New Apparitions Stalk the Earth
Spring 2026 BFA Senior Exhibition
From the Collection: Celebrating Women's Art
Rising Sun
Decades of Dress
Wonderlands
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
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New Apparitions Stalk the Earth (April 20 - May 22)
The Reece Museum presents the New Apparitions Stalk the Earth. The exhibition is on display from April 20 to May 22 at the Reece Museum, primarily featuring the work of Karel Appel along with other artists including Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky, Georges Braque, Paul Gauguin, Käthe Kollwitz, Joan Miró, and others. New Apparitions Stalk the Earth features thirty-seven works, all from the Museum’s permeant collection along with in depth text panels exploring the connection to the Reece Museum’s past and current collection practices.
Karel Appel (1921-2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, muralist, and poet. Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists of post-World War II Europe, Appel rebelled against his studio training and was a founding member of multiple influential avant-garde groups, where he experimented with technique, color, and form. Since 1946 Appel’s work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions. In the 1970s, Appel mounted a traveling retrospective exhibition that toured American institutions and brought awareness of his work to new audiences.
This exhibition explores Karel Appel’s legacy within the framework of collections and exhibitions within a global network of cultural institutions. The artworks on display in the exhibition were collected between 1966-1981 to become part of the museum’s educational collection, useful for art history courses of the time and mysterious to public folklorists and Appalachian studies scholars of today.
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Spring 2026 Senior BFA Exhibition (April 20 - May 22)
ETSU Department of Art & Design and the Reece Museum present the Spring 2026 BFA Senior Exhibition. The exhibition is on display from April 20 to May 22 at the Reece Museum, featuring the work of three Bachelor of Fine Art students: Kamden Davis, Hannah Hardin, and Victor Sanchez. A reception will be held on Thursday, April 30 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Reece Museum.
Primordia by Kamden Davis is a collection comprised of digital prints and mixed media sculptures. Davis’s work is motivated by a primal desire to explore and forge new connections; to venture into unknown places and discover something new. Using clay, they allow impressions made by their fingers to serve as evidence of the human interaction that makes these connections possible. Their large-scale digital prints create visual portals to another world that invite others to question the relationship between fantasy and reality.
Confined Within My Head by Hannah Hardin is a body of work comprised of both oil paintings and ink drawings. The exhibition entails the journey of mental health on a personal level. Hardin’s works focus on the female form in undefined surroundings as a way of bringing her emotions to life.
Retro Arcade by Victor Sanchez is a collection of digital prints documenting arcades in East Tennessee characterized by their vibrant color palettes. This work vividly portrays arcade cabinets, neon lights shimmering on screens, and passionate gamers competing for high scores. The series evokes a sense of nostalgia and preserves memories of a subculture and community in America.
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From the Collection: Celebrating Women's Art (March 9 - May 8)
Women’s History Month began as a local celebration in Santa Rosa, California. The Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women planned and executed a “Women’s History Week” celebration in 1978. The organizers selected the week of March 8 to correspond with International Women’s Day. The movement spread across the country as other communities initiated their own Women’s History Week celebrations the following year.
In 1980, a consortium of women’s groups and historians—led by the National Women’s History Project (now the National Women's History Alliance)—successfully lobbied for national recognition. In February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring the Week of March 8th 1980 as National Women’s History Week.
Subsequent Presidents continued to proclaim a National Women’s History Week in March until 1987 when Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, each president has issued an annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.”
The National Women’s History Alliance selects and publishes the yearly theme. The theme for Women's History Month 2026 is “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future” — National Women’s History Museum
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Reece Museum has selected thirteen works from the permanent collection by eleven artists. Varying in media, these works highlight the significant contributions women artists have made to the collection, Appalachia, and the world.
Featured Artists:
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Decades of Dress: The Collection of Louise St.John Taylor (February 27 - May 28)
Louise Avery St. John Taylor (July 5, 1897 – September 29, 1998) was a lifelong Johnson City resident and a prominent figure within the city’s social scene during the 20th century. Her occupational endeavors have included various levels of governmental and community service. Notable positions held include: various leadership positions with the American Red Cross of Washington County at Mountain Home/the National Sanitorium, a field service representative of East Tennessee for the American Red Cross during World War II, and a membership with the Monday Club, which began during the establishment of the Mayne Williams library. Throughout her career, she was granted accolades for her levels of service, including recognition at the annual Red Cross luncheon in 1963 following her retirement, being elected president of the Monday Club from 1964-65, and being granted chapter chairmanship of the organization in 1965.
Aside from her occupational endeavors, she is remembered by her family a private, independent, and hardworking woman with an inclination for refined clothing, often referencing characteristics of the Victorian age (1837-1901) due to this inclination and her love of hosting and entertainment, especially in her later years. The dresses in her collection cover a broad stylistic scope of the twentieth century, showcasing dresses from as early as the Victorian or Edwardian (1901-1914) eras, or as late as the 1940s-60s, and were donated by her family and estate. Connecting artifacts selected for display in this exhibition extend from various subcollections within the Reece Museum’s permanent collection and cover a similar scope.
Grace Jonas is a second year Appalachian Studies and Archival Studies graduate student from Maryville, Tennessee. She holds her bachelor’s degree in history and geography/environmental studies and a certificate in public history from Emory & Henry College. She is a graduate assistant at the Reece Museum and works in the collections space. Decades of Dress was curated by Grace as a part of her thesis/applied project research, which examines the creative process of her exhibition and the lenses through which she hopes to tell the life story of Louise St. John Taylor: through the examination of display techniques utilized within textile and fashion-based museum exhibitions and the principles of object or artifact-based storytelling.
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Rising Sun: The Musical Legacy of Clarence "Tom" Ashley (March 2, 2026 - February 19, 2027)
Clarence "Tom" Ashley (September 29, 1895 - June 2, 1967) was a musician from Mountain City, Tennessee. Clarence began making music at medicine shows and local fiddler's conventions as early as 1911. He was active as both a solo recording artist and a member of various string bands in the early twentieth century, from the mid-1920s until approximately 1943. One of his most notable recordings includes The Coo-coo Bird, which was recorded during the pivotal Johnson City Sessions in 1929. Following a serious hand injury, there was a gap of time in which Clarence stopped making music altogether. However, in the early 1960s, he was encouraged by friends and local musicians to try making music again, just in time to participate in the revival of American folk music that swept the nation throughout the 1960s.
Rising Sun features a collection of artifacts donated by Joe Ashley, Clarence "Tom" Ashley's grandson, in memory of Clarence "Tom" Ashley’s musical legacy.
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WONDERLANDS (January 12 - May 22)
The Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University presents Wonderlands, an exhibition of photographs and Reece artifacts engaging with the cultural history of the southeastern United States by photographer and ETSU professor Tema Stauffer. The exhibition is on display Jan. 12 through May 22. A reception for Wonderlands will be held on Friday, Feb. 13 from 5 to 8 p.m. The reception will include a gallery walkthrough with the artist.
Wonderlands explores the intersection of tourism, religion, and folklore with natural beauty, preservation, and decay in southern Appalachia. The title of the series draws inspiration from novelist Charles Baxter’s collection of essays about fiction writing, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, in which he describes settings that reflect a heightened psychological atmosphere in specific literary works. “Wonderlands are caused by, or are expressive of, emotional instability, estrangement, fantasy, and solitude,” Baxter writes.
The exhibition focuses on settings that evoke characteristics of wonderlands in counties of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southeastern Virginia. Roadside attractions, religious iconography, relics, and verdant landscapes create a psychic experience that is at once eerily still and emotionally charged. The most recent photographs in the series capture tragic destruction against the backdrop of natural beauty after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the region in 2024. In conversation with the photographs are a selection of Appalachian artifacts from the Reece Museum’s collection, creating a unique dialogue that connects visual art and material culture.
Tema Stauffer is a photographer whose work examines the social, economic, and cultural landscape of American spaces. She is an associate professor of photography at East Tennessee State University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Daylight Books published two monographs of her work, Upstate (2018) and Southern Fiction (2022). Selected prints from these two series were exhibited at ETSU’s Reece Museum, Tracey Morgan Gallery, ilon Art Gallery, Hudson Hall, Auburn University’s Biggin Gallery, MTSU’s Baldwin Photographic Gallery, Winthrop University’s Rutledge Gallery, Upstairs Artspace, and Chattanooga State Community College’s Denise Heinly Art Center. Her work is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina.
Production of the Wonderlands exhibition was made possible by a Research Funding Program Award (2024) and a Summer Research Award (2024) from the College of Arts and Sciences at East Tennessee State University.
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