New art museum exhibits revealed

The Taubman Museum of Art will feature an exhibit on baroque Italian painting when it opens in November, confirmed David Brown, the deputy director of art.

The new $66 million art museum will also feature a digital installation by students and faculty at Virginia Tech that will respond to movement and sound, and an updated version of an earlier exhibit on how the museum was built.

The museum declined to confirm the rest of its schedule, but it is expected to include exhibits on contemporary landscape photography and the art of tattoo design, according to several sources, including participating artists’ websites.

The museum expects to make a major announcement on its entire first year exhibition schedule and related programs at the end of August, said Kimberly Templeton, director of external affairs. "Our mission is to be diverse in subject matter and in media."

The Italian paintings are from The Haukohl Family Collection, which has been called “the largest collection of 17th century Florentine Art in America.” (The painting show here, by Giovan Domenico Ferretti, is actually from a slightly later date.)

The period is generally referred to by art history scholars as the baroque. It was a time when the well-defined spaces and measured perspectives of Italian Renaissance painting gave way to a more emotional style, with rich colors and dramatic effects of light and shade, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Houston collector Mark Fehrs Haukohl is friends with top museum donors Nicholas and Jenny Taubman, and donated two prints to the museum in their honor a few years ago.

The Haukohl collection made news last year when a visitor kicked a hole through “The Triumph of David” by Ottavio Vannini, on loan to the Milwaukee Art Museum at the time. Though experts have pronounced the painting restorable, it will not be included in the Roanoke exhibit, Brown said.

Virginia Tech’s “Revo-Over” (“revo” is “over” spelled backward) is apparently still a work in progress. The exhibit, which will be displayed in the new museum’s MediaLab gallery, will involve a three-dimensional screen that interacts with viewers’ voices and movements to produce a “visual and aural environment” of sounds and images, Brown said.

Local tattoo artists Joe Hegarty, Thom Little and Monica Moses of Alex’s New Tattoo on Franklin Road have been asked to take part in the museum’s exhibit on tattoo design, Hegarty and Moses said. Hegarty said he was “kind of stoked” when asked to show his designs at the new art museum. “I felt like we’ve reached a milestone, having tattoos as art in a museum.”

Other galleries will feature highlights from the museum’s permanent collection, likely including some paintings that have never been shown before.

Those galleries will include some borrowed works to enhance the museum’s contemporary art collection, Brown said. Museum officials are hopeful donors will step up and purchase some of the borrowed works for the museum.

“The museum’s collection is relatively small,” Brown said, especially in the realm of contemporary art. “There’s lots of room for improvement.”