UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
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WONDERLANDS (January 12 - May 22)
Wonderlands, an exhibition of photographs and Reece artifacts engaging with the cultural history of the Southeast by ETSU professor Tema Stauffer will be on display January 12 through May 22. A reception for Wonderlands will be held on Friday, February 13 from 5 to 8pm. 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 the craft of fiction, "Wonderlands," 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.”
The series 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 the 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 currently an Associate Professor of Photography at East Tennessee State University. Stauffer’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. In 2018, Daylight Books published a monograph of her Upstate series portraying the lingering legacy of American industrial and agricultural history in and around Hudson, New York. The book was nominated for the Unveil’d Photobook Award 2018 and the prints were exhibited at ETSU’s Reece Museum, Tracey Morgan Gallery, ilon Art Gallery, and Hudson Hall. Her second monograph, Southern Fiction, was published by Daylights Books in 2022. Southern Fiction has been exhibited Auburn University’s Biggin Gallery, Tracey Morgan Gallery, ETSU’s Reece Museum, 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. The production of the 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 19 - April 3)
Through the Light by artist, Molly Sawyer, will be on display January 19 through April 3, 2026. The exhibition by the cross-disciplinary artist 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, Molly 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 craftbased 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.”
Examples of this can be seen in 4 Square (2025) and Big Pink (2025) which consist of the burlap of recovered, coffee bean bags which have traveled to the United States from countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru and Nicaragua. The bags are chosen both for their textile qualities and as a representation of global interdependence for goods and services. In Big Pink, with emphasis on color pairings, Sawyer again uses found burlap to reference both the Color Field School and Joseph Alber’s teachings at Black Mountain College. While in Corrugate (2025), a large-scale, suspended work of 13.5 ft., the artist uses corrugated, packing paper salvaged from a revitalization project in Asheville to consider the contradiction of redevelopment of historical spaces; questioning the salvaging of history for present-day gain.
Another large-scale installation is Reaching Through (2025). This work includes salvaged material sourced from Asheville’s utility companies as they worked to rebuild the city’s network after Hurricane Helene. In this grouping, where suspended rings are covered with chains of white fiber, hand knit by the artist, the artist expresses ethereality by collaborating with primary and secondary forces of light and shadow. Sawyer regards her sculptural, site-specific installations almost as living beings, continually in flux, expanding and contracting. In keeping with this momentum, Sawyer has expanded on Reaching Through by adding an additional ring so that the grouping currently totals six circular, fiber elements.
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 (b. 1973), Molly Sawyer attended the New York Studio School (2002), the Art Students’ League of New York (2004), and Guilford College (1995). Solo exhibits include Reece Museum (2026), Spartanburg Art Museum (2025), Western Carolina University (2020 ; Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art (2017); and North Greenville University (2013 ), and Lyndon House Art Center (forthcoming-2027). Group exhibits include the Asheville Art Museum (2020), Reece Museum (2024), Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) Raleigh (2020). Other group shows include New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and Virginia. Her work is among the permanent collections of Reece Museum (TN); Spartanburg Art Museum (SC); Mandarin Oriental (NY); The Ritz-Carlton Boston (MA); AC Hotel Atlanta Midtown (GA); Mohegan Sun Casino, (CT); and the former Atlanta Medical Center (GA). Sawyer has attended art residencies in North Carolina, Connecticut, Wyoming, Washington, and Ireland and currently maintains a studio in Asheville, NC.
For more information on Molly Sawyer, Please visit www.mlsawyer.com and on Instagram @mlsawyerart or by phone (646) 853-1100. -
Rising Sun: The Musical Legacy of Clarence Tom Ashley (February 23 - 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 will feature a collection of artifacts donated by Joe D. Ashley, Clarence Tom Ashley's grandson, in memory of Clarence Tom Ashley’s musical legacy.
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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 features 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 to 7 pm at the Reece Museum.