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.

It was Aug. 5, 1998.

"She said, 'Have you seen the paper?'" recalled Marshall, a museum board member. The Cartledge family, which owned Grand Home Furnishings, was donating its former downtown store to Center in the Square, the arts and cultural complex that housed the museum.

It seemed to answer the museum's dreams. From its days as an art center, it had grown so much it was bursting at the seams. It was expecting a bequest of paintings from Peggy Macdowell Thomas, a Roanoke relative of the painter Thomas Eakins. Yet there was no space in its current quarters to expand.

Now, a whole new building was in the mix. "The two of us talking over bagels said, 'We need to talk to somebody quickly,'" Marshall recalled.

Soon the museum was the leading candidate to move into the Grand building on Campbell Avenue.

But with a closer look came misgivings. It would be hard to meet the museum’s humidity and temperature requirements in such an old, porous building. Then an architect gave his estimate for renovations: $20 million.

For that money, supporters asked, why not just build a new museum?

At an afternoon news conference on June 5, 2000 , Roanoke Mayor David Bowers announced the city was donating $4 million to a combined new Art Museum of Western Virginia and IMAX theater , to be located across the railroad tracks from Hotel Roanoke. The city would donate the property as well.

The IMAX was eventually jettisoned from the new museum project for financial reasons. But the die was cast.
The new art museum would be built on the most prominent undeveloped space left in downtown Roanoke.

Some began to argue for a building that would put Roanoke on the cultural map.

"Roanoke is a terrific city and a great place to live," said Larson. "The one thing to my mind that it lacked was a signature building."

Others agreed. Most involved in the museum project had heard about the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which had helped turn Bilbao into an international tourist destination. Designed by American architect Frank Gehry, the titanium Guggenheim was a powerful lesson in cultural tourism and the potential advantages of a radical design.

The museum's building committee compiled a list of possible architects that included some of the biggest names in design. Some, it turned out, were too busy; others failed to impress. One who stayed on the short list was a young Los Angeles architect named Randall Stout.

"He had an impeccable background," said Marshall of Stout, who had architecture degrees from the University of Tennessee and Rice University and a resume that included a stint as Gehry's senior associate.

"Randall came totally prepared," recalled Valeta Pittman, a member of the museum's building committee. "He actually brought a tabletop model of the market area." The youngest of the finalists at 44, Stout had never designed a museum from scratch. But he had designed some striking buildings in Europe.

Some found his east Tennessee drawl reassuring. To Larson, Stout's age and relative inexperience designing museums were a plus.

"You just know you're going to get 200 percent of that person," she said. They chose Stout.

Sometime in the fall of 2002, an enormous crate arrived at the museum at Center in the Square. Registrar Mary LaGue and helpers unfastened screws and began to wrestle out the model for the new museum. It was officially unveiled to board members in the museum's lecture hall.

Their reaction? Pittman, asked the question at a coffee shop, sat straight up in her chair. She inhaled sharply. Her eyes grew big.

She laughed.