Community News: Write or draw on gallery walls to share thoughts about the Art Museum

Read the news release from the Art Musuem below

ART MUSEUM ENCOURAGES COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION WITH FINAL EXHIBITION

Write or draw on gallery walls to share thoughts about the Art Museum

ROANOKE, Va., April 3, 2008 – The Art Museum will close its doors at its current facility after asking the community to share their memories and wishes for the new Taubman Museum of Art in an interactive exhibition that opens to the public tomorrow. Past, Present, and Future: An Audience Interactive Exhibition will remain on view through June 10. The Art Museum galleries will be free of charge until the museum’s move to the new facility to encourage the community to participate in this unique project.

The exhibition allows individuals of all ages to express, through writing, stories about the Art Museum, how an event or program moved them or had an impact on them or their wishes for the future of the Art Museum when it moves to its new facility this fall. In addition, individuals are free to express themselves through drawing. Participants can use an assortment of writing and drawing implements (pencils, markers and burnishing tools) to leave their thoughts or drawings on foil-faced panels, chalkboard walls, or blank gallery walls. A bamboo wishing tree also will be located in the galleries to hold community wishes for the future.

“In the last few months that we are open as the Art Museum of Western Virginia, we want to encourage the community to express their own feelings directly on the walls of our galleries before we leave,” said Georganne Bingham, executive director of the Art Museum. “We look forward to visitors taking advantage of the opportunity to help create, through their written or drawn contributions, art on our walls that reflects their various viewpoints and thoughts.”

About the new Art Museum of Western Virginia:

Scheduled to open to the public in November, the new Art Museum building will be a dramatic composition of flowing, layered forms in steel, patinated zinc and high-performance glass paying sculptural tribute to the famous Blue Ridge Mountains that provide Roanoke’s backdrop and shape the region’s spirit. The 81,000 square foot structure designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout will be the first purpose-built art museum ever constructed in Roanoke. The new facility will house significantly larger exhibition and education spaces, a flexible theater/programming space, a multi-purpose auditorium, a research library, a book and museum shop, a studio classroom, a works on paper study room, and a café with indoor and outdoor seating. All exhibition and education spaces will be wired to provide real-time, interactive distance learning experiences via high speed network to classrooms across the region and the state. The institution will change its name to the Taubman Museum of Art upon opening.

Recently, the new Art Museum received one of the prestigious 2007 American Architecture Awards awarded by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd. The American Architecture Awards honor and celebrate the most outstanding new accomplishments for architecture designed and built in the United States by leading American firms and international architecture firms practicing in the USA. The awards identify the new cutting-edge design direction, urban philosophy, design approach, style, and intellectual substance in American architecture today.

For more information about the Art Museum, visit www.artmuseumroanoke.org.