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      • Natural History
      • First Peoples
      • Forging a Nation
      • The Civil War and Reconstruction
      • Change and Challenge
      • Tennessee Transforms
    • Temporary Exhibitions
      • A Better Life for Their Children (Opens Feb. 24, 2023)
      • STARS: Elementary Visual Art Exhibition 2023
      • Early Expressions: Art in Tennessee Before 1900
      • In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee Since 1900
      • Why Do Museums Collect
    • Online Exhibitions
      • Tennessee at 225
      • Ratified! Statewide!
      • Canvassing Tennessee: Artists and Their Environments
    • Past Exhibitions
      • Painting the Smokies
      • Tennessee at 225
      • Best of Tennessee Craft
      • Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote
      • Tennessee and the Great War: A Centennial Exhibition
      • STARS: Elementary Art Exhibition 2022
      • Cordell Hull: Tennessee's Father of the United Nations
      • Lets Eat! Origins and Evolutions of Tennessee Food
      • The State of Sound: Tennessee’s Musical Heritage
      • Red Grooms: A Retrospective
      • Between The Layers: Art and Story in Tennessee Quilts
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      • Daily Life on the Tennessee Frontier
      • Cherokee in Tennessee: Their Life, Culture, and Removal
      • The Age of Jackson and Tennessee’s Legendary Leaders
      • The Life of a Civil War Soldier
      • The Lives of Three Tennessee Slaves and Their Journey Towards Freedom
      • The Three Rs of Reconstruction: Rights, Restrictions and Resistance.
      • Understanding Women's Suffrage: Tennessee's Perfect 36
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      • The Modern Movement for Civil Rights in Tennessee
      • Tennessee: Its Land & People
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Temporary Exhibitions

Tennessee's Musical Heritage

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In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee after 1900 image

In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee after 1900

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In Search of the New: Art in Tennessee after 1900

At the opening of the 20th century, Tennessee was transitioning from a primarily agrarian economy to a mixed one. Artistic tastes would also change in this period. With the advent of photography, hard-edged reality could be captured by a camera much cheaper and truer than a painter could achieve. Artists began to go out with newly invented chemically-produced pigments in paint tubes, and that freed them to paint outdoors from reality, rather than from sketches. Experiments in new ways of depicting the world also very gradually crept into Tennessee as well. Artists represented in this show include Mayna Treanor Avent and Willie Betty Newman, two woman artists who went to Paris in the late nineteenth century to take painting lessons. When they returned home to Tennessee with their newly acquired training, their work brought new ways of showing the world around them. Other artists visited the state, or passed through, including Will Henry Stevens, Rudolph Ingerle, and Ernest Lawson. The Great Depression brought opportunity as well as hardship, with the WPA paying artists to create murals for government buildings across the state. You’ll discover several examples of studies by Dean Cornwell, Luis Mora, and George Davidson in the collection. Following World War II, artists such as Philip Perkins, who had worked in Paris before the war, came back home. European artists like Eugene Vitale Biel-Bienne also came to Tennessee from Paris, and taught other artists. These influences began to move some of our artists to use expressionism, abstraction, and surrealism.

Tennessee artists now are very much attuned to the latest styles and methods used in all forms of artistic expression. Nashville-natives Red Grooms and Robert Ryman have made international names for themselves. Margaret Ellis made a name for herself with a jewelry line, and Richard Jolley is an internationally known glass artist. At the same time our traditional crafts are also thriving. Akira and Larry Blount made dolls that are widely collected. William Edmondson is a legend in outsider sculpture. Wendy Maruyama brought a new style of Studio Furniture to the Appalachian Center for Crafts. Mark Taylor makes some of the finest musical instruments today. All of them are a reminder that the arts are very much alive and well in Tennessee.

In Search of the New is scheduled to be on view through the beginning of 2020.              

Circus Rabbit by Carroll Todd, 2002  "Autumn Brilliance" by Coralie Tweed, golden acrylics and pastels on paper, 1994

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