With spring just a few weeks away, Knoxville’s unofficial festival season is here. Multiple Big Ears-related exhibits open on Friday, giving gallery-goers a chance to get an early taste of this year’s internationally recognized music and culture extravaganza. The 70th annual Dogwood Arts Exhibition opens on Friday, too, and is set to run through the Dogwood Arts Festival in mid-April. 

Multiple art exhibits connected with the Big Ears Festival open this week.

Violins of Hope: Strings of the Holocaust

This exhibit showcases more than 50 preserved and restored instruments that belonged to Jewish musicians during the Holocaust and tells stories of “injustice, suffering, and survival” while highlighting “the power of music to foster hope, resilience, and acceptance.” The exhibit is open through April 9 at Digital Motif (108 S. Gay St.), with hours extended to 8 p.m. for First Friday on March 7. A performance with Knoxville Symphony Orchestra is scheduled for Tuesday, April 8, at 7 p.m. at the Tennessee Theatre. Presented by Stanford Eisenberg Knoxville Jewish Day School and part of the 2025 Big Ears festival. 

The Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay St. 

Art world superstar Wayne White — even if you don’t recognize the name, you might know his work from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and the video for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” — will show some of his signature word paintings at the Emporium as part of this year’s Big Ears festival. Wayne White: Big Words features Chattanooga native White’s wry, painstaking (and frequently ripped-off) textual manipulations of middlebrow midcentury landscape prints. On display March 7-30, with extended hours for Big Ears (March 27-30). 

Also on display: the local nonprofit artists’ collective A1LabArts marks its 30th anniversary with Creativity and Community, a members’ show that reflects the organization’s ongoing commitment to artistic expression; Timeless Strings – The Art of Guitars and Clocks by Deb Cikovic; From Paper to Thread to Yarn by Kerry Remp; and Flora and Fauna of Tennessee by Hannah Doss. An opening reception for all exhibits will be held on Friday, March 7, from 5 to 9 p.m.

University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, 106 S. Gay St.

Get an early start to Big Ears by dipping into Kite Symphony, a multimedia project by Roberto Carlos Lange, aka Helado Negro, and visual artist Kristi Sword. The full experience, which includes two film screenings and accompanying live scores, won’t be available until the festival kicks off later this month, but a series of drawings titled Radio Telescope will be on display at UT’s downtown arts outpost starting March 7 and running through April 5. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 7, from 5 to 9 p.m. The Downtown Gallery will have extended hours during Big Ears (March 27-30). 

RED Gallery, 130 W. Jackson Ave.

The members of Borneo-based Malaysian arts collective Pangrok Sulap use large-scale, communal printmaking (and lots of percussion) “to empower rural communities and the marginalized.” They’ll spend part of March collaborating with UT students and faculty to produce a single woodcut, while examples of their potent printmaking technique will be on display at RED Gallery in the Old City through March 31, with an opening reception on Friday, March 7, from 5 to 9 p.m. Pangrok Sulap: Malaysian Printmaking Collective is part of the Big Ears festival, but open to the public during regular gallery hours. 

Gallery 1010, 100 S. Gay St. 

UT’s student art gallery, located inside the Emporium Center, hosts three one-night shows during March: Following the Pattern (March 7, 5-9 p.m.), a group exhibit curated by Hannah Jordan exploring visual patterns found in art, design, architecture, and the natural world; Thoughts of the feeling of Flesh (March 14), “a primarily ceramic exploration of the transsexual body”; and in touch (March 28), “a ceramic art show that delves into the connection between artist and material.”

University of Tennessee Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard

UT’s on-campus gallery, located inside the Art + Architecture Building, kicked off its annual celebration of top student artists in January with the 78th Annual Student Art Competition. The juried show, established by UT School of Art founder C. Kermit Ewing in 1947, runs through March 9. 

Graduate students get their required thesis exhibitions later this month. The first group of 2025 MFA candidates will show their work March 24-31; the second group show runs April 7-15.

University of Tennessee McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1327 Circle Park Drive

Science and art come together in X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out, a collection of 32 X-ray research images from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, with additional images from the McClung Museum, the Etnier Ichthyological Collection, and the Vertebrate Osteology Collection. On display through June 15. 

Also on display: Homelands: Connecting to Mounds Through Native Art, co-curated by representatives from the Cherokee Nation, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, features works by 17 contemporary Native American artists and will run nearly three full years, through December 2027. Masterful Mammals, an exhibit examining the life and work of noted (and increasingly notorious) naturalist John James Audubon, remains on display through 2026.

Tri-Star Arts at the Candoro Marble Building, 4450 Candoro Ave. 

UT art professor Jered Sprecher’s new solo show, Under the Branches, and My Art Is Fine, My Art Is Craft, an exhibition of textile art by Melissa Everett, are on display through March 29.

Knoxville Museum of Art , 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive

Curated by Fitsum Shebeshe, who moved from Ethiopia to Baltimore in 2016, States of Becoming highlights art by more than a dozen contemporary artists of African descent who are currently working in the United States. On display through April 27. KMA’s continuing exhibitions, including Higher Ground: A Century of Visual Arts in East Tennessee, Currents: Contemporary Art from the KMA Collection, and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass, are also on display.

Dogwood Gallery, 123 W. Jackson Ave. 

Get ready for the annual Dogwood Arts Festival with the Dogwood Arts 70th Anniversary Exhibition, on display March 7-April 18. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 7, from 5 to 8 p.m. 

Lilienthal Gallery, 23 Emory Place

2025 Nouveau, a group show of “hyper-contemporary” art by Yigal Ozeri, Vita Kari, Stanley Casselman, James Gortner, Swoon, and Basmat Levin, opened in January and runs through March.