Influential People

He doesn't spit nails or crack heads. He has a disarming, likeable grin. He loves video games, and hip-hop music thumps from the loudspeaker of his pickup truck.

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.

Jenny Taubman chaired the new art museum’s fundraising campaign in the early years of the project. Her biggest success as a fundraiser turned out to be with her own husband, Nicholas Taubman.

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

Heywood Fralin likes to work behind the scenes.

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

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

Architect Randall Stout, who designed the Taubman Museum of Art, lives in Los Angeles and has designed buildings in Europe.

The Art Museum of Western Virginia will be renamed for its biggest donors, Nicholas and Jenny Taubman, the museum announced.

Former Advance Auto Chairman Nicholas Taubman and his wife, Jenny, have pledged $15 million to the new Art Museum of Western Virginia, museum officials confirmed Monday, making them the largest single