Promoting Tennessee Artists
Brian and Carolyn Jobe met at UT while earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees at UT. They married and, after both graduating in 2004, Carri continued her art practice and worked in nonprofit administration in San Antonio. She then coordinated art handling and installation projects in Brooklyn. Brian earned his MFA in sculpture from the University of Texas at San Antonio, taught college courses, worked at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio. When the Jobes returned to Tennessee in 2014, where they both grew up, they founded Locate Arts, an organization that connects and promotes contemporary visual artists in Tennessee.
Brian and Carri modeled the Locate Arts web resource in part after Glasstire: Texas Visual Art, the oldest online-only art magazine of its kind in the country. The mission of Locate Arts is to anchor and spotlight the contemporary visual art scenes in each Tennessee region and foster a cohesive statewide art scene. Their programs promote art dialogue between the different cities in the state, and between the state and the world.
Their curated artist registry showcases the best Tennessee artists. The registry, for which artists can apply for free, features nine images per artist along with a wealth of artist information. The Locate Arts exhibition listings highlight noteworthy Tennessee exhibitions and listed more than 600 shows during the first 10 months of 2017 alone. Along with their blog, The Focus, those website features demonstrate how the Tennessee art scene is part of the national conversation about contemporary art.
Ashley Layendecker, an alumna of the UT BFA program in painting and photography, has been working as an intern for Locate Arts since June 2017. She conducts studio and gallery visits primarily in Knoxville, interviewing and photographing artists with their work. She contributes to the Locate Arts blog and recently began interviewing regional artists of note. In a separate position, Layendecker does curatorial work for Fluorescent Gallery, located in the revitalized Central Avenue corridor in Knoxville.
Layendecker met the Jobes when they came to one of her exhibitions at Gallery 1010 while she was an undergraduate student at UT. She says that having the opportunity to curate her own shows at Gallery 1010 was really important to her success as a student and gave her valuable connections, such as the one with Locate Arts.
Brian credits his time at UT with giving him a valuable group of peers and great teachers. He was in constant conversation and friendly competition with six other seniors and three graduate students.
“It seemed like we were always trying to outdo each other,” he says, smiling.
He continues to collaborate with one of his former professors, Jason S. Brown, through the Land Report Collective, a group of six artists, four of whom are UT alumni.
In addition to advocating for artists in the state of Tennessee through their website, Brian and Carri are co-directors of Seed Space, an exhibition program and speaking series that serves as the “in-person” side of Locate Arts programming in Nashville, Tennessee. Brian is an adjunct professor, mostly of sculpture, but also drawing and art history, primarily at Lipscomb University in Nashville. He is planning a professional practices course at Lipscomb for fall of 2018.