Taubman Museum of Art

Randall Stout's building sits on the site of the old Roanoke grocery terminal, and when you stand in the galleries the crystalline roofline echoes the ridgeline of the Blue Ridge visible through the windows — the architecture was designed to mirror what you're looking at. Stout, a protégé of Frank Gehry, delivered a seventy-five-thousand-square-foot facility that drew controversy when it opened in 2008 but has since received international praise. The institution itself began in 1951, when the Roanoke chapter of the American Association of University Women requested a major exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. By 1983 the museum had moved to Center in the Square on Market Square downtown; by the late 1990s it had outgrown that space. In 2000 the city donated a site and four million dollars. Construction began in May 2006. Nicholas F. Taubman, former CEO of Advance Auto Parts and later U.S. ambassador to Romania, and his wife Eugenia donated over fifteen million dollars toward the sixty-six-million-dollar project. The museum was named in their honor. The building houses twelve galleries hosting twelve to fifteen exhibitions annually, a seventy-seven-foot City of Roanoke Atrium for large temporary installations, and Art Venture, an interactive gallery for younger visitors. Corporate donations have provided free admission to the permanent galleries since 2012. The permanent collection of more than two thousand works includes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art — Hudson River School, American Realism, American Impressionism, Arts and Crafts — as well as modern and contemporary art, photography, design, decorative arts, and Southern folk art. Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, John Cage. The museum received a bequest in 2001 that included twenty-seven works associated with Thomas Eakins and his circle, along with funds to support a named gallery. You go because the admission is free and the collection is serious, and because Stout built a room where the art and the mountains occupy the same sightline.