Color Me Bad: Animation, Pop, Satire

The idea of an aesthetic fusion of popular culture with Appalachian vernacular in many ways invites a calamity of principles and taste. Brian Clinebell, Peter Morgan, and Jessica Walker grew up in Abingdon at the end of twentieth century with color televisions and new-media saturation yet surrounded by the tchotchkes and Americana that are favored in ...

Circles in the Sand: Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Central Desert in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection

Circles in the Sand: Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Central Desert in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection includes work from three desert communities – Papunya, Yuendumu and Balgo – each with their own distinct history and style of painting. In putting together this exhibition, Kluge-Ruhe focused on the art centers associated with these communities, which not ...

Shining Light: Folk Artists Nancy Johnson and Minnie Ma Scyphers

Nancy Johnson is a studio artist at Abingdon’s Arts Depot. Much of her work is inspired by family history and childhood memory. She also references the early history of African-Americans from the region and beyond. Johnson incorporates a range of materials including paint, glitter, stickers, pencil shavings and paper. Her gift for story-telling is at ...

Ceramics by Birdie Boone

The ceramic work of Birdie Boone transcends the functionality associated with cups and saucers, dishes and bowls, teapots and vases. Boone carefully considers the form, texture, and character of her pieces so that they begin to communicate and take on an identity of their own.  Carefully displayed or assembled in large-scale installations, Boone’s concepts regarding ...

Dalí Illustrates the Divine Comedy: From the University of Tennessee’s Ewing Gallery

Art and literary enthusiasts will have the opportunity to see a literary masterpiece come to life through the work of the late world-renowned artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) in Dalí Illustrates Dante’s Divine Comedy

From These Hills 2011: Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachian Highlands

William King Museum is proud to present the tenth From These Hills biennial exhibition. Historically, this exhibition boasts a wide range of media and subjects with reference to this notable time and place. Our Guest Juror, Amy Moorefield, selected the following twenty-three artists to be featured in this 2011 ...

Fantastic Mechanics Sean Pace and Robert Sulkin

Sean Pace of Asheville, North Carolina, and Robert Sulkin of Roanoke, Virginia, are imaginative engineers in the studio. Sean Pace creates mixed-media sculptures that often have a complex network of motors and gears. With human intervention they can be set into motion and facilitate surprising activities such painting an abstract picture or shooting a rubber chicken. ...

The Virginia Dulcimer: 200 Years of Bowing, Strumming, & Picking

The dulcimer is one of the most popular symbols of mountain music. This exhibition explores the dulcimer’s long journey from northern Europe, to the mountains of Appalachia, and eventually into the hands of folk musicians across the nation. The Old World dulcimer underwent a dramatic change in Virginia. In The ...

Quilt National: The Dairy Barn Arts Center Biennial

UNShelved: Nick DeFord, Daniel Essig, Travis Head, and Robyn Raines

From all corners of the region, the artists selected for this exhibition together reveal an interest in text-based images, seeing books as art objects, and working with paper in both traditional and alternative ways. In many ways these artists are also astute collectors -of images, publications, stories, and things – which also serve to inform their work. ...