At the Taubman, neighborhood art offers a reason to slow down

Art made with neighbors

A museum trip from the Gretna region to Roanoke can begin with a question closer to home than the city’s skyline: what does a neighborhood make when its residents help shape the art? The Taubman Museum of Art’s September spotlight on the Southeast neighborhood offers one answer, with works made through collaboration rather than an exhibition organized solely around an individual studio practice.

The museum lists the exhibition through September 27. It features the Southeast Neighborhood Activation led by resident artist Molly Kernan, with work created between 2024 and 2026 in collaboration with the community.

Nature recurs in the pieces, according to the museum’s description. The larger resident-artist initiative includes several Roanoke neighborhoods and grew from a city program begun in 2022.

For visitors, that background suggests a different way of looking. Alongside questions about color or technique, ask who helped make a work and what relationship it has to a place.

A neighborhood project invites attention to participation as part of the result. The museum description establishes the collaboration; it does not supply evidence that every resident took part or that an exhibition can represent every experience of Southeast Roanoke.

Images of reverence

Another current exhibition opens a related conversation from a different direction. “Reimagining Reverence: A Spotlight on Gilded Icons” is listed through October 18 in the American Art Gallery.

It considers the use of gilding in religious and other visual traditions, alongside contemporary approaches. Peter D.

Gerakaris’s Icons series treats rare and endangered plants and animals with a visual reverence associated with sacred subjects.

Seen together, the exhibitions offer a useful pairing: one asks visitors to notice collaborative work rooted in a neighborhood; the other asks what it means to give an image the materials and attention of devotion. That is an editorial reading of the pairing, not a claim that the museum designed them as a single exhibition.

It gives families and friends a simple conversation to carry from one gallery to the next.

Planning a visit

The museum advertises free general admission. Its posted regular hours are Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., at 110 Salem Avenue SE.

Special programs may require separate tickets.