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...
Current Exhibitions
Dates subject to change
Friday, February 15, 2013 - Saturday, May 25, 2013
French painter Jean Hélion (1904 - 1987) was a leading figure in the Paris art world in the 1930s, associated with the best abstract artists of his time. Yet he had vital roots in Virginia, including a studio in Rockbridge Baths. This unique exhibition tells the story of this artist in 18 works from local collections that span nearly 50 year, a story told from the point of view of guest curator (and painter) Bill White, himself one of the most important artist in the state.
The show maps a man's journey from Paris, to New York then to Rockbridge Baths, where Hélion settled with his American wife from Richmond. It is a dramatic life story that includes being...
Friday, February 15, 2013 - Saturday, June 1, 2013
Continuing its multi-year focus on American art history, the Taubman Museum of Art presents 50 Great American Artists, a distinguished collection of works that represent some of the best artist from the nineteenth century to the present. Spanning a 135-year period, the 50 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures on view feature key individuals and movements that continue to have an impact on artists and audiences to this day, be they familiar celebrated masters of little known innovative figures whose art deserves a second look.
Included in the group are textbook classics like James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Andy...
Friday, February 15, 2013 - Saturday, June 1, 2013
John Cage's legacy is far-reaching and profound, inspiring artist around the world with his expansive approach to the artistic process and his unique ability to incorporate music, language, dance, and the visual arts in his experimental practice.
This show features video and film works by two leading-edge artists, each engaging the music of John Cage in different ways. In Performing Silence (2009), Tyler Adams (b.1980, Los Angeles) brings together 25 found YouTube videos of people "playing" Cage's famous 4'33", a piece comprised of three movements in which the performers are instructed to remain silent. The second work (JC{639}), is by...
Friday, March 22, 2013 - Saturday, July 13, 2013
Since 1980, the Mountain Lake Workshop has invited internationally-known artists to collaborate with fellow artists, students, and community residents of Southwest Virginia in the creation of experimental works of art.
Located in Giles County, Virginia, and supported in part by Virginia Tech, the Mountain Lake Workshop project has focused on facilitating community-based art collaborations that engage aspects of contemporary art, Appalachian culture, and social and technological trans-disciplinary planning sessions with guest artists have for decades brought together the art and sciences as a way to feed an unexpected and dynamic creative process, resulting in experimental...
