Events

Museum Events are Free & Open to the Public

• SPARK! @ the Reece

  SPARK! Cultural Programming for People with Memory Loss
  1st Tuesday of Every Month

• A Community Install w/ Aaron McIntosh - July 31

  You are invited to join the community install of artist Aaron McIntosh’s participatory artwork: Invasive Queer Kudzu. This event will be taking place on Thursday, July 31 from 2 to 4 pm at the Reece Museum.

  Invasive Queer Kudzu will be the final artwork that is installed as part of the Reece Museum’s upcoming exhibition, The Place Speaks. This exhibit is designed to explore intersections of Appalachian culture, folk art, and folk religion, as well as interpretations of nature and Appalachian placeness as it reveals the divine to artists. The Invasive Queer Kudzu project raises visibility of Southern queer folks and their communities by using the metaphor of kudzu to exponentially grow queer stories across the South.

  Participants of this workshop are invited to craft their own stories or messages of support that will contribute to the growing mass of Southern queer kudzu. Participants will be provided with a cloth kudzu-shaped leaf, which they can write/draw/adorn with their stories using fabric markers, embroidery floss, and other embellishments, which could include small personal mementoes, symbolic vestiges, or tokens of memory brought from home. “Engulfing hills, trees and old buildings in a dense stranglehold, the kudzu vine colonizes, and alien landscapes emerge. An ‘invasive’ species, kudzu taps into our fears of otherness, connecting it in many ways to perceptions of queerness.” – Aaron McIntosh.

  Aaron McIntosh (b. 1984, Kingsport, Tennessee) is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire, and identity politics in a range of works including quilts, sculpture, collage, drawing, and writing. As a fourth-generation quilt maker whose grandparents were noted quilters in their Appalachian communities, this tradition of working with scraps is a primary platform from which he explores the patchworked nature of identity. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ South.

  This event is free & open to the public. Invasive Queer Kudzu will be part of the exhibition The Place Speaks: Sacred and Artistic Genealogies of Appalachia, which opens on Monday, August 4, 2025. 

  The Place Speaks is curated by Savannah Bennett, Collections Manager at the Reece Museum; in partnership with Dr. Jennifer Adler, Religious Studies, Appalachian Studies, History at ETSU; and Dr. Rick Cary, former Art Department Chair at Valdosta State University and Art & Design Professor Emeritus at Mars Hill University. The exhibition is an exploration of how religious expression is presented through visual artistry in the Appalachian region. The exhibition will feature works by Rev. Jimmy Morrow, Bessie Harvey, Howard Finster, Abe Partridge, Dr. Rick Cary, and other significant artifacts from the permanent collection that are grounded in regional history and placeness.

• Memory to Material & Objects Reception - September 4

  At reception for LaKesha Lee's Memory to Material & Objects will be held Thursday, September 4 from 5 to 7 pm. This event is free and open to the public. In conjunction with Lee's solo exhibition, this reception will also showcase the work she did for the Museum's 2025 Teen Renaissance art camp turned exhibition titled, Bound & Threaded, featured in the gallery adjacent to Memory to Material & Objects. 

  LaKesha Lee's work is an ongoing material dialogue between past, present, and future that honors self-representation, family legacy, and the resilience of Black identity. Through assemblage collages, sculptural forms, and ceramics, Lee uses found objects-old photographs, textiles, ceramics, and everyday artifacts-as a material language to explore memory, history, and cultural traditions.

  Lee is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. A recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Lee earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 20I9. Her work celebrates Black representation and family legacy, offering visual narratives that honor the past while inspiring a shared future. 

  LaKesha Lee served as the Reece Museum's 2025 Teen Renaissance Art Camp visiting art instructor that took place the week of June 2 through 6. The nine participating campers produced an exhibition with Lee leading the projects. The exhibition, Bound & Threaded Stories, is on display in the adjacent gallery through September 12

• SPARK! Art Reception- September 30

  Stay tuned for more upcoming information about this event taking place Tuesday, September 30 from 4 to 6 pm.

• Reece Faire: 60th Anniversary - October 10

  Stay tuned for more upcoming information about this event taking place Friday, October 10.

• The Place Speaks Reception - October 16 

  Stay tuned for more upcoming information about this event taking place Thursday, October 16 from 5 to 7 pm.

• Workshop with Aaron McIntosh - October 17

  Stay tuned for more upcoming information about this event taking place Friday, October 17.