This Friday, artists from all across the country will come together to display their art in the UT Downtown Gallery. They are the incoming graduate students in the UT School of Art.
Mike Berry, gallery manager, has worked with UT Downtown Gallery for 11 years. Hired at the start of Knoxville’s downtown renaissance, Berry watched the local art scene grow.
For Berry, UT Downtown Gallery has been a cornerstone in this city-wide artistic revival.
“I think we are an important part of the community and an extension of the university,” Berry said. “It’s a good way for students to come down and see a professional show that is not their professor or a local artist. It’s educating them on something different.”
With a dual purpose of education and artistic promotion, UT Downtown Gallery is a fitting place for incoming MFA students to start their graduate career.
“The piece on display is their current work, what they’re bringing to the program,” Berry said. “Which is really interesting because if you follow a grad their work usually changes quite a bit.”
One incoming student, Tom Wixo, is entering the school for painting with a drawing concentration. His work deals with artistic and sociological aspects.
“I make mostly abstract paintings that work with language and the failure of language,” Wixo said. “I’m really interested in language, sort of how it works and how it’s a code and how that code falls apart in certain situations.”
Wixo is part of a handful of drawing and painting students accompanied by students in transmedia, design, sculpture, ceramics and printmaking.
Despite being one of the nation’s most prestigious programs, UT’s printmaking program, which contains only three professors, has accepted only one new graduate student this year. Johanna Winters worked in a printmaking studio in Minneapolis for years before choosing to return to grad school.
“Beauvais (Lyons) has certainly built up a strong program,” Winters said. “The other faculty, I’m not sure how long all of them have been teaching, have a reputation of being a kind of powerhouse printmaking combo.”
For many of the upcoming students, this will be their first time seeing each other’s work. For the rest of the UT School of Art, the exhibition will be their introduction to the new graduates.
“Every student finds their own path and they come here to stretch themselves and to grow,” Berry said. “Usually the work that they exhibit is how they were accepted, on the strength of that work. It’s showing the school, these are our new grads and our new TAs and this is what they’re bringing to the program.”
The first-year graduate student exhibition will be on display from Aug. 21-29. A public opening reception will be held on Friday, Aug. 21.
