Come support Cattywampus & celebrate Big Puppet Energy

We're throwing our 2nd Annual Fall Ball on Sunday, Oct. 27th at The Emporium and we want you to join us! Our goal for the event is to fundraise $20,000 towards supporting our 2025 programming. Help us keep community-based art and giant puppet magic alive in Knoxville!

A Fall Ball? Big Puppet Energy? What's that?

Great question! For this year's Fall Ball, Big Puppet Energy is the theme. Think the Met Gala meets Cattywampus vibes. Black tie meets giant puppets. We're inviting you to dress up silly, fancy, or whatever attire helps you best embody your larger than life, most unapologetically joyful, whimsical big puppet energy self. There will be music, dancing, drinking, snacking, a pink fuzzy carpet with puppet-razi snapping photos, a silent auction and of course, lots of giant puppets. There will be performances by the Knox Honkers & Bangers (Cattywampus's hot pink community marching band). Who knows, a pop-up parade might even ensue! You definitely don't want to miss it. 

Who We Are

Cattywampus Puppet Council is a 501c3 community-based arts nonprofit in Knoxville, TN and an intergenerational collective of artists, performers, teachers, musicians, and community organizers. We create tools for resilience through play, celebration arts, and storytelling to transform individuals and communities. Over the past 9 years, we have been bringing interactive parades, theater, play, and giant puppets to communities across East Tennessee and the South, utilizing the arts as a vehicle for helping communities tell their stories, build relationships with one another and cultivate power, joy, creativity, and justice together. 

What We're Raising Funds For

Cattywampus is a primarily volunteer-run organization, bringing giant puppets and innovative community-based art programming to Knoxville and beyond on a shoestring. With the help of last year's first Fall Ball, we were able to hire our first full-time staff member, launch a Community Art course with the UT School of Art, and carry out an incredible season of parade programming focused on housing justice in Knoxville. We are truly a community-supported organization and your donations make our work possible.

Funds raised through this year's Fall Ball will directly support our 2025 programming including:

Our 2025 Cattywampus Parade & Block Party 

Now in its 8th year, Cattywampus’s people-powered Parade & Block Party has become an annual spring tradition in Knoxville. It brings together diverse and intergenerational cross-sections of our community to play, create, and build relationships with one another, while using the visual and performing arts as tools to help tell our stories and vision what futures we might create together. Community members of all ages are invited to make giant puppets, masks, costumes, and other art and come together to parade as one! Check out our most recent "We Dwell Together" Parade & Block Party, which happened on May 19th in Happy Holler as part of Open Streets and asked our community to envision a Knoxville with affordable, safe, and healthy housing for all: 

10 Parade Youth Art Residencies

As part of our parade programming, Cattywampus hosts 9-week long art residencies at afterschool partner sites in Knoxville, such as Centro Hispano, the Boys & Girls Club, Canvas Can Do Miracles, Knox County Schools and others. During 2024, over 250 K-8th youth were served through this program! These residencies are completely free to our community partners. Cattywampus teaching artists and youth interns meet weekly with students to support them in designing and creating their own original giant puppets and other parade art. Each residency culminates in students forming their own parade crew and sharing their original art with the community at the Cattywampus Parade & Street Party.

Youth Intern Squad

Each winter/spring, Cattywampus hires local high school art students to work at our Parade Youth Art Residencies. Through this paid workforce development program, students have an opportunity to explore teaching careers in the arts, learn leadership skills, and so much more. 

The Knox Honkers & Bangers (and Shakers)

Birthed from the Cattywampus ethos that everyone is an artist and that bringing joy & magic to public spaces can transform them, this raucous, hot-pink community brass band is open to everyone. Since its inception in January 2023, we've grown to 60+ members of honkers, bangers, flag twirlers, dancers, and more. We've performed at the Big Ears Festival, the Dogwood Arts Festival, Open Streets, SoKnoPride, the Old City Performing Arts Center, and other community events. And we're just getting started!

And so much more...