The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum is a premiere arts destination in the Roanoke Valley. It features the work of internationally renowned artists and emerging and regional artists. The museum also presents work from Hollins’ permanent collection and mounts exhibitions that explore currents in contemporary art. The museum provides a place to look at art and to talk about it, enhancing both the life of the university and the community beyond.

About the facility
Located on the first floor of the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center, the museum is a state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility. The museum has three interconnected galleries of different sizes totaling approximately 4000 square feet of exhibition space. Through the generosity of a grant from Roanoke County, the museum now houses a dedicated permanent Collection and Educational Resource Center, which is available to students, teachers, and other patrons who are interested in furthering their study of art in the museum’s permanent collection. It also functions as a small educational center for groups and classes, providing a forum for discussion, workshops, and projects based on exhibitions.

Educational programming
Since opening in fall 2004, the museum has presented more than 60 exhibitions with supplementary programs, including tours, lectures, workshops, gallery talks, and classroom instruction. The museum enriches the university’s curricular offerings through internships, volunteer opportunities, and courses on museum management to promote cross-disciplinary learning and visual literacy.

Outside recognition
The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum was recognized in the March, 2009 edition of Roanoke’s City Magazine for having the Best Art Exhibition of the last twelve months, for the exhibit Talia Logan: Georgianna Waxes.

The Museum has also been featured recently in US Airways Magazine’s Profile: Roanoke (2009), and in three separate interviews on radio station WVTF, among others.

For a link to these interviews, please see the Newsroom page.

The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum has won awards from the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) for three of its publications. The 2008 fall newsletter received a Silver and the 2009 spring newsletter received a Honorable Mention in the Museum newsletter category. The 2009 Binh Danh exhibition catalogue received a Honorable Mention in the Museum book category. The SEMC, begun in 1951, is a nonprofit membership organization that serves 12 states throughout the Southeast - Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia - and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. SEMC fosters professionalism, mutual support, and communication among its members and the larger museum community.

Photo, above, Betty Branch. Her work, Through the Crow's Eye: a Retrospective, will be on exhibit from September 17 - November 21, 2009.