Upcoming Exhibits

Guests view Expressions 2025 at the opening reception on May 31.
June 18, 2025 - July 25, 2025  

Expressions 2025

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, King's Grant, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

This annual open-entry exhibition presented by Lynwood Artists and Piedmont Arts features work by artists from Southern Virginia and the surrounding regions. The exhibit was judged by Gretchen Carr, gallery manager at Tamarack Marketplace in Beckley, W.Va.

Visit the museum to vote for the People's Choice Award. Winner will be announced after the close of the exhibit.


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Lil Sheeba, Bob Ray
August 9, 2025 - October 11, 2025  

What Memory Wears: Works by Barbara Hardy and Bob Ray

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

Hardy and Ray have been living and working together for more than 25 years. They are inspired by found objects, patterns and designs discovered in nature. Through their intimate, creative and artistic bond they have created a diverse body of work full of rich textures and layered patterns.

Hardy says that art has always been an important part of her life. From an early age, she drew, painted and made things. She studied art education at Appalachian State University and painting and metal at Eastern Carolina University. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across the Southeast and is part of many private collections.

Ray works in a variety of media from drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to performance works. His aesthetic borrows heavily from the Dada and Fluxus movements, with a strong combination of word, gesture and image. Since 1990 he has been active in international correspondence art activities and projects in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Japan, United States, Bolivia, Spain, Hungary, Switzerland and Latvia. He is a 2015 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Fellowship.

Admission Free

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Pregnant Pony, Grayson Highlands, Russell Hart
August 9, 2025 - October 11, 2025  

In a Different Light: Photographs by Russell Hart

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

American photographer, teacher and author Russell Hart uses his medium to explore the ways in which humans occupy and alter their environments and the landscape, but his photographs aren’t meant to be documentary or even realistic. “My work is based on observation,” Hart explains. “It doesn’t express a world view or share an intimate experience in the manner of so much contemporary art. It’s intended to show familiar things in a new way.”

In recent years, however, Hart’s work has ventured into more personal territory in the form of a project called “As I Found It: My Mother’s House,” newly released as a large-format coffee-table monograph by German art book publisher Kehrer Verlag. The project tells the story of his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s and dementia, but not with the customary images of the disease’s sufferers and their caregivers; instead, it features photographs he made as he emptied out his mother’s house of forty years when she could no longer live there.

The images in “As I Found It: My Mother’s House” include not only the home’s increasingly empty interiors but also delicate still lifes taken from the massive yet ordered, deeply idiosyncratic collection of sentimental and practical objects and materials his mother left behind. For Hart, making these photographs was a way of mitigating his grief and extracting something positive from the experience. On the one hand the book is a meditation on memory and the pathos of objects. With the context provided by its introduction, texts, and captions, however, it is also a representation of how history and identity are lost to dementia. Signed copies of the book are available in the Piedmont Arts gift shop.

Both bodies of work will be featured among the thirty-five prints of “In a Different Light, ” Hart previously exhibited his environmental photographs at Piedmont Arts in 2017, and his work has been shown at galleries and museums including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Hudson River Museum, the DeCordova Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has awarded him three traveling fellowships. He has taught photography at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently teaches in the master’s in digital photography program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Hart was for many years Executive Editor of American Photo magazine, and received the Griffin Museum’s Susan Sontag Scribe Award for best writing about photography. His writing on photographic subjects has also appeared in The New York Times, Men's Journal, and La Repubblica del Donne, among other publications. Hart grew up in Charlottesville, Va. and now lives in Lexington, Va.

Admission Free

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A woman views the exhibit Peace Post at the International Peace Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
October 25, 2025 - January 10, 2026  

Peace Post

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

"Peace Post" is a collection of 198 portraits of peace advocates by over 100 artists. The stories that permeate our newsfeed have become increasingly dark lately. Abuse, discrimination, oppression, violence and war are global problems that all countries and people face. In an effort to shine a light on some of the individuals who stand against injustice and advocate for peace, this project asked artists to create a series of digital stamps featuring portraits of these heroes, one for each sovereign nation.

"Peace Post" is a project of Selman, a tight-knit studio of creatives who are committed to creating projects that positively impact our world. Selman was founded by Martinsville, Va. native Johnny Selman and is based in Brooklyn, N.Y.  

Admission Free

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From the "Timekeeper" series, Leah Raintree
October 25, 2025 - January 10, 2026  

Legible Earth: The Fire Tapestries

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

This drawing series by Leah Raintree underscores the importance of mark making, time and process across her artistic practice. Intricate and maplike, her drawings are produced on crushed paper with charcoal from the 2015 Valley Fire in California. The char was collected from the site of her sister’s home, which was destroyed in the fire. Marks occur at the scale of the human hand, but accumulate to reference the scale of geology, creating a concentrated record of time and attention.

Raintree is based in Richmond, Va. and Brooklyn, N.Y. Her practice focuses on the human connection to earth, with an interest in how we frame and experience time, matter, scale and phenomena. Her work is rooted in an experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with materiality and place. She primarily works across drawing, ceramic, and photographic processes, often using site-specific materials to explore our interconnection with the planet. These investigations occur at the scale of the body, revealing interrelationships between human and geologic scales. Raintree’s childhood was spent on a small farm in rural Virginia and she often returns to the process of “touching earth” as the cornerstone of her practice. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.

Admission Free

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The Journey, Stephen Quiller, AWS, D.F.
January 24, 2026 - March 28, 2026  

American Watercolor Society 158th International Exhibition

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

This annual traveling exhibition by members of the American Watercolor Society includes paintings with styles ranging from hyper-realistic to abstract by artists from around the globe. More than 1,100 artists from the U.S. and 32 foreign countries submit their work to the exhibition each year and 40 pieces are chosen to be exhibited across the country. 

The American Watercolor Society was founded in 1866 and is a nonprofit membership organization devoted to the advancement of watercolor painting in the United States. Membership in the society is granted by a panel of judges and signifies an artists mastery of the medium.

Admission Free

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Sun Kissed, Gail Doyle Smith
January 24, 2026 - March 28, 2026  

Act II: Paintings by Gail Doyle Smith

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

Smith is an oil painter based in coastal North Carolina. Living on the Brunswick River has provided her with an endless source of inspiration for her paintings. Straddling the border between representational and impressionistic, her style has developed over 16 years of study and experimentation in oils. She paints what she loves and enjoys tinkering with color. 

Admission Free

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Some Semblance of Order, Betsy Hale Bannan
April 11, 2026 - May 30, 2026  

Paintings: Betsy Hale Bannan

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

Bannan’s works are based on seeing the earth from above. The experience of her first transcontinental flight was a stunning visual experience that demonstrated in a graphic way the enormity and variety of the land mass our country is situated upon. It was at that moment her painting became inexorably tied to flying. She is  fascinated by visual sensations resulting from the interplay between manmade elements and the natural land surface and how people carve out a living in the geography in which they exist. 

Bannan is a professor in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. She holds a BA in studio art from Virginia Tech and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the country.

Admission Free

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Everyone is from Somewhere, Lisa Beth Robinson
April 11, 2026 - May 30, 2026  

Accelerations: Lisa Beth Robinson

10:00AM at Piedmont Arts

Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.

Robinson’s work is propelled by the unexpected lines she sees sewing the universe together. Sometimes close, sometimes loose, there are parallels and commonalities to be found. Bringing these threaded lines to light weaves a space where viewers can see themselves as part of a larger whole. She wants viewers to see that they have meaning, connection and agency over life’s outcomes.

Robinson is a professor at the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University. She is also the proprietor of Somnambulist Tango Press where she makes artists books, broadsides, fine art, installations, curates exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited around the country is part of the collections of the New York Public Library, University of Chicago, Brown University, UC-Santa Cruz, Emory University and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Admission Free

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