It's official. The new Art Museum of Western Virginia will open to the public Nov. 8, with a day of festivities featuring a ribbon-cutting, live music, appearances by celebrities and politicians and, of course, the $66 million museum itself.

Entrance that first day will be free. The art museum, which will be known as the Taubman Museum of Art, is considering issuing tickets for various times, however, to keep crowds flowing through smoothly. The museum also may ask the city to close some nearby streets to traffic for the day, external affairs director Kimberly Templeton said.

The building will open at noon Nov. 8 and close at midnight. Museum members (memberships cost $35 -- call Lisa Thomas at 224-1223) will get their first look two days earlier, on Nov. 6, and a gala is scheduled for Nov. 7.

The list of celebrities and dignitaries who will attend is not set. The museum has not yet announced its schedule of temporary exhibits, either, including the ones on opening day. It is trying to confirm its exhibition schedule for the first five years of operation and will announce its first-year schedule in coming months, Templeton said.

The museum also has permanent collections including folk art, Japanese prints, and American paintings by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins and others.

The modern-looking building's design is by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout.

Edible museum?

Not a fan of the new museum? Well, what if it was made of chocolate?

We can't really have a chocolate museum, of course. People would eat the walls.

But the museum will offer visitors to its gift shop the next best thing -- art museum chocolate bars. The Hershey's chocolate bar comes with a picture of the museum on the wrapper, and the slogan: "A Bold New Future for Our Region."

They will be available in the store along with other merchandise "and all sorts of fun things with the museum image on it," Templeton said of the candy bars. She said the price has not yet been set.

Civil War in 3-D

It's common knowledge that there were lots of photographs taken of the Civil War -- a boom time for the emerging new technology of picture-taking, if not for human life.

What's less well-known is that many of those photographs were taken in stereo.

Call it the video of the 19th century. Pictures taken in duplicate from slightly different angles and then viewed through a stereoscope gave an illusion of depth, and were all the rage.

At 7 p.m. Feb. 28, Bob Zeller will give a free slide show of 3-D Civil War photographs at Shaftman Performance Hall. The slide show is a joint presentation of the Roanoke City Library, the O. Winston Link Museum, the 2008 Roanoke Arts Festival and Jefferson Center.

Zeller will bring his own projector and screen. Viewers will get plastic 3-D glasses -- not the elaborate hand-held 19th century-style stereoscope. Ideally, the effect will be much the same.

Many of the images used in Ken Burns' famous Civil War documentary were created for stereoscopes, said Laura Wickstead, librarian for the Virginia Room at Roanoke's downtown library. But the three-dimensional quality was not apparent.

"They have to be seen this way," she said. "It's a rare opportunity. It should be quite remarkable."

Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography and a collector of Civil War photographs, formerly covered NASCAR for The Roanoke Times. He now lives in North Carolina.

For more information about his presentation, call Wickstead at the Virginia Room, 853-2073.

More Civil War photos

The Link Museum's exhibit of Civil War photographs from the David L. Hack Collection remains on view through March 1. 982-5465; www.linkmuseum.org.