William King Museum is the only facility of its kind serving Southwest Virginia, Northeast Tennessee, Western North Carolina and South Eastern Kentucky. Located in Abingdon, Virginia, this non-profit regional art museum and arts education center is Virginia’s only nationally accredited museum west of Roanoke. The Museum is a Partner of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is a member of , the Virginia Association of Museums.
Housed in a historic 1913 former school, the aptly named William King shares its namesake with the early philanthropist who donated the land for the first school built on this site.
The organization traces its origins to a group of civic-minded individuals who, in 1979, sought to both create a community Museum and save an abandoned building. More than a decade later, the Museum redefined its service area as regional and successfully completed three renovations that resulted in the region’s first art museum. An excellent example of both community involvement and adaptive reuse, this once vacant and deteriorating facility now features museum-standard galleries.
The Museum currently offers three galleries that each focus on a different aspect of the museums mission. The first is the Legard and United Company Gallery which focuses on rotating exhibitions of world art – past exhibitions have featured Matisse and Picasso, Egyptian antiquities, Goya and Dali, and pre-Columbian artifacts, to name only a few. The second gallery is the United Company Regional Art Gallery, which offers the best new contemporary regional artwork. The final gallery is the Price-Strongwell Gallery, which centers on decorative and folk arts based on the findings of the Cultural Heritage Project.
The Betsy K. White Cultural Heritage Project, begun in 1994, seeks to document the cultural and artistic legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee from 1780 to 1940 and to foster a full and accurate appreciation of the region’s role in American decorative and folk arts. To date, field researchers have identified more than 2,000 objects made by hand in the region, everything from pottery to furniture to textiles, from metals to toys to musical instruments, and those records are maintained at the Museum as a resource for researchers interested in the region’s material culture. Thirteen original exhibitions have now been mounted from this record, and a book is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.
An average of 9 exhibitions are mounted each year, showcasing art of the region and of the world. The Museum’s full-time curator organizes exhibitions, which change about every three months. Related programming, developed specific to each exhibition, includes artist talks, lectures and symposia, workshops, and special events like meditation. Two additional, informal galleries are also available to museum visitors, offering up t0 24 exhibits each year. These are the Student Gallery, which displays works from area schools and colleges, and the Panoramic Gallery that features self-curated shows by local artists.
An extensive arts education program serves both school and public audiences. Tour Plus, the core in-house program, provides a first museum visit for many of the region’s children, and VanGogh Outreach places arts educators directly in classrooms of 12 Southwest Virginia school districts serving approximately 3,200 children three times a year. Both programs were developed in response to the lack of arts education at the elementary level and are providing SOL-based curriculum enrichment in service to the region’s schools.
For adults, core instruction is available in a variety of media, which is augmented by special offerings, which range from oil painting to life drawing to banjo – and much in between! Educational facilities on-site include a fully equipped clay studio, black & white darkroom equipment, printmaking press and numerous multi-purpose classrooms. These facilities are also used in the Museum’s in-house school programs throughout the academic year, and in after-school or weekend offerings for youngster’s ages pre-K through 12.
The Museum also features resident artist studios, enabling visitors to both meet working artists and see art in process, as well as the Looking Glass Museum Store and outdoor sculpture garden. The Museum’s permanent collection of regional decorative and folk arts is housed at the Fields-Penn 1860 House Museum, an historic house museum owned by the Town of Abingdon.
