Exhibitions
THE BODY IS A DRUM, THE VOICE A SONG, THE SOUL A FIRE
Knoxville Museum of Art / 1050 World’s Fair Park Dr. November 7, 2025 - March 1, 2026
Tabitha Arnold, Dianna Settles, Lewis Hine
Labor is more than work; it is an act of care. It binds people not just through toil, but through collective action. On the factory floor, at the loom, along the picket line—these are spaces where effort meets empathy, where shared struggle becomes a living record, a force, a song. This exhibition brings together the work of Tabitha Arnold, Dianna Settles, and Lewis Hine— artists who call attention to the lives shaped by labor: its intimacies, its struggles, its persistence. Arnold’s tapestries weave together a history of labor movements in the Southeast, Settles’ paintings reveal the collective heartbeat where everyday life and organizing work meet, and Hine’s photographs capture the daily realities and inequities of industrial labor in early 20th-century East Tennessee. The exhibition draws from the audio archives of the Highlander Center, a wellspring of resistance that has preserved the music and voices of labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and the people who built this country with their hands. These images and sounds, both past and present, are not just records of labor, but testaments to the histories that shape us still.
image: Dianna Settles, Hundredth Repetition, After High Noon, 2025, acrylic and colored pencil on panel, 24 x 32 inches
About Knoxville Museum of Art:
The Knoxville Museum of Art began its institutional life in 1961, establishing core values as a community-rooted organization that mined what art and culture could mean in East Tennessee. In the late 1980s, operations moved to a downtown location to serve a growing community. The modern-day KMA opened in 1990 in a 53,200 square-foot facility designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. By the new millennium, the Museum’s collecting and programming mandate also advanced from an array of traveling blockbusters and local craft to focus on an archaeology of the fertile history of Appalachia and its evolving present. Our core exhibition project, Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee, was decades in the making, proposing a more inclusive historical narrative that entrenches the importance of stalwarts such as Lloyd Branson, Catherine Wiley, and the Knoxville Seven, while also recognizing the contributions of previously marginalized artists, most notably brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney, as well as the self-taught Bessie Harvey. The KMA enters its next organizational chapter by way of a programmatic vision that pushes our purview into a more expansive geography. Under the banner of Appalachian Imaginary, the Museum presents a dynamic series of exhibitions that embrace a wider lens with which to see our site, and ourselves. Located at 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive in downtown Knoxville, the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday (10:00 AM–5:00 PM) and Sunday (1:00–5:00 PM). Admission and parking are free. Learn more at knoxart.org.
Press Contact: Sarah Kaplan, skaplan@knoxart.org, 865-934-2034
