Saturday art market 10:00 to 5:00, no cover

Support your local artists, great for holiday gifts

Audiences will likely be familiar with Wammo as the cofounder and raucous front-man of the wildly popular roots band the Asylum Street Spankers. What you may not know is this vagabond troubadour is also a prolific visual artist. For the past 16 years, Wammo has crisscrossed the globe, establishing a large and loyal cult following for his work as a performer, song-writer and musician. Now embarking on a new solo path as a one-man creative juggernaut, Wammo will showcase his artwork at a gallery exhibition in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Wammo’s solo exhibition will take place at Ironwood Studios located at 119 Jennings Avenue in the Downtown North area of Knoxville. The exhibition will run October 1 – November 1, 2010 with a soft opening to coincide with Knoxville’s October First Friday. An opening event will take place at the gallery on Saturday, October 2nd starting at 7:30 with a performance by the artist at 8:30pm.

Gallery owner Preston Farabow: “At my very first Spanker show, Wammo whipped open his iPhone and showed me his work. I had no idea he could paint and knew immediately that I wanted to show his art in my gallery. Ironwood Studios is proud to bring Wammo’s recent work to the Knoxville community.”

EXHIBITION DETAILS & CONTACT INFO

Solo exhibition at Ironwood Studios October 1 – November 1, 2010

Performer, poet, musician, visual artist: Wammo defies simple classification. He’s a singer/songwriter who can also express himself through paint on canvas, a record producer who is also a performance poet, an actor who is also at ease behind the camera, a crackerjack washboard player with comic
timing to match. This multi-talented man is creative to his core.

Born in NYC but raised in the wilds of Texas, Wammo is an American original. The eldest son of Metropolitan Opera star William Walker, Wammo grew up as a musical omnivore who embraced influences ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles to Black Flag. He also began painting intense canvases drenched in contrast and color.

In 1984 he received his BFA in  Radio/TV/Film from Texas Christian University and immediately went to work as a radio DJ and musician. First coming to national attention on the MTV and Lollapalooza tours in 1994, Wammo founded the first-ever Austin Poetry Slam, took second place in the National Poetry Slam in 1995 and cut his first solo album, Fat-Headed Stranger on the Mouth Almighty/Mercury label.

As cofounder of the Asylum Street Spankers, Wammo established himself as a creative force in America’s roots music revival leading into the 21st century. By 2010, Wammo had performed on nine Spankers albums (of which he produced two), two more solo albums, two full-length concert DVDs, and had appeared on stages and in music festivals across America, Europe and Japan, including Roskilde, Austin City Limits, and SXSW. His song Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV, a parody of Tie A Yellow Ribbon, has garnered over a million hits on YouTube.

Wammo made his professional film debut in Richard Linklater’s Slacker and was also featured in the documentary Slam Nation. In 2007,  Wammo headlined the TerraNOVA SoloNOVA Festival in New York City with his one-man show, Road Dog. In 2008, he starred off-Broadway in What and Give Up Show Biz?, a variety show tracing the history of the Spankers.

5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

With opening band Sugarfoot Serenaders!!

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. show starts at 7 p.m.

Suggested Donations $5 – $10

info: Erik & Libby Johnson 983-5234

www.runawaycircus.com

New paintings from Kit Hoefer, and sculpture by Preston Farabow.

Music provided by Brian Waldschlager

5 p.m. to 10  p.m.

Cost: free

Tickets are $40.00 per person and include the reception at Ironwood Studios and the tour.  There is an option for either a walking tour or a trolley tour of the route.

Live music for all ages. Cost: $10.00

Age limit: All ages

Description: Andy Statman’s music is at once progressive and traditional, reframing traditional Jewish folk music in an improvisational model based on John Coltrane’s celestial jazz explorations of the 1960s. Statman grew up in Queens. Influenced by the Greenwich Village folk revival, he picked up the mandolin and moved to Nashville in the mid-1960s, where he became part of that city’s nascent newgrass scene. His profound spiritual response to Coltrane about that time led him on two parallel but related musical journeys: first, back into the klezmer of his youth, and second, into a rigourous program of jazz improvisation. Statman picked up the clarinet and started playing an avant-garde, improvisational version of traditional Jewish folk music, a startling fusion of old and new that combines elegant formalism with adventurous musical freedom. (For you bluegrass fans put off by a fear of out-there jazz, he also still plays mandolin.) (Matthew Everett)
Start Time: 07:00
Date: 2010-02-15