Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TNThe Knoxville Museum of Art celebrates the art and artists of East Tennessee, presents new art and new ideas, educates and serves a diverse community, enhances Knoxville’s quality of life, and operates ethically, responsibly, and transparently as a public trust. (Mission statement approved by the KMA Board of Trustees in 2009). The KMA’s predecessor, the Dulin Gallery of Art, opened in 1961 in the elegant Dulin House, a 1915 John Russel Pope architectural masterpiece located in a residential neighborhood on the west side of Knoxville. It was here that the institutional “DNA” of the KMA as an outwardly-focused, education-oriented, community-rooted organization first took shape. By the early 1980s, it was evident that, in order to reach out to and serve a growing and increasingly diverse community, the Dulin would have to expand, or move its operations to more accessible and spacious quarters. The City of Knoxville offered a tract of land on the downtown site of the 1982 World’s Fair, and an ambitious community effort raised $11 million to construct a new, state-of-the-art building, designed by renowned American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. In March 1990 the Knoxville Museum of Art opened in its current 53,200 square-foot facility. The exterior of the four-story steel and concrete building, named in honor of Jim Clayton, the largest single contributor to its construction, is sheathed in locally quarried pink Tennessee marble...