Enjoy First Friday Downtown on Friday, June 1st from 5-9pm in the Market Square District & other downtown areas.
Special Highlight: The Lost Marbles with caller Nick Boulet - Old-time contra dance band for singles, couples, and families on the square.
Additional Highlights: Three Flights Up Gallery - Three Flights Up Gallery, located in the Emporium Center at 100 S. Gay Street, invites you to an evening of art, food and music. The 9 featured artists this month--Antuco Chicaiza, Koeun Cho, Amanda Henry, Medha Karandikar, Cynthia Markert, Batina McCain, Tom McDaniel, Rod Whyte, Wendy Williams, Terrie Yeatts--work in a variety of media including painting, drawing, installation, photography, digital imaging and jewelry.
LaCosta - La Costa on Market Square will feature $3.00 Caipirinha's and Michelada's until 9:00pm in addition to our regular happy hour (4:00 to 7:00) that features $3.00 Margaritas, $2.00 Beer, and 1/2 off of all Wine Bottles!
Arts & Culture Alliance - The opening reception for the Arts & Culture Alliance 2007 Members Exhibition. The Arts & Culture Alliance presents its Members Exhibit, the largest annual showcase of local artists in the Greater Knoxville area. The fresh mix of two- and three-dimensional works created within the past two years encompasses a wide variety of media such as oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, pencils, mixed media, photography, fine crafts, beadwork, iron sculpture, stone sculpture, clay, wood-carving, ceramics, and jewelry from local artists who are all members of the Alliance. Local jazz singer Kelle Jolly provides music from 7-9pm. Join us beginning at 5pm for complimentary hors d’oeuvres.
Indigo - Indigo is featuring Beyond Pink n' Blue Trunk Show. Local artist Jennifer MacIsaac is the designer of unique clothing for unique babies. Offering an alternative to the traditional pink and blue clothing options that currently saturate the market.
bliss - bliss will host a reception for Bert Tanner. Bert, a native of the Gulf Coast region of Mississippi, now resides in Atlanta, GA where he keeps busy as a theatre artist and storyteller in the duo-team “Have We Got Something to Tell You.” As well as performing, Bert is also talented with his hands as a visual artist, including fabric painting, jewelry making, home interior and exterior design accessories. His Grandmother’s witty collection of artsy attire and the colorful garb of the “Noebele People of Africa” inspire Bert’s bold mix of colors. Bert’s second home is Knoxville where he is a resident artist with the Carpetbag Theatre.
bliss Home - She is synonymous with the remarkable Three Flights Up Gallery and bliss Home is very proud to host a reception for the one and only Lauren Karnitz. Her Artist statement—JUNE 2007: I'm addicted to the freedom I have in paint...the freedom to take the world in which I live, select from it elements of color, form, line, shape, narrative, context, physical principles, etc, to then reinterpret. There's an absurd hopefulness in the process and product, a hopefulness about alternate combinations, fresh contexts, pairings of the fashionable and awkward, the beauty in absurdity, the necessary existence of chaos and order. What a challenge it is to solve the the simultaneous existence of olive, choral, Robin's egg blue, inquisitive lines, bones, seed pods, memories of my Great Grandmother's jewelry box, silhouettes, figure and ground. And, perhaps, that's just one painting with it's very own physical & narrative existence.
Pasta Trio & Downtown Wine + Spirits - As always food from Pasta Trio will be served as well as wine from the Downtown Wine + Spirits.
Tomato Head - "Power lines, Plagiarism, Parables, Perspective", an exhibit by Jason Oakes
Stuck and not knowing what to do, Jason took a few drawings from March, stole several ideas from his 5 year old daughter in April, stared at phone poles in May, and near the end of preparing for a show at Tomato Head began to see the light for a new direction. These works on paper in pencil and watercolor continue to explore the terrain of the Chocolate Shores. Tomato Head will also offer a fantastic First Friday Wine Special, including discounted wine tasting flights and the soon-to-be-famous $12 a bottle sale.
Vagabondia - Vagabondia will be having a trunk Show featuring Jewelry Artist Jyl Walker of Be-Jeweled.
World Grotto - Black-Eyed Susan followed by Dishwater Blonde.Abode - Abode hosts the artistic touch of Chelsea Evans. Evans works with oil and watercolor as she strives to create art that's both luscious and visceral. Evans draws inspiration from her upbringing in Knoxville as well as several adult years spent living in New Orleans surrounded by painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Come check out Chelsea's work. As always, the wine is on the house, and the home goods are on you.
Downtown Grill & Brewery - The Brewery will extend their happy hour until 10:00. FREE popcorn in the bar.
The Basement Gallery - The Basement gallery is proud to present the drastically playful drawings and installations of Sarah Hollis and Ryan Mulligan. Both artists are extremely interested in the daily practice of journaling and self-musing but formally approach the content and materials in extremely different ways. Hollis has developed a body of work by obsessively scanning every page out of blank sketchbooks and then journaling on the color printouts in sequence. By removing the hand held quality of working in a journal she deals with the new object-ness of the digital print while maintaining the page-to-page relationships a narrative implies. Delicately crafted drawings merge with continually agitated and mildly depressed banter in a knowing push pull of maker and audience. In contrast Mulligan's site variable installations form a ridiculously humorous narrative about a space journey gone wrong. The works reside somewhere between wonderfully poorly crafted drawings that are extremely personal and sad objects that are universally recognizable. Using painted found materials from an abandoned hospital, drawings, cartoons, clipboards, and word panel paintings Mulligan exaggerates the story into a psychological realm dealing with his father's mortality. To quote Mulligan, "I paint about Wookie Mcnuggets and spaceships going to asteroids ruled by Steve Martin to not have to deal with death, but deal with micro problems on the surface of the work." Both artists are located in Cincinnati, Hollis just received her MFA and Mulligan teaches at the University of Cincinnati and holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. UT Downtown Gallery - Will host an opening reception for the exhibit Images of Human Rights From South Africa. This print portfolio, consisting of 27 black and white relief prints, was conceived of and released in 1996 in commemoration of the newly post-Apartheid nation’s Bill of Rights. The South African artists whose work is exhibited were chosen after an extensive competition and were encouraged to be creative in expressing a particular constitutional right. These prints were created by artists representing the nine provinces of South Africa and hand-printed by master printmaker Jan Jordaan.
KAT First Friday Trolley is Fare-Free:
In conjunction with the popular First Friday downtown gallery and shopping tour, KAT will operate a trolley route to connect downtown visitors with the galleries and shops along Gay Street, Market Square and the Old City. The First Friday trolley will travel down Gay Street and through the Old City every 5-7 minutes from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. The First Friday trolley is Fare-Free. To catch it, just watch for the sign on the front of the trolley that says "First Fridays."