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The completed Bluff Furnace “Art of History” Project sits in the shadow of the Hunter Museum of American Art and The Bridge.
In 2010, the Foundation pledged $1,000 in support of the Bluff Furnace Project, a collaboration of Mark Making and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Institute of Archaeology as a joint effort of the university and the community to create a work of monumental art that stands as a document to the history of Chattanooga.
The work “Art of History” is an artistic account of Chattanooga’s historic Bluff Furnace and its time and place in Chattanooga’s past and future. Designed and executed by the collaborators and painted on a 1,440-square-foot vinyl “skin,” the furnace’s story comes to life through the team’s selective interpretation of fact and photograph traced onto acetate with markers, scanned into Adobe Illustrator, and projected and hand painted on the vinyl’s surface using an industrial inspired color scheme. The result creates a dynamic illumined perspective inviting the viewer to consider the work from all angles.
The original Bluff Furnace in Chattanooga, circa 1860.
Located on the historic south bank of the Tennessee River, along the contemporary River Walk and its serpentine twists just west of the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Bluff Furnace was Chattanooga’s first heavy industrial site built in the 1850s as a charcoal-fired, steam powered hot blast furnace. Converted to a coke-fired furnace in 1860, and failing after two blasts, the furnace and its ruins were slowly buried by debris until archaeological excavations during the 1980s recovered the lost site.
The wall case contains documentation of the process of Art of History: group thinking and action, materials, process, and outcome. The freestanding case contains a model of the actual site installation and archaeological artifacts recovered from the site.
The Bluff Furnace Project exhibit at UTC.
An exhibition at UTC illustrates both the history of the furnace and its archaeological and artistic resurrection. It also serves as a reference to Chattanooga’s effort to redefine and resurrect itself industrially from brown to green as a leader on all fronts, and its commitment to the arts as a defining community parameter.
The UTC Institute of Archaeology, directed by Dr. Nicholas Honerkamp, Director, is a non-profit archaeological research unit affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Geology, College of Arts and Sciences. It is committed to the scientific investigation of cultural process throughout both historic and prehistoric eras.
UTC Anthropology majors Meredith Gilligan, Will Andrews, and Shea Cochran; Environmental Science major Lindsay Roden; Anthropology Alumna Lindsay Cochran; and dual Art and Anthropology major Tanya Dickenson participated.
Mark Making, founded by Chattanoogan Frances McDonald in 2008, is a non-profit organization whose mission is to enfranchise all, regardless of age, gender, or situation, in the creation of meaningful art in highly visible community sites.
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