Yes, my title for this entry is tongue-in-cheek. As part of its week-long series of spring break activities, the Taubman Museum of Art’s Art Venture center for children invited visitors, especially kids, to “yarn bomb” objects today. The results were predictably cute. I wrote a little bright about the not-so-covert action, and Rebecca Barnett has photos. Click the image below to see and read. (Though I might seem to be razzing the museum a teensy bit for its lack of rebellious spirit, to be fair, every yarn bombing that I know of that’s happened in the region has been done with the blessings — and even the participation — of the property owner.)

From my Inbox to you:

The Taubman Museum of Art will be celebrating Art Venture’s One Year Anniversary with Spring Break arts activities, April 2-6, 2013. Themed days will inspire the art discoveries to be shared with family and friends throughout the week. Art demonstrations and performances will be occurring in Art Venture and the Taubman Museum’s brilliant Atrium to inspire the act of art making.

Art Venture Spring Break Schedule with Demonstrations and Performances

April 2 Textiles
11am-5pm Yarn Bombing

April 3 Sculpture
3D Printing

April 4 Painting & Drawing
11am & 1pm Painting and Music Performances

April 5 Theatre
Improvisation and Puppets

April 6 Music & Visual Art
11am-2pm Radford University Percussion Ensemble

The art that visitors make in the Art Venture is theirs to take home and cherish. We will have two on going activities that require the art to be donated for display. These activities are:

Create a butterfly for the Center In The Square Butterfly Garden (Opening Day May 18th)
Create an origami fish for Center In The Square Aquarium Installation (Opening Day May 18th)

About the Taubman Museum of Art
The Taubman Museum of Art is open with free general admission Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Additional hours include First Fridays for Art by Night from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. To learn more about current exhibitions or to register for the workshop, please visit www.taubmanmuseum.org or call 540.342.5760.

Staff videographer Katrina Tulloch has created 6-second video tours of all the new exhibitions at the Taubman Museum of Art. Click here to have a look.

From Sunday’s column:

The Roanoke Valley SPCA’s annual “Best in Show” fundraiser will begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday in the atrium of the Taubman Museum of Art.

More than 200 artists have contributed paintings, drawings and sculptures that will be for sale during the reception. As a new element, participants were encouraged to create artistic versions of dog and cat houses and pet beds. At least half the proceeds of each sale benefit the animal welfare organization. Purchased pieces can be picked up after 8 p.m. Friday.

The physical show lasts only through Friday evening, though a virtual exhibit and sale of the remaining unsold art will continue through the end of March on the Roanoke Valley SPCA’s website and Facebook pages.

The nonprofit’s calendar committee will select a piece from the show for the cover of its 2014 Pet Calendar. Last year, Troutville artist Judith Lochbrunner won the Best in Show prize with her painted paper collage “Play Day.”

Other prizes will be awarded by guest judge Karen-Sam Norgard, an artist and professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Sponsored by HomeTown Bank, the event will feature music from the Jeff Todd Trio.

Admission is $5; children 12 and under, $1. For more information, call 339-9247 or visit rvspca.org/events or the Roanoke Valley SPCA page on Facebook.

I’m pleased to present another art review from Hollins University art professor Ruth Epstein’s art criticism class, this written by junior Abigail Minor. “STATE OF THE ART: Virginia Crossroads” remains on display through Feb. 23.—MikeA

STATE OF THE ART: Virginia Crossroads
By Abigail Minor

Works by nine regional artists battle for attention on the walls, floor, small tables and racks in a single white gallery at the Taubman Museum of Art in State of the Art: Virginia Crossroads. John Clingempeel, David Freed, Ann Glover, Charles Goolsby, Reni Gower, Chris Gregson, Sam Krisch, Taliaferro Logan, and Robert Sulkin hail from Virginia, a requirement that creates surprising depth.

Standout pieces include Robert Sulkin’s imaginary mix-media machines. Found objects such as lights, wire, tires and skeletal fragments, generate repetitive forms and spontaneous sparks, frozen in the medium of photography. In Man and Beast, Sulkin’s gripping scene of tension between organic and manufactured objects, an animal skull and vertebrae arch to follow the circular forms of a bicycle and wagon wheel, respectively, held together with ropes and wires.

John Clingempeel’s distinguished paintings on plywood display a deep understanding of the interaction between light and dark. Using beeswax to build up thin layers of color, Clingempeel deconstructs natural elements into abstraction. The artist’s charcoal compositions, lacking in color, evoke a different, somber mood. In Untitled (2011) tendrils extend upward from a nucleus of white at the bottom right toward the top of the canvas, slashing through the dark charcoal strokes. The contrast of white and black, intermingled with greys, presses the lighter elements of the composition into the viewers’ space.

Equally distinctive are Reni Gower’s hanging strips of mesh and metal grating, covered with vibrant paint splatters. Like three-dimensional Pollocks, Gower’s constructions pleasantly assault the eye with a visual feast of color, texture, and no discernable pattern.

A mix of traditional media and innovative techniques, State of the Art: Virginia Crossroadspresents an impressive array of work from the region. Curators thoughtfully pieced together a multitude of styles and subjects that Virginia artists are choosing to explore today.

Alison Hall first went to Italy 12 years ago while she was an art student at Hollins University. Traveling with her professors Bill White and Jan Knipe, she visited the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi in Umbria and saw for the first time the frescoes attributed to early Renaissance master Giotto di Bondone.

“In the winter in Italy it feels so medieval,” the Martinsville native said, but then going inside the spectacularly painted chapel, “it’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ in Technicolor.”

After that first tour of Italy, “I just wanted to make a life there somehow,” she said.

Now an art teacher herself, at Hollins and the University of Virginia, Hall’s gone back to Italy every summer, and visited both the St. Francis of Assisi chapel and the Arena Chapel in Padua, where Giotto also contributed frescoes.

Her visits to those chapels provided the inspiration for “Alison Hall: Pilgrimage,” which opened Jan. 29, the first of five new exhibitions at the Taubman Museum of Art.

The other four, “50 Great American Artists,” “John Cage: The Sight of Silence,” “Jean Helion: A Painter’s Journey in Life and Art,” and “Time and Indeterminacy in John Cage’s Legacy: Tyler Adams and Sabine Groschup,” all open Friday.

On display through May 11, “Pilgrimage” is Hall’s first museum show. It’s meant to evoke a chapel in its configuration, with a large painting opposite the main entrance to the regional gallery and three smaller drawings on the walls to each side, similar to how frescoes or stained glass windows would be placed.

Click here to read the rest of the column.

It figures that the late avant-garde composer and artist John Cage—famous for, among many things, scandalizing the classical music world by debuting four minutes and 33 seconds of silence as a musical composition—would require curators who showcased his exhibits to incorporate factors that randomize their display. “The Sight of Silence,” an exhibition of watercolors Cage painted at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Blacksburg, opens Feb. 15, and was put together following Cage’s principle of “chance operations.”

According to a museum press release, “The exhibition is hung according to a system of ‘chance operations’ so that the show is never presented in the same way. Rolling the dice will determine where five paintings will be hung for this major exhibition—first deciding which gallery, then which wall, and finally where on the wall the piece will be hung.”

Here’s more about the exhibition, taken from the Taubman’s website:

As part of a national 2012 celebration of John Cage’s centennial year, the Taubman presents John Cage: The Sight of Silence, featuring over 60 watercolors and works on paper created at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Blacksburg, Virginia. Best known as a groundbreaking composer, musician, and avant-garde thinker, Cage (1912-1992) was also a prolific visual artist who wove Eastern philosophy with elements of chance as a way to free up the creative process. With additional handwritten musical scores, illustrated notations, and videos of performances also on view, the exhibition provides insight into one of the twentieth century’s most unconventional and influential artists.

Additionally, in the spirit of Cage, the exhibition was installed using Cage’s “chance operations” approach, allowing the throw of the dice determine where works were to be hung on the walls.

Any thoughts on the story, or the forum itself if you attended? Feel free to share them in the comments.

The construction of Interstate 73, proposed to create a corridor from South Carolina to Michigan, hasn’t been a topic of much discussion in Southwest Virginia of late.

Roanoke business leader and philanthropist Heywood Fralin says that’s a mistake.

At the Roanoke Regional Forum, held Monday at Jefferson Center’s Fitzpatrick Hall, Fralin said that building I-73 should be the region’s top economic development priority. He called for stronger leadership to unite localities with one another and with the business community, and said the region should recognize that “Virginia Tech is the most important economic driver of our economy.”

He cited statistics to bolster a case that Southwest Virginia lags behind the rest of the state in job creation, salaries and education.

“It’s possible to take an economically depressed area and turn it around,” he said. “If you’re going to make it happen, everyone has to get on the same page. That requires leadership.”

Fralin spoke at the forum with his son, former state Del. William Fralin, R-Roanoke, who also emphasized a need for stronger regional leadership. The younger Fralin said that Roanoke, with neither the clout of a large city nor access to the government assistance offered to rural areas, will have to organize its own financial resources to bring in amenities essential to future economic development, such as fiber optic cable networks.

Roanoke should strive to be the most business-friendly community in the country, he said.

“Leadership’s important. Being involved is important.”

Click here to read the rest of the story.

More than 70 families in the Roanoke Valley have adopted Chinese children, according to Pearl Fu, founder and director of Local Colors of Roanoke.

These families have longed for someone who could teach their adopted children the language, music and dance of their home country. Fu found an unlikely teacher – a 13-year-old student at North Cross School.

Liu Yang has been instructing her young pupils in Chinese folk dances. Though she’s young herself, she has nine years of dance experience already. She’s been meeting with the children and their parents on weekends to teach them for free, Fu said.

On Saturday at the Taubman Museum of Art, Liu, who performs under the name Lulu, will dance with about 10 of her students as part of the 2013 Chinese New Year celebration.

Technically, it’s the Year of the Snake, but Fu doesn’t like snakes. She joked that she’s calling it the year of the “little dragon” instead.

The free event is intended to bring more people through the museum’s doors. “We’re doing the whole thing for them,” Fu said. “It’s such a wonderful facility.”

Liu will also perform a Mongolian dance. Fu called her “very mature for her age.”

The program also features a piano performance of a Chinese folk song by Annie Chen, a student from China attending Roanoke Catholic School. She’s played piano for 13 years, starting when she was 4.

Fu said that it can be difficult to find Chinese classical musicians familiar with their native music, as many are trained to learn Western compositions.

Click here to read the rest of the column.

It appears that Blacksburg might get an IMAX theater, though it’s not clear how big a screen this theater is going to have.

Regardless, a number of Roanoke readers are no doubt gnashing their teeth this morning. Infamously, the Taubman Museum of Art was originally going to include an IMAX Theater, but by 2005 the museum organizers chose to drop that idea, saying it would be too costly to maintain. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a similar decision made to reduce the size of the $66 million building, and so there’s still an enormous unused space on the museum’s second floor where the IMAX projector was originally going to go. To this day, there are Roanoke residents who still haven’t forgiven the museum for that decision.

Staff writer Jeff Sturgeon quotes Bruce Frank, CEO of Frank Theatres of Jupiter, Fla., as saying the IMAX screen in the proposed CineBowl & Grille could be “up to 100 feet wide,” which implies it could indeed be a classic IMAX 72-foot high screen. There’s been controversy in recent years over people paying the higher ticket prices for IMAX shows only to discover the screens are hardly bigger than a regular movie screen.

Here’s Jeff’s story:

First & Main may soon host an IMAX
Developers say the shopping center needs a dose of entertainment.
By Jeff Sturgeon

Bringing the region’s first IMAX cinema, the First & Main shopping center in Blacksburg will add a 60,000-square-foot entertainment complex featuring a 12-screen movie theater, bowling alley, arcade, and bar and restaurant under plans announced Wednesday.

The luxury, open-air shopping center, which is half-occupied in its fifth year of operation, met with limited success as an eating and shopping destination. Now it is moving in a new direction: entertainment.

The new complex will have 10 regular movie screens and two ultrawide screens, one with IMAX sound and projection equipment; 16 lanes of bowling; and premium arcade games for children and adults. Food — American cuisine — and drink — a wine list and 25 craft beers — will be available for consumption in a movie, while watching sports on big screens or in a lounge.

Click here to read the rest of the story.