Photo by Rebecca Barnett.

The Science Museum of Western Virginia wants to make an offer to visitors.

The museum opened May 18 along with Center in the Square, but only two-thirds of its exhibitions were set up and only two species of butterflies could be seen in its much ballyhooed butterfly garden. The museum likely won’t have everything in place until the end of June.

“Some visitors have expressed disappointment that things aren’t in place,” museum Executive Director Jim Rollings said.

To address those concerns, the museum has temporarily cut the additional charge for the butterfly garden from $4 to $2 through June 30. During that period, visitors who pay the full admission fee ($10 adults, $8, kids ages 3-17) will receive a voucher for a free return visit that’s good through September — a two-for-one deal. The voucher does not include the butterfly garden.

Basically, the museum wants to make sure that folks who visit while the museum still is setting up will come back when the “total vision” is in place, Rollings said.

The newly renovated museum has had a bumpy start. An undetected gap in the butterfly garden roof allowed some of its fragile charges to escape before it was noticed last week. A government regulation-required freezer that the garden needs to gain U.S. Department of Agriculture approval was lost in transit. Criticism of the museum’s new admission prices drew a public response from Rollings.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

I’ve received the following letter from Science Museum of Western Virginia director Jim Rollings in response to reader Chris VanCantfort’s letter questioning the museum’s new prices, and I’m sharing it here.

The OmniGlobe at the Science Museum of Western Virginia.

The Science Museum of Western Virginia at Center in the Square is poised to be among the most outstanding attractions in the region. The complete renovation of Center has been augmented by an investment of more than $3 million by area donors to the Science Museum to provide new exhibits that not only are spectacular but also designed for all ages. That’s an added dimension for the community.

We will continue to install these one-of-a-kind exhibits over the next several weeks, with most of them fully completed by the end of June.

Now, our attention is focused on operations and sustainability for the future. Along those lines, we gave a long, hard look at new admission rates for the Museum and for the Butterfly Garden. (“Butterflies and Killer Prices,” May 21)

As a baseline, Science Museum admission, back when we moved out of Center in the Square in 2011, was $8 for adults and $6 for children 3-12 years old. Planetarium shows and MegaDome movies were an additional $3 to $5 depending on the program. That meant that a non-member family of four paid $28 for general admission. If they added a MegaDome movie, that total was $48.

MegaDome, incidentally, is out of business. So we no longer have their 40-minute big-screen documentaries to show.

Today, that same family of four – adding a Butterfly Garden visit – sees a total fee of $52, a $4 increase. And by the way, because we extended our “child” admission age from 12 years up to 17 years, it could literally be that same family who, two years later, still pay the lower child rate! Read more »

Today’s Letters to the Editor column includes this item from Chris VanCantfort, one of our sharpest readers when it comes to nonprofit numbers.

The Roanoke Times reports that “prominent figures” are, once again, in a tizzy over how to sustainably fund arts and culture programs (“Panel tackles role of arts in the region,” May 9 news story).

Now maybe those figures can explain how the Science Museum recently disclosing that it plans to charge a non-museum member family of four $52 every time it wants to visit the museum and its big-budget butterfly garden is a step toward sustainability. (“Visitors and volunteers will have to work together to keep the butterfly garden intact,” May 17 news story).

Another Taubman Museum in the making?

CHRIS VANCANTFORT
RADFORD

Any thoughts on the points he raises?

From Sunday’s column:

Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times. Dianne Smith of Harlem, N.Y., used butcher paper and rope to create her installation for the newly reopened Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Center in the Square.

Butcher paper represents a number of things for Harlem, N.Y., artist Dianne Smith.

“It’s at once durable and yet there’s a fragility to it,” she said. She has used it in her art as a way of representing the treatment of black people in America through history, showing how the paper can be manipulated and pushed into corners. It also calls to mind elders, aging, and the way history leaves marks.

Yet she also sees beauty in the abstract organic forms she can shape the paper into. “I’m hoping the viewer can engage with the work to find a number of things.”

She used butcher paper and rope to create the site-specific installation “No Limits,” pieces of which hang inside the entranceway to the newly reopened Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Center in the Square and in the hall just outside it.

She deliberately suspended the long, crumpled strands of butcher paper in spaces where art doesn’t normally hang in a museum. A configuration in one corner resembles a fisherman’s net, weighed down by pieces of old wood found here in Roanoke. Another paper construct rises in a column from floor to ceiling like a thick tree trunk.

The pieces in the hall sport more color, twined and knotted from long strips of patterned fabric, breaking away from somber monochrome to amplify a sense of spontaneity. “At the end of the day all of this is about life,” she said.

Smith chose to call the piece “No Limits” after meeting with school groups and Harrison Museum board members. She saw Roanoke as a place undergoing rebirth, with no limits to the directions it can go.

Click here to read the rest of the column.

Photo by JOEL HAWKSLEY | The Roanoke Times. A monarch butterfly perches on a flower in the garden at the Science Museum of Western Virginia.

Don’t touch the butterflies.

Don’t pick them up. Don’t try to catch them. Don’t step on them. Don’t leave with any of them on your clothes.

Entering and leaving the new butterfly garden at the Science Museum of Western Virginia isn’t like a simple traipse into a field. There are rules you have to follow — many of them required by federal law.

The butterfly garden with its fragile resident monarchs and painted ladies will open its doors to the public Saturday during Center in the Square’s Family Day of Discovery that serves as its grand reopening. Enforcing the rules will keep volunteers fluttering.

Derek Kellogg, the museum’s lead animal care specialist, explained that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has strict rules designed to prevent non-native butterfly species from escaping from the garden.

The no-escape rules apply to unregulated butterfly species as well, as the USDA sees potential for those butterflies to become carriers of germs and parasites contracted from more exotic tropical butterflies that will eventually join them.

To minimize chances of escape, there are two vestibules that function like air locks. One is for entering, one is for exiting. There will be volunteers stationed at each vestibule. A visitor will be escorted inside, then asked to remain in the vestibule while the volunteer explains the rules.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

From my Inbox to you. Virginia Museum of Transportation Director of Marketing informs me there are still a few Sunday slots left open.

The Virginia Museum of Transportation
to give rail fans a chance to operate a steam locomotive

At the Throttle
Saturday, May 18 and Sunday, May 19

Train lovers will have the rare opportunity to operate the
New Hope Valley Railway #17 0-4-0 Tank Steam Locomotive.  

“At the Throttle” sessions will last 30 minutes. A qualified railroad engineer will
be in the cab with participants at all times.
Cost for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is $125.

The Virginia Museum of Transportation (VMT) announces the “At the Throttle” program, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will put train lovers in the operator’s seat of a steam locomotive on Saturday, May 18 and Sunday, May 19.

Participants in the program will be in control of the New Hope Valley Railways #17 steam locomotive, a 0-4-0 tank engine, for 30 minutes. A qualified railroad engineer will be in the cab with participants at all times.

“Train lovers will experience what it was like to run a steam engine during the golden age of railroads,” said Beverly T. Fitzpatrick, Jr., executive director of the Virginia Museum of Transportation. “They can reach up, open the throttle and feel the engine move at their command.”

Participants in “At the Throttle” must be at least 18-years-old and have a valid driver’s license. Clothing appropriate to a working railyard should be worn at all times. Long sleeves, long pants, work boots and gloves are recommended.

Those wishing to participate in the program can register online at vmt.org or in person at the Museum’s downtown Roanoke location. Read more »

Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times. The Science Museum of Western Virginia, on the fourth and fifth floors of Center in the Square, is still unveiling its exhibitions in preparation for the May 18 opening.

Aquariums, iPads and flat screen televisions. Chandeliers and sculpted ceilings. Floor tiles arranged to make the shape of a giant butterfly. A skylight with colored glass in irregular shapes that seems to match the late Dorothy Gillespie’s aluminum sculptures ascending toward it.

There’s no question that more than $27 million in renovations has transformed Center in the Square.

At a Tuesday morning news conference, Center President and General Manager Jim Sears talked about how the days are gone for good when all a visitor saw in Center’s atrium were two volunteers seated at a desk.

“This project was a great labor of love,” said David Bandy , president of Roanoke architecture firm Spectrum Design, which designed the building. Flourishes such as allowing the science museum’s new butterfly garden to rise through the roof had to be balanced with conservation of historical features to meet requirements for tax credits, he said.

Center has less than two weeks to go until its May 18 grand reopening, with a preview Grand Affair gala scheduled for Saturday. Though on schedule and on budget, the project’s hectic pace to put on finishing touches has become more frantic than ever.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times.
The newly renovated Center in the Square building features a rooftop deck with a restaurant space, a koi pond still being lined, the skylight for the butterfly exhibit, and a glass railed staircase to an upper deck with a view of downtown Roanoke.

Jeff Goldberg/Esto Photographics

From Sunday’s column:

A Virginia Tech architecture professor and her students created a technologically interactive art installation modelled on Japanese lanterns at the Smithsonian.

Part of a series called “The Lantern Field,” the installation consisted of swaths of paper folded into flowery shapes hung from bamboo poles. Motion sensors caused the lighting to change colors and electronic bamboo chime sounds to change rhythm as people moved through the space beneath the “lanterns.”

“The Lantern Field” was on display at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in April. The seeds that grew to become the installation were planted before Aki Ishida joined the Tech faculty.

The project was inspired by the lantern festivals Ishida saw while growing up in Japan.

“Public parks would transform overnight into magical landscapes,” she said. Yet that magic was ephemeral. “These were paper lanterns that would go away after the days of the festival.”

“The Lantern Field,” too, was ephemeral. The installation went up April 5 and came down two days later after the gallery closed.

Ishida, 42, came to the United States when she was 11. By 2004 she was a New York architect teaching part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design. Japanese architecture has a tradition of using paper to modify lighting.

Click here to read the rest of the column.

(Here as promised in Sunday’s column is the video of the making of “The Lantern Field” at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.)

Click the picture to see Rebecca Barnett’s photo gallery:

KYLE GREEN | The Roanoke Times. Jim Rollings, executive director of the Science Museum of Western Virginia, talks with volunteers Tuesday about the butterfly garden during an orientation at the museum at Center in the Square. The museum, still under renovation, needs 70 volunteers prior to the grand opening in May.

The Science Museum of Western Virginia needs enough trained volunteers to fill about 70 positions prior to its grand reopening.

So far the museum has trained or scheduled training for about 33 volunteers, spokesman Michael Hemphill said.

The museum will hold its next orientation sessions 5:30 p.m. Thursday, 2 p.m. Monday and 3 p.m. April 21.

Anyone interested in signing up can contact museum volunteer coordinator Betsy Hale by calling her at 342-5726 or emailing volunteers@smwv.org.

Click here to read the rest of the story.