The Bottom: Stories from the Neighborhood

JUNE 1 – AUGUST 3, 2024

Organized by Phillip Collins of Good Black Art

This exhibition is in collaboration with The Bottom, Good Black Art, and Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin.

In Southern Black communities, our stories aren’t simply passed down from one generation to the next—they serve as maps with markers for our future. This truth is evident in The Bottom, a neighborhood in East Knoxville, Tennessee. Despite its demolition in the 1950s due to urban renewal and systemic racism, its legacy lives on.

Curated by Good Black Art and grounded in the research of Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin, a local sociologist specializing in race, place, and Black communities, The Bottom: Stories from the Neighborhood is an exhibition that delves into life in the neighborhood beyond its destruction. While it highlights the narrative of Knoxville, it resonates with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and underprivileged communities across different times and places. The exhibition presents both familiar and imaginative interpretations by two Southern artists through a dialogue of folklore and futurism, drawing from oral histories of former residents and archival sources from The Bottom.

The Bottom has long been a home to Knoxville’s Black creatives. To complement the contemporary works on exhibition by Ahmad George and Erin LeAnn Mitchell, Good Black Art has curated a selection of work by Beauford and Joseph Delaney and Ruth Cobb Brice from the permanent collections of the Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture and borrowed works from the Beauford Delaney Estate and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center to honor those visual artists who came before.

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