ROANOKE, VA.- The Taubman Museum of Art presents a selection of American naïve paintings from the Colonel Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch Collection at the National Gallery of Art as part of its spring exhibition schedule. American Naïve Paintings from the Garbisch Collection will open to the public on March 5 and remain on view through May 16, 2010.

The 35 works in the exhibition were created by folk artists who had little or no training in the arts. Portraits, landscapes, sporting and maritime scenes, and depictions of memorable historical events will engage audiences with their unique qualities of simplicity, directness and creative vitality in color and design.

Works on view include "The Connecticut Valley" by Thomas Chambers, "The Grave of William Penn" by Edward Hicks, Joseph Slade by Ammi Phillips, and "Bare Knuckles" by George A. Hayes, as well as works by William Matthew Prior, George Washington Mark, and more.

Colonel and Mrs. Garbisch were pioneer collectors in this field beginning in the 1930s. They assembled a collection of several thousand works that were later offered by gift and bequest to museums around the country.

American Naïve Painting from the Garbisch Collection at the National Gallery of Art is made possible by grants from the Altria Foundation and the Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson, Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, with additional support from WDBJ7.

Also opening:

Unusual Suspects
According to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, "visionary art refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself."

Unusual Suspects will present more than fifty works from eight regional collections and provide a sampling of the breadth and range of the artists who work in this manner. Benny Carter, Missionary Mary Proctor, Purvis Young, S.L. Jones, and Jacob Kass are just a few of the well-known artists whose works will be on view through May 23, 2010.

Susan Jamison: Into the Forest
In Jamison’s allegorical egg tempera paintings of women, animals are drawn to the subject like an enchanted Snow White. Compositionally, figures appear either as cropped and isolated parts of the body, or as formal Renaissance inspired portraits. Medical illustrations of the head are appropriated and modified into archetypal images that suggest a dream state. The bodies are decorated with a flowery hot pink, extremely feminine pattern. Sewing implements, thread and lace honor traditional female arts. Fairy tales, scientific, botanical and avian illustrations, Persian miniatures and fashion design are influences. Jamison paints in a precise detailed style that eschews shadow in favor of a flat, illustrative light. Solid backgrounds create an undefined or infinite sense of space. The exhibition will remain on view through May 23, 2010.

Jamison’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York, Washington, DC and Richmond, VA and in group shows in New York, Washington, DC and Miami, and is in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Zabludowicz Collection in London, and the Christopher Lloyd Collection in Los Angeles. Jamison received a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from James Madison University.

Reef: Rob Ley and Joshua Stein
California-based architects and designers Joshua Stein and Rob Ley shift their interests between the fields of art, architecture and design, often collaborating with specialists inside and outside those fields to investigate and explore new forms. Reef is part of their continuing investigation of how artificial life may be driven by behavior rather than intelligence. The work also explores the role emerging material technology, such as shape memory alloys, can play in the sensitive reprogramming of architectural and public space. The work will remain on view through August 2010.

Shape memory are a category of metals that change shape according to temperature and offer the possibility of efficient, fluid movement without the mechanized motion of earlier technologies. Operating at a molecular level, this motion parallels the movement of plants and lower level organisms that are considered responsive but not conscious. A field of sunflowers as they track the sun across the sky or a reef covered with sea anemones offer images of the type of responsive motion this technology affords. This unique exploration of technology shifts from the bio-mimetic to the bio-kinetic while liberating and extending architecture's capacity to produce a sense of willful intent.

Ley is the founding principal of Urbana, an architecture and design studio in Los Angeles, which engages current material and formal technologies to develop environments that respond to human inhabitation and experience. Ley teaches graduate design studios and seminars at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and holds a Master of Architecture from University of California, Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Stein heads Radical Craft, a Los Angeles based studio that investigates urban and material patterns while focusing on the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary fabrication techniques. He has taught design studios and seminars at Cornell University, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Woodbury University, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, as well as fabrication workshops in Barcelona, Istanbul, and Krefeld (D). Stein holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.