The Bottom Links Art to Research on East Knoxville Neighborhood
The Bottom: Stories from the Neighborhood
Through August 3, 2024
UT Downtown Gallery
Research on East Knoxville’s former Bottom neighborhood has led to an exhibit featuring new works by southern artists, as well as paintings by artists connected to the area, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Downtown Gallery.
The Bottom: Stories from the Neighborhood is a way to amplify, celebrate and preserve the stories of a southern Black community demolished in the 1950s push for urban renewal.
Sociologist Enkeshi El-Amin (’19) researched the Bottom neighborhood during her doctoral studies at UT. Then she founded a nonprofit, also named The Bottom, as a Black community space that features arts programming.
A collaboration among El-Amin, The Bottom, and Good Black Art created the exhibit for the UT Downtown Gallery, which presents diverse perspectives while exploring contemporary social and political themes through artwork.
Sharing the Story
“Neighborhoods are more than street signs. Neighborhoods are more than houses. There are stories there, there is culture there, there are customs and people,” said curator Phillip Collins, founder of New York-based Good Black Art.
He grew up in East Tennessee, and during a visit last spring was reaching out to the art community here. “I started with going to The Bottom,” Collins said. “I loved what they were doing.”
Then during Collins’ visit to the UT Downtown Gallery he met Director Julie Lohnes, which led to a later brainstorming session over Zoom.
“If I’m going to do an exhibition in Knoxville, it needs to be culturally relevant and relevant to the community, not just the Black community but Knoxville at large,” Collins explained of the plan for Good Black Art’s first exhibit outside of New York City.
The themes of urban renewal and displacement are relevant not only for the Bottom neighborhood, but Black, Brown, and Indigenous people on a larger scale.
“I wanted to tell a local art story, but I wanted it to resonate with people nationally and internationally,” Collins said.
At the exhibit, he said, “You’re going to see things that Black people resonate with whether they grew up in Knoxville or the Bronx.”
Informed Art
Collins brought together two artists rooted in the Black southern narrative, Ahmad George, who has a focus on folklore, and Erin LeAnn Mitchell, whose work speaks to Black futurism.
The artists held a workshop with El-Amin, the first PhD graduate of the UT Department of Sociology’s critical race and ethnic studies concentration, and Ty Murray, director of arts and communications for The Bottom.
El-Amin explained her research, and Collins said they also tapped into the Black in Appalachia history database.
George and Mitchell created a total of seven new works for this exhibit with diverse media, including painting, screen printing, and quilting.
‘The Knoxville Greats’
Collins also brought in works by three artists he calls “the Knoxville greats” who were connected to the Bottom neighborhood, with paintings from UT’s Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture and borrowed works from the Beauford Delaney Estate and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center.
Artist Ruth Cobb Brice grew up in the Bottom neighborhood, and brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney just a few blocks from it. “Their uncle’s barbershop was right in the heart of the Bottom,” Collins said of the Delaneys.
“We wanted to tell a story about the Knoxville connection to the art world and artists who paved the way for younger artists,” Collins said. “We thought it was a way to bring old and new together and keep it relevant.”
More Events
Upcoming cultural programs are related to the exhibition, which continues through August 3.
A Stitching Stories workshop, from 3-5 p.m. Saturday, July 6 will invite people to explore the rich tradition of quilting as a cornerstone of storytelling within the southern Black experience. Attendees will create individual quilt blocks using a variety of textiles and techniques, and a quilt made of those blocks will become the first piece in The Bottom’s permanent collection.
The quilt will be unveiled at a Community Cookout Celebration, 2-5 p.m. Saturday, July 20, at The Bottom. Former residents of the Bottom have been invited for a tour of the exhibit in conjunction with the celebration, Collins said. “We made it for them.”
Learn more about the exhibit and RSVP for the events on the UT Downtown Gallery website.
by Amy Beth Miller | Photos by Ewing Gallery Staff
