KNOXVILLE – With funding from Ready for the World, the campus’s international and intercultural initiative, the McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will showcase three exhibits.
“Exhibition of Sudan: The Land and the People” opened on June 4 and will run until August 28.
The seventy photographs presented in the exhibition are drawn from the book Sudan: The Land and the People, written by US Ambassador Timothy Carney, and his wife, journalist Victoria Butler. Award-winning photographer Michael Freeman spent more than two years compiling images of ethnic, cultural, and geographical diversity of Africa’s largest country.
“A lot has happened in Sudan over the past five years, and the McClung Museum has added to the exhibition, bringing Sudanese politics to the present,” said Jeff Chapman, director of the McClung Museum.
“Windows to Heaven: Treasures from the Museum of Russian Icons” opens September 10 and closes January 2, 2012. This exhibition brings together a group of historically significant Russian icons from 1590 to the present, such as saints, Mother of God, St. Nicholas, the Resurrection Feast, and Dormition. Exhibition viewers will learn about the historical background in which these icons were created, the definition of an icon, the process involved with creating icons, and the historical background of the systematic destruction of holy images, known as iconoclasm.
“The subject matter fits well into our mission and will be a teaching asset for a number of classes,” Chapman said.
“The Decorative Experience” exhibit will open in September. In this permanent exhibition, a selected number of objects from the McClung Museum collection have been chosen from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa that embody an aesthetic component.
Many of the objects (such as ceramics, textiles, glass, stone, leather, basketry, silver, beadwork, furniture)—especially those of the tribal societies of the Americas, the Pacific, and Africa—symbolize aspects of the value and belief systems of the cultures in which they functioned. Some functioned in the daily lives of the people and others were used only for important individual or community events.
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C O N T A C T :
Emma Macmillan (865-974-9409, emacmill@utk.edu)
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, amy.blakely@tennessee.edu)