Museum undergoing modern Renaissance

William King Museum of Art in Abingdon, Virginia, is undergoing a renaissance. Recent monetary gifts, gifts of art and a newly completed facelift of the façade are leading the way into the future.

“We’re on the verge of something wonderful, not only for this museum, but this entire region,” Betsy White, executive director of the museum, says.

The museum is being given an extraordinary opportunity through a new collaborative partnership with the Virginia Museum of Animal Art that will bring their collection of wildlife art to Abingdon. Recognized as one of the most significant collections of this genre, it consists of approximately 80 paintings, 20 indoor and 12 outdoor sculptures, valued at between eight and nine million dollars.

Featured artists include Robert Bateman, Rosa Bonheur, Alexander Koester, Guy Coheleach, Thomas Quinn, Raymond Harris-Ching and Manfred Shatz. The collection was developed by the late Gene and Anne Worrell, who started the Virginia Tennessean newspaper in 1949, which later merged with the Bristol Herald Courier. The Worrells carefully collected this extraordinary collection since the early 1990s, and it is the wish of their foundation now to share it with the area the Worrells called home for so many years

The Worrell gift will fund a new three-story wing for the collection, which will include exhibition space, receiving and storage areas, as well as an entry lobby with a café area, for a total of 10,000 additional square feet. Scheduled to be completed by fall 2024, the new wing will be located at the north (or rear) end of the main museum building.

Ted Williams Billie Tsien Architects of New York have been engaged to design the new wing. Their projects include the Phoenix Museum of Art, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College and the Barak Obama Presidential Library, among others. Wolf Josey Landscape Architects of Charlottesville, Virginia, have been engaged to design the museum lawn and area around the new wing, completing the campus renovation plan.

In addition to the front entrance facelift, these new changes will complete the landscape and campus renovation concepts created several years ago by the Virginia Tech Community Design Assistance Center. That plan includes revised and improved traffic flow and parking, museum trails to view outdoor sculpture, an amphitheater and lawn event space.

The first part of the Virginia Tech plan is the recently renovated entrance, designed by Barrington Landscape Architecture. A three-terrace system of concrete and brick patios make up the museum’s new entrance. Each terrace is bound by a low retaining wall topped with handrails. An ADA accessible ramp accesses the patio levels. An additional ramp leads to an ADA-compliant entrance. An area for sculptures, murals and seating are placed throughout the new entry, providing places to enjoy the expansive, stunning views of the mountains, town and campus.

The museum’s new emphasis on the intersection of art and nature includes a planned collection that Bristol artist, Suzanne Stryk, has been commissioned to create in a new residency at the museum. Based on her “Notes on the State of Virginia” exhibit, the new artwork will focus on the Southwest Virginia region. The finished collection will serve as an introduction to the exhibit space holding the Worrell Collection of Animal Art. Stryk’s work intersects with the natural world celebrated by the Worrell collection.

“The Worrells’ intent is for us to become a museum of national stature, so that’s why I say this is a gift to Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee as much as it is to the museum. It’s a wonderful thing for us to be able to regift it to the region in the way we exhibit it and interpret it with our educational programs,” White says.

This transformative gift came to the museum not only because of the Worrells’ connection to the region, but because William King is an accredited museum. Out of the approximately 35,000 museums in the country, only 1,000 are accredited.

“Accreditation is a very high mark to achieve. The thing that I really like about it, other than what it enables us to do, is that it ensures that the operation here is of a high standard and reaches for excellence. It also shows that we are very community service oriented and therefore it builds an element of trust with the community,” White says.

Being an accredited museum was also part of the reason the museum recently received a major gift from the McGlothlin Foundation. This $500,000 grant supports the exhibition program, often paying loan fees for major exhibitions of the caliber of the recent “Bernini: The Roman Baroque” exhibit. Without accreditation, the museum would not have been considered as a location for the exhibit. The McGlothlin gift is $100,000 per year for five years.

“It’s a real nice boost. It allows us to schedule works by artists with recognizable names as well as significant figures in world art. Some of them will be historical, like the Bernini exhibition and the upcoming ‘Contemplating Character,’ and others might be more contemporary. We have to schedule these about two years out, so we’re looking at ideas for 2024 now,” White says.

The “Contemplating Character” exhibition opens in April 2023 and features more than 150 works from two and half centuries of portraiture. It includes works by French artists such as Jacques Louis David, Clotilde Martin-Pregnard, François Guiguet and Alfred Dehodencq.

Another aspect that contributes to White’s joy is the Art Lab. The Art Lab houses artist studios, classrooms, a photography lab, ceramic studio, digital lab, printmaking lab and more.

“The Art Lab is a major new initiative that is extremely innovative for high school, college and adult audiences. We’ve always had some of those programs, but we’ve never concentrated on it in the same way that we have with elementary schools. It’s just astounding what we offer. The digital lab has 22 computers, laser printer and 3-D printer. We teach the Adobe suite so that participants can be certified. And we have the teen labs. They just love that. Last summer, they were doing stop motion photography, and they just were having a grand time playing with all this technology. There’s just a whole lot going on. In the future, I see the museum teeming with people of all ages from our school programs, family programs, art lab classes and, of course, our exhibitions,” White says.

The museum offers multiple educational programs for elementary school children. These date back to the origins of the museum. When White and her team of volunteers were tasked with finding a cultural use for the empty school that now houses the museum, two of the regional needs that they identified were a lack of art teachers at the elementary level and the lack of a high-security gallery that could house exhibitions of original art.

“We thought the big spaces downstairs would be great exhibition halls and allow us to bring in art that people would otherwise have to go to Roanoke, Richmond or Knoxville to see. We married that with an education program that targeted elementary school audiences around the region,” White says.

The Van Gogh Outreach elementary school program started in 1998 for the second grade. The program moved to the third grade when Virginia changed its SOL requirements. The museum didn’t just change the Van Gogh program, they added a new program teaching Native American traditions for the second grade. When the museum installed its Cultural Heritage permanent gallery in 2017, they developed Heritage Express which brings children in the fourth grade to the museum to learn about their own rich culture.

“Related to our animal art and our campus renovation, we have on the drawing boards a program called Art Explorers for the fifth graders to come in and go through this animal art collection as well as Stryk’s new collection on our campus. The old teacher in me just loves this,” White says.

Once a school, William King Museum of Art remains a place where education and culture are important – not just for children, but all ages. White says that it’s a “joy and a pleasure” to be at the museum at this point in time.

For more information, visit www.williamkingmuseum.org.

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