Contributors
Amanda Leigh EvansDuring the SOUTHS Symposium, Amanda Evans contributed to the even through an artist choreographed dinner.

Amanda Leigh Evans (she or they) is an artist, educator and cultivator seeking social and ecological interdependence. Her work manifests as research-driven ceramic objects, performance, print and digital media, public art, and long-term collaborative systems.

Proudly a first-gen college student from a blue and pink-collar working class family, Evans spent her childhood doing homework in the breakrooms of beauty salons and climbing on 2x4 frames at construction sites in California’s Inland Empire and rural Nevada County.

Evans’ work oscillates between work for art spaces and multi-year, site-specific projects by-with-for the communities she inhabits. For five years (2016-21), Evans was an artist-in-residence in a large affordable housing complex in East Portland, OR, where she and her neighbors co-created The Living School of Art, an intergenerational alternative art school that centered the creative practices of their multilingual, multigenerational community. For eight years (2014-2022), Evans was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a K-5 public elementary school in Portland, OR. Since 2021, Evans and her collaborator Tia Kramer (together known as DeepTime Collective) have been developing When The River Becomes a Cloud, a coauthored contemporary public artwork generated with students at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA. DeepTime Collective were recently one-year artists-in-residence at the Everson Museum (2023-24), presenting a day-long event and solo exhibition titled, A Day Without A Clock.

Additionally, Evans has coauthored several multi-year projects engaging the history, politics and ecology of the Los Angeles River through LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15).

Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a Post-Bacc in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Curry J. Hackett During the SOUTHS Symposium, Curry J. Hackett was the afterpary DJ.
Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South.

Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. He has exhibited at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
 Curry holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Jasmine Smith

aRtists
Jennifer Akerman Jennifer Akerman is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Chair for Graduate Studies (Architecture) at the University of Tennessee. She teaches courses in critical practice, including socially engaged design, design-build, and living architecture. Her work bridges architectural education and practice, emphasizing collaborative change in both fields.

Emily BivensEmily Ward Bivens is an artist working across film/video, sound, animation, installation, and performance. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Time-Based Art and Cinema Studies in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her current body of work examines cultural complacency toward survival and the transformative potential of awe within the nearly overlooked.
Jason BrownJason Sheridan Brown received his M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, and has been teaching Sculpture at the University of Tennessee since 2001. Brown’s artwork has been exhibited nationally, including solo and group exhibitions in 22 states, and internationally in Canada, Germany, and New Zealand.

In 2018, Brown completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Alberta, Canada. He recently participated in artist residencies and cast iron sculpture symposiums at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Park and at Atelier Haus Hilmsen in Germany in 2023. His public art projects have included temporary large-scale outdoor sculpture installations at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, North Carolina; Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, Kentucky; and Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota.

Brown is involved in a number of collaborative public art projects and his work engages other disciplines including architecture, ecology and landscape design. Throughout his art and teaching, Brown emphasizes interdisciplinary cooperation amongst creative thinkers such as his current traveling exhibitions and curatorial projects with the Land Report Collective.
Cattywampus Puppet Council Cattywampus Puppet Council is a 501c3 community-based arts organization and an intergenerational collective of artists, performers, teachers, musicians, and community organizers. Our mission is to create tools for resilience through play, celebration arts, and storytelling to transform individuals and communities. Over the past 10 years, we have been bringing innovative theater, youth programming, people-powered parades, and giant puppet magic to communities across East Tennessee and the South, collaborating with a wide range of organizations, artists, and institutions including: the Knoxville Museum of Art, UT School of Art, the Knox County Public Library, Centro Hispano, the Boys & Girls Club, Big Ears Festival, Johnson City Public Art, Dragonfly Aerial Arts, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Yo-Yo Ma.
 To learn more, visit www.cattywampuspuppets.org
Heather Coker HawkinsHeather Coker Hawkins is a filmmaker-choreographer and teacher originally from Southwest Missouri. She holds an M.F.A. in Film Production with a specialization in Directing from Chapman University and an M.F.A. in Dance from UCLA. Heather makes films, as well as, live physical theater and dance pieces with integrated video projection. Her work choreographs the audience’s eye using bodily and perceptual movement to communicate the ‘other side of the story’ and a ‘closer look into the world of” representations of the human (body) in multiple social and cinematic contexts.
 Christopher CoteChristopher Cote is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design. He teaches Graphic Design. He experiments with self-publishing, public installations, and a variety of dissemination methods alongside of his freelance practice. You can see some of his work at chris-cote.com.
Ashon CrawleyAshon Crawley is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), an epistolary exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument” (WW Norton), about the impact of the AIDS crisis for black social life. Entering the conversation by considering musicians, singers and choir directors that labored for black churches, “Made Instrument” explores the ways gender, sex, sexuality remain unthought and untheorized but are no less real practices of the living and the dead.  A multidisciplinary artist working in the visual and the sonic, Crawley is a Yaddo interdisciplinary arts fellow, a MacDowell interdisciplinary arts fellow, and a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, a LIT (Learning It Together) Artist Fellow and his work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington DC, at Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum both in Los Angeles, California. All his writing and his approach to art practices is about what he calls otherwise possibility.
Casey FieldsCasey Fields is a figurative and portrait artist living and working in Knoxville, Tennessee. Field studied classical drawing and painting with modern Master artist Patricia Watwood. She returned to art as a practice in 2018 after several years practicing law and mothering. Field’s process is rooted in respect for classical techniques as well as her own contemporary 21st century perspective of living in the American South. Her work has been recognized by and featured in publications of The Portrait Society of America, and she is a former recipient of the Bailey Opportunity Grant. She works out of her studio in the Candoro Marble Building in South Knoxville, where she is one of the Tri-Start Arts Studio Artists. Find her work at www.caseyfieldart.com.
Lynne Marinelli GhenovLynne Marinelli Ghenov focuses on drawing, collage, and other works on paper. Recent exhibitions include Quixotic Medium Line, a solo exhibition at RED Gallery, Knoxville, TN, and To Uncurtain A Line With A Ghost, a two-person exhibition at the Appalachian Cultural Center in Jefferson City, TN, and memory embank, a solo exhibition at the Goodyear Gallery, Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Lynne’s 2026 scheduled solo exhibitions include Tri-Star Arts at the Candoro Marble Building Gallery in Knoxville, TN, and Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. She is a 2024 recipient of the Bailey Grant. Other exhibitions include Crosstown Arts, Memphis (TN), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn (NY), Los Angeles (CA), GCCA, Greenville (SC), Proto Gallery, Hoboken (NJ), Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (CA), University City Arts League, Philadelphia (PA) and UT Downtown Gallery, Knoxville (TN). She has been a featured artist in the Compass Magazine (2023) and the Red Branch Review (2024). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in New Jersey, Lynne now lives and works in Knoxville, TN. She co-founded and co-directed C for Courtside Gallery, an artist-run curatorial space in north downtown Knoxville, from 2017-2020. Lynne received her BFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA (1998), and studied at Temple University Rome in Italy (1996). Lynne is the Associate at Loghaven Artist Residency in Knoxville, TN.

LynneMarinelliGhenov.com
Rubens GhenovRubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2010. Ghenov has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY), Marginal Utility (PA), Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA) amongst others. Ghenov has been featured in Art in America, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, The Village Voice, Title Magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Freshwater IllustratedTen years in the making, Hidden Rivers is Freshwaters Illustrated’s newest feature film that explores the rivers and streams of the Southern Appalachian region, North America’s most biologically rich waters. The film follows the work of conservation biologists and explorers throughout the region, and reveals both the beauty and vulnerability of these ecosystems.
Jodi HaysVenues for Jodi Hays’s solo exhibitions include David Lusk Gallery (Memphis and Nashville), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Vanderbilt University (Nashville), Johnson Lowe Gallery (Atlanta), and Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville). Two person show venues include Susan Inglett (New York), Devening Projects (Chicago), and the University of Mississippi. Selected group shows include Brooks Museum (Memphis), Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York), The Jones Institute (San Francisco), and Boston Center for the Arts.
In 2025 she was awarded a residency at Yaddo. Additional residencies include The Cooper Union, Oxbow, Hambidge, and Vermont Studio Center, and wait listed twice for the Sharpe Foundation (New York). Her work has been supported by the New York Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYFA/the Rauschenberg Foundation, Tennessee Arts Commission, Center for Craft, and more.

Press and mentions includes, The New York Times, ArtForum International, Hyperallergic, New American Painting, Wall Street Journal, Two Coats of Paint, and the Nashville Scene. Prizes and awards include nomination for Outstanding Educator Award (SECAC), 2019 finalist for the Hopper Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Howard Foundation Prize (2025).
Jodi Hays earned an M.F.A. at the Vermont College of Fine Art and holds a B.F.A. from The University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She studied Foundations at School of Visual Arts (NY/GA) where she was awarded a Silas H Rhodes scholarship. As a freelance curator and educator, she consults for various private collectors and institutions. She has extensive teaching experience from college to graduate school and beyond. Guest lectures and full time teaching include Tennessee State University, Belmont University, Pratt, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Eastern Michigan University, Shakerag, SMFA Tufts, University of North Carolina (Greensboro), University of Tennessee (Chattanooga), and more.
She is a lover and a fighter.
M. KobeM. Kobe is a storyteller and multidisciplinary artist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She holds an MFA in Painting from Boston University and both a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Louisiana State University. Working primarily with textiles, found natural materials, and “lucky” objects, she draws upon her experiences growing up in the American South. Her work contends with the religious mythologies of her upbringing, superstition, notions of home, and cultural inheritance. Kobe’s work has been shown at Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY), the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (Green Bay, WI), Cedar Crest College (Allentown, PA), Prince Street Gallery (New York, NY), Appalachian Center for Craft (Smithville, TN), and The Arrowmont Galleries (Knoxville and Gatlinburg, TN). She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Azule Artist Residency. In 2024, Kobe spoke at the Mid-South Sculpture Conference on repurposed materials in sculpture. She was the grand prize recipient of the 2023 Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Award, the BU Women’s Council Scholarship, the Constantin Alajalov Visual Art Scholarship, and the Michael Crespo Memorial Scholarship.
LaKesha LeeLaKesha Lee (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee. Lee creates deeply layered visual narratives that preserve and reimagine African American histories and family legacies. Her practice combines found and handmade materials, quilting traditions, and photomontage, crafting a “authentic material” that honors her matrilineal heritage while envisioning a collective future.
Lee’s work explores the transformative potential of memory and storytelling, challenging perceptions of Black identity and labor through tactile processes rooted in community and cultural preservation. Recent solo exhibitions include Memory to Materials and Objects at the Reese Museum, Spaces of Abstraction at the Tennessee Valley Universalist Unitarian Church, and Layered Barriers at the Frieson Black Cultural Center and Gallery 1010 at the University of Tennessee. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the Southeast, including Embodying Culture: Women in Appalachia at the Reese Museum, ST of ART UAB at the Gadsden Museum of Art, and the upcoming Here/Now at the Leu Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. Lee holds a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the Faculty Fellow for Watkins College of Art at Belmont University. Her current projects continue to expand her material language, integrating collage, quilting, and ceramics to celebrate the legacy of family through textiles that help cultivate intergenerational dialogue.
Scottie McDanielScottie McDaniel is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at UTK. As an enviornmental artist, her work engages deeply wiht ecological processes and relationships among communities, systems, and materials. She explores these layered connections through reserach practice, revealing forms of beauty that cultivate awareness of human and nonhuman interdependence.
Maurice MooreDr. Maurice Moore is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Moore is the author of Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol. 1 (Versal Journal, 2022), winner of the Amsterdam Open Book Prize. The book, composed of visual poems, investigates queer mark-making as a site of resistance and possibility. Their writings and artworks have also appeared in Bloomsbury, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Obsidian, and the Poetry Foundation. Since 2011, Moore’s creative work has been exhibited and performed internationally, nationally, and regionally at venues including the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London, UK; Calabar Gallery in New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, CA; Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC; Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC; and the Modern Art Museum Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, Korea.
“Seeing Appalachia”“Seeing Appalachia” is a photography exhibit. The decision to rename the project from “Looking at Appalachia” to “Seeing Appalachia marks a subtle but powerful shift in perspective. While “looking at” suggests a passive, surface-level engagement - which was never the original intent of the project - “seeing” implies a deeper, more meaningful connection. “Seeing” goes beyond the simple act of observation to invite empathy, awareness, and an understanding of the complexities of Appalachian life, culture, and landscape.

This change reflects the intention to encourage a more nuanced and respectful portrayal of the region, challenging stereotypes and inviting the viewer to connect with people and stories of the region on a more personal level. It emphasizes the importance of not just “looking at” the images, but truly “seeing” - recognizing the richness, diversity, and humanity that might otherwise be overlooked. Wendell Berry writes in The Unforeseen Wilderness, “For before a man can be a seer, he must be a looker.”
We invite you to see with us.

The Seeing Appalachia exhibit consists of 64 photographs made by 45 photographers between 2015 - 2017. The first Seeing Appalachia exhibit was mounted in 2015 and traveled to 13 locations until 2018.

Photographers in the SOUTHS exhibit include:
Nathan Armes, Sandy Berry, Josh Birnbaum, Rachel Boillot, Ashleigh Coleman, Cameron Davidson, George Etheredge, Wes Frazer, Nate Larson Roger May, Lauren Pond, Dennis Savagem Stephanie Strasburg, Kristian Thacker, Pang Tubhirun, Meg Wilson
Jered SprecherI make paintings, drawings, and installations that use analog and digital technologies to abstract the landscape. These artworks probe the precarious relationship between nature and technology. My paintings wrestle with the beauty and complexity of the environment and how we as humans interact with the world, whether through direct experience or mediated through digital tools. I gather photographic images of flowers, thick forests, and sun-dappled foliage, seeking images that evoke wonder, depict natural beauty, and the complexity of the world. In the process of painting, I translate these images through technological filters that affect changes, ruptures, and glitches in the image. In these paintings, I weave together multiple images, creating a technologically abstract tapestry of natural forms, evoking both beauty and trepidation. The underlying grid in the paintings pushes and pulls at the imagery, as flowers and forms emerge and are pulled back into the flickering tangle. Each painting’s highly touched surface evokes glowing digital screens while remembering sunlight’s gentle caress.
Liz TestonLiz Teston is a Professor in the School of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee. Her area of research includes the public interiority, politics of design, and the impact of memory and cultural identity on everyday design contexts. Liz teaches studios with a focus on inclusive design.
Chase WilliamsonChase Williamson is a painter and MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Born and raised in Middle Tennessee, her southern living experience is the major propeller for her work. She centers the interconnection of the Southern Black Garden, memorial waters, and Black womanhood through her paint and fabric compositions. Williamson received a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Psychology from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga (2022). Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, such as the African American Museum of Dallas (2025), the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago, IL) (2024), the Frist Art Museum (Nashville, TN) (2024), cë Gallery (Nashville, TN) (2024), and Zeitgeist Gallery (Nashville, TN) (2024). Additionally, Williamson was a Curatorial Fellow at the Frist Art Museum (2023), an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Daytona Beach, FL) (2023), and has had work published in Burnaway magazine.
UTK SoLA StudentsThe University of Tennessee School of Landscape Architecture students involved in SOUTHS include:

Matthew Harley and Margaret Marando