes. But we don't think of art as being something that's critically influential in terms of public policy. And in the case of the Smokies, it was. This wasn't just people expressing their innermost feelings. It was people showing the world what the Smoky Mountains look like.

Because they were – we could only see them from a distance for a long time, until people like Charles Krutch began painting them, and people like Jim Thompson began taking pictures of them. And these were, in some ways, indeed, influential in making the Smoky Mountains a national park basically in the 1920s. And that's partly the story we want to tell with the book, and with our program this week.

A scene from the Knoxville Museum of Art’s permanent exhibit, ‘Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee.’ The exhibit was first opened in 2008, but was renovated and re-opened alongside an accompanying catalog co-written by Jack Neely and Steven Wicks in 2023.
Kelsie Conley
/
Knoxville Museum of Art
A scene from the Knoxville Museum of Art’s permanent exhibit, ‘Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee.’ The exhibit was first opened in 2008, but was renovated and re-opened alongside an accompanying catalog co-written by Jack Neely and Steven Wicks in 2023.

Gentry: In the book, you talk a bit about sort of a discovery of Black artists in Knoxville and East Tennessee who might have otherwise went undiscovered – who might have been marginalized during their time. Can you talk a little bit to me about that?

Wicks: Well, they were marginalized. They still are, I think. This was basically us doing research when it came to the Appalachian expositions and the National Conservation Exposition. There were African American pavilions at those particular events. And, in the pavilion, it was basically one structure that was used for all three of the expositions, and it was designed and built by African American architects and builders.

It housed a broad array of achievements. It could be anything from textile designs, to dinnerware, to oil paintings. It was basically just showcasing African American creative achievement, and it attracted a lot of attention. The frustrating part of it is that they would mention the names of certain award winners, but we've yet to find any kind of trace of their output. What did they create? Who collected it? Where did it end up?

And so I feel as if what we've done in the book is raise some questions, shine some light, and then we're hoping that there will be additional findings in years ahead, and we'll be able to figure out who are some of the key people from this particular community who achieved these amazing things. How can we weave them into the fabric of the art history that we're trying to build?

Gentry: Why give a talk now? What are you hoping to accomplish on Thursday night?

Wicks: I think what we're doing is we're going to try to set the tone for what we hope is an ongoing series of conversations. Some of them might take the form of two or three people chatting about a particular set of artists within the larger span of time and Higher Ground. I think what we're trying to do is also just break into these conversations that I think will enrich people's experience in the exhibition.

Neely: Yeah, and I think it's great for people who live in Knoxville to be able to connect with this, to realize that this city has a full complexity of a culture. And, I mean, not high-C culture, just culture. This is what the the way, what people do with that they don't have to do either creating things to express themselves, or to express ideas, or to further a movement like the Smoky Mountains National Park movement. That this has been happening all this time and has really been gathered into one place – it's really completely fascinating.

Gentry: Jack Neely and Stephen Wicks, thank you so much for joining me today.

Pierce is a Knoxville native and an undergraduate student studying Journalism in the University of Tennessee’s College of Communication and Information. He first came to WUOT as an intern in the Spring of 2024, before transitioning into a part-time role over the Summer. In his free time, Pierce enjoys reading, photography and getting lost in the Great Smoky Mountains.