Calendar of Events

When: 3:30 PM ET
Where: Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101)
John C. Hodges Library, 1015 Volunteer Blvd., Knoxville TN
OR via livestream at tiny.utk.edu/DLS-Cao

On March 27, Maggie Cao, David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will give a public talk titled, "How to Look at Ice."

During the Civil War era, American artists traveled to and painted sublime landscapes of the Arctic. But ice was not just a substance associated with the poles. The period’s enchantment with polar expeditions also coincided with the booming industrial ice trade, which transported frozen water from the United States deep into the tropics. This lecture connects these two icy enterprises, showing that the perceptual strategies used in the frigid north and the technologies of globalization used in the torrid south indelibly linked ice, art, and racial politics during an age of imperialism.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is held in Hodges Library’s auditorium on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!

About the speaker:
Maggie Cao is an associate professor of art history at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art. Her research focuses on the history of globalization with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics. Her first book, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America, published in 2018, examines the fate of the nation’s preeminent artistic genre in the face of new conceptions of nature and physical alterations of terrain. Cao has also written on media theory, material culture, and ecocriticism. Her recent publications include essays on the print culture of the earliest worldwide financial bubbles and the materiality of export art made in eighteenth-century China. Cao is currently writing a book entitled Painting and the Making of American Empire, the first synthetic treatment of nineteenth-century U.S. art and empire in a global context.

Maggie Cao was invited to campus by Beauvais Lyons, Chancellor’s Professor in the UT School of Art.

865-974-4222 or https://humanitiescenter.utk.edu
@UThumanitiesctr

Southview to Gettysvue: From a Small Coal Camp to Olympic Podium to Courtside
March 27, 2023 @ 6:00 p.m.

Bill Schmidt discusses his new memoir Southview to Gettysvue, which begins with his childhood growing up in the small Appalachian Pennsylvania coal camp Southview. Though he suffered from family tragedy and personal struggles his interest in sports helped create a path forward. After graduating from college he made the 1972 US Olympic team and won the bronze medal for the javelin throw. Bill parlayed his success into sports marketing and served as the Sports Director for the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, President for Sports at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and Vice President of Worldwide Sports Marketing at Gatorade. His perseverance provides the core of Bill’s message of determination and testimony to dreams coming true.

https://www.easttnhistory.org/events/southview-gettysvue

East Tennessee Historical Society, 601 S. Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37902. Museum hours: M-F 9-4, Sa 10-4, Su 1-5. Information: 865-215-8824, www.eastTNhistory.org/lights-camera

A Colossal Experience, Millions of Years in the Making

Prepare for a Jurassic exploration at Zoo Knoxville! March 1 through September 4, a pack of prehistoric creatures will be stationed throughout the park. Bring your young paleontologists and discover hidden truths about the era "terrible lizards" walked the earth. https://www.wildlyfun.com/

Zoo Knoxville, 3500 Knoxville Zoo Drive, Knoxville, TN 37914. Open 9 AM - 4 PM everyday. Information: 865-637-5331, www.zooknoxville.org

Our relationship to moving images is constantly evolving. Amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, for example, our use of–and reliance on–streaming services to access Hollywood blockbusters not only changed how we watch movies but also disrupted traditional models for financing and distributing such productions.

How did our relationship with moving images begin? What technological and cultural events sparked our interest in motion pictures as entertainment? And what role has East Tennessee and its people had in moviemaking?

Lights! Camera! East Tennessee!, a new feature exhibition at the East Tennessee History Center, answers these questions by chronicling Knoxville’s contributions to film from the promotion of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1895 to its use as a location for major productions currently in development. At the heart of the story is 35 mm film, shown both in urban theaters and suburban cineplexes and shot by itinerant filmmakers, documentarians, industrial filmmakers, and news reporters. Multiple screens featuring highlights from these genres anchor the exhibition.

Equally intriguing are the stories of how Knoxvillians made Hollywood history. Learn about Clarence Brown, a graduate of Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, who became one of MGM’s most prominent directors. And see why James Agee, known to us today as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, was better known as a film critic and screenwriter during his life.

Lights! Camera! East Tennessee! will also spotlight the numerous actors from across East Tennessee who became Hollywood A-listers and the variety of films that were shot in East Tennessee, including A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970) and That Evening Sun (2009), both of which premiered in Knoxville.

East Tennessee Historical Society, 601 S. Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37902. Museum hours: M-F 9-4, Sa 10-4, Su 1-5. Information: 865-215-8824, www.eastTNhistory.org/lights-camera