From the Collection: Celebrating Women's Art
Rising Sun
Decades of Dress
Wonderlands
Through the Light
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
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From the Collection: Celebrating Women's Art (March 9 - April 2)
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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Through the Light: Sculptural Works by Molly Sawyer (January 20 - April 2)
The Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University is please to present Through the Light: Sculptural Works by Molly Sawyer, Jan. 19 through April 3, 2026. The exhibition by cross-disciplinary artist Molly Sawyer weighs the ominous nature of the human dilemma against that of peaceful, and sometimes playful, intention. A reception with the artist will be held on Friday, Feb. 13 from 5-8 p.m. The Reece Museum is free and open to the public Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Based in Asheville, North Carolina, Sawyer’s contemporary works combining salvaged with artist-made materials bridge sculpture and installation art with works on paper. The artist’s chosen materials and methods used for combining such pull the past into the present, emphasizing Sawyer’s concern with global changes, both ecological and humanitarian. She blends her disparate materials in a contemporary manner using versions of traditionally craft-based techniques of stitching, embroidery, knitting, felting, and piecing, among others. These combinations emblematize a convergence of the historical with the current, illustrating conceptual narratives relating to universal concerns. As these investigations are metaphor describing the balance of forces in nature with the human condition, Sawyer states, “By collecting materials which have had one or more lives already, I am giving credence to their narratives, which have been developed through handling, weathering and age.”
Sawyer was introduced to the Reece Museum when her work was juried into the 2024 Embodying Culture: Women in Appalachia, an exhibition exploring the ways in which women embody Appalachian culture and traditions of the past and present while shaping the future. She has since worked with Reece staff to build this solo exhibition occupying two galleries with her large-scale, suspended, sculptural installations and works on paper. “It has been a wonderful process to work with Molly as this exhibition has taken shape,” Spenser Brenner, exhibition coordinator at the Reece, said. “The Museum is excited to see her work transform the galleries.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Molly Sawyer attended the New York Studio School (2002), the Art Students’ League of New York (2004), and Guilford College (1995). Her works have been exhibited in the Asheville Art Museum (2020), Reece Museum (2024), Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) Raleigh (2020), Western North Carolina University (2020), Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art (2017), and North Greenville University (2013). Other group shows have included her work in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and Virginia. Her work is among permanent collections at the Reece Museum; Mandarin Oriental, New York; The Ritz-Carlton Boston; AC Hotel Atlanta Midtown; Mohegan Sun Casino, Uncasville, Connecticut; and the former Atlanta Medical Center. She has conducted art residencies in North Carolina, Connecticut, Wyoming, Washington, and Ireland and currently maintains a studio in Asheville, NC.
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