Calendar of Events

The Knoxville Museum of Art will reopen beginning Wednesday, July 1, 2020, with limited hours and extensive precautions to ensure the health and safety of visitors and museum staff.

Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door has been extended through October 25. The museum’s permanent flagship exhibitions--Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee and Currents: Recent Art from East Tennessee and Beyond—have been reinstalled and refreshed!

Visitors will be welcomed with the following measures necessitated by the public health situation:
• The KMA will be open on a restricted schedule, Wednesday-Sunday 1-5pm. The museum will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. (The KMA will also be closed Saturday, July 4 for the Independence Day holiday.)
• Attendance will be limited to 25 visitors per hour and reservations will be required by signing up on www.eventbrite.com. Link is also available on www.knoxart.org.
• Visitors will access the museum via the June and Rob Heller Garden gate adjacent to the parking lot, enter the building on the lower level, and exit at street level (one-way route).
• Visitors will be asked to wear face coverings. Disposable masks will be available for visitors who need them.
• Cleaning and sanitizing in public areas will be greatly increased.
• Visitors will be asked to stay 6 feet apart.

For questions about the reopening, visitors can contact the museum at info@knoxart.org.

Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door
This exhibition of 50+ paintings, works on paper, and unpublished archival material examines the 38-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris) and writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview.

Through the Unusual Door seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a rich, complex lifetime relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. The exhibition draws from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, public and private collections around the country, and rarely displayed papers held by the Delaney estate. KMA curator Stephen Wicks is organizing the exhibition, which is accompanied by a color-illustrated catalogue published by the University of Tennessee Press.

Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World's Fair Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37916. Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 1-5 PM. Information: 865-525-6101, www.knoxart.org