Member Hour – New Perspectives on the Permanent Collection Part II

The Taubman’s Permanent Collection contains jewels of American art, particularly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Join Laura Higgins, Curator of 75th Anniversary Gifts to the Permanent Collection, as she takes Museum Members on a special guided tour of the refreshed contemporary galleries featuring newly interpreted works, many pulled from “the Vault” that haven’t been on view in a while.

Featuring works from 1950 to the present, these galleries bring together landscapes, folk carving, visionary art, social satire, and everyday objects to reveal how the stories we tell about home, belief, labor, and identity are more fractured than they first appear. Even the pedestal of contemporary art objects — where mugs, wishbones, cartoons, ashtrays, and a bottle of unraveling magnetic tape echo the seductions and contradictions of consumer culture — asks us to reconsider the myths a nation builds from its most ordinary things.

Across ceramics, paintings, and photographs, Laura will help you explore how place takes form through material, memory, and routine — through clay drawn from the earth, rooms shaped by shifting light, familiar interiors, and landscapes held in imagination. Each work offers a different way of understanding how we inhabit the world around us, suggesting that place is not fixed but made and remade through daily life.

Please check-in at Visitor Services when you arrive, and we will meet in the Atrium and go to the galleries together.

Reminder: Members are encouraged to bring up to two paying guests with them to each Member Hour.  

Registration requested.

Members: Free
Member Guests: $10

Not a Member? You can join today for a variety of benefits such as discounts on classes, member-exclusive event invitations, free reciprocal membership to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and more.

Become a Member today!