Envisioned Worlds: Lithographs from the Hokes Archives

Heuser Art Gallery
September 23 – November 6, 2015
Lecture: September 24, 5pm – Horowitz Auditorium, Caterpillar Global Communications Center
Reception: September 24, 6-7:30pm – Heuser Art Center

“Envisioned Worlds: Lithographs from the Hokes Archives,” presents a twenty-five year survey of prints by Beauvais Lyons, Chancellor’s Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Lyons, who is the self-appointed Director of the Hokes (pronounced “hoax”) Archives, has been creating elaborate works of academic and museum parody for over three decades. This exhibition offers a window into his invented worlds.

Lyons’s art might be regarded as a form of science fiction, but one that uses historical methods of representation. His art is informed by literary and cinematic traditions of mock-documentation, and he often accompanies his exhibitions to talk about the imaginary founder of the Archives, Everitt Ormsby Hokes. This exhibition is comprised of twenty-five lithographs from three of his projects “Reconstruction of an Aazudian Temple, “ Hokes Medical Arts,” and “The Association for Creative Zoology.”

Lyons has taught printmaking in the University of Tennessee since 1985. He received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. Lyons’ one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 60 museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. His prints are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. PA.

Learn more at: web.utk.edu/~blyons