History

"It will be spectacular": A brief history of the art museum

They opened the first one with $250.

The year was 1954. The place: a former restaurant on Franklin Road. The money paid for rent and renovations.

How the art museum came to be

Where to start the story of Roanoke's new art museum? Maybe in a Roanoke bagel shop, where lawyer Heman Marshall ran into Judy Larson, the museum's executive director at the time.

Meet Jim Yeatts

Before there was a Taubman Museum of Art, or an Art Museum of Western Virginia, there was the Roanoke Fine Arts Center and Jim Yeatts.

Peggy Macdowell Thomas

Peggy Macdowell Thomas , who died in 2001 at age 89, was an only child who never had children.

Meet Heywood Fralin

Heywood Fralin likes to work behind the scenes.

Thomas Eakins: A flesh-and-blood American painter

The poet Walt Whitman once wrote that his friend Thomas Eakins "is not a painter, he is a force."

Meet museum director Georganne Bingham

When the Art Museum of Western Virginia, now the Taubman Museum of Art, hired Georganne Bingham from the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2003, one North Carolina colleague bemoaned the loss of "the be

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