"Starlight" Moving On

This month will be your last chance to catch our temporary exhibit, "Starlight on the Rails," currently on loan from the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. The exhibit showcases nighttime railroad photography NOT done by O. Winston Link (though it certainly must have been inspired by his work).

This exhibit will be leaving in mid-April, to be replaced by two exhibits -- one on buses, the other on the Virginian Railway. Look for more info about those soon.

If you've been by the museum, you've probably seen a banner out front advertising the "Starlight" exhibit. If you were of an especially keen eye, you probably saw that this exhibit was supposed to have left us last year, but has been held over. However popular the exhibit has been (and people have seemed to enjoy it), we didn't keep it this long because of the mass appeal of nighttime railroad photography -- Roanoke already has a museum for that.

We kept it, to be blunt, because there were a hundred other things we had to do, and only six paid employees working in the building, two on a part-time basis. You'll probably hear some spin about how popular it is, but the reality is that when your roof comes off in a storm and your former Executive Director resigns, priorities shift dramatically, and taking pictures off a wall that HASN'T suffered water damage isn't that high on the list. Anyway, our thanks go to the Robert Mann Gallery for being so understanding. They've extended the loan of this exhibit well beyond our contract, and haven't once pushed us to get it back before we were able.

So, only about six or eight months late, "Starlight on the Rails" is leaving us to go back home to New York. Come on down and see it while it lasts. Sunday, April 8th will be the last day the Lawrence Gallery (where "Starlight" currently resides) is open before it changes over.

Come. See. Gawk.