NEWS

Knoxville Museum of Art Presents Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South by Baldwin Lee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty

April 27, 2010

The Knoxville Museum of Art presents Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South by Baldwin Lee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty from May 14 – August 1, 2010.

Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period. Walker Evans (1903-1976) is represented by incisive images of Alabama sharecroppers stemming from his epic collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern writer and photographer who traveled across Mississippi in the 1930s and early 1940s taking photographs and documenting rural and small-town life in her home state. Baldwin Lee (born 1951) is a professor of photography at the University of Tennessee, and a former assistant to Walker Evans. Complementing the 50 or so works by Evans and Welty are more than 30 of Lee’s images of African-American life in the South taken during the 1980s with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Vision, Language, and Influence was organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art in collaboration with Baldwin Lee.

A members-only preview party is scheduled for Thursday, May 13 from 5:30-7:30pm which will include a gallery talk by Artist Baldwin Lee and Alexis Boylan, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Tennessee.

Sponsors for this exhibition include the Tennessee Arts Commission. Media sponsors include AT&T Real Yellow Pages, Digital Media Graphix, Method Bureau, and WBIR.