September 12-December 12, 2025
Opening Reception September 12, 2025, 6-8 p.m.

Curator Off Duty celebrates the diversity and creativity of the Virginia visual arts community. Beginning in 2019, all Virginia artists and creators were invited to submit up to five works of art in any medium to be exhibited in the following years. The only curatorial criterion was that the submissions had to fit within one cubic foot. Curator Off Duty allows exploring, emerging, and established artists to showcase their work in an all-embracing gallery space, resulting in an eclectic exhibition with inclusivity at its core.

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Art Makerspace and Resource Center
September 12-December 12, 2025

Open every day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Shared Studio offers space, materials, and educational resources to all creators in the communities of Southwest Virginia and beyond. Paired with the fall exhibition Curator Off Duty, Shared Studio focuses on fostering a creative environment that welcomes all forms of artistic expression.

While Shared Studio provides a variety of materials that can be borrowed and used in the space, visitors also have access to the Resource Center, where gently used art supplies and materials can be donated for other artists to take with them for their next creative endeavors.

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January 23-March 22, 2026
Opening Reception January 23, 2026, 6-8 p.m.

Thoughts and Prayers is an exhibition that explores power, control, and ideology—examined through the lens of a fictional society. Through sculpture, 2D work, and immersive vignettes, artist Jacob Smith constructs a world that mirrors and distorts the structures of Western culture, revealing the absurdities and contradictions embedded within it.

Using furniture, artifacts, dioramas, and sculptural elements, Smith’s work interrogates the forces that shape identity: gender roles, religious dogma, political propaganda, militarism, and consumerism. These pieces do not present answers but rather pose questions—forcing the viewer to navigate an unfamiliar yet eerily recognizable world.

Critiquing one’s own culture carries the inherent risk of alienating parts of the audience before the work has been fully considered. By crafting a proxy society from the ground up, Smith lays bare the myths and mechanisms of his own. The constructed objects serve as relics of a belief system both foreign and intimately familiar, inviting reflection on the systems society inherits, perpetuates, and resists.

Thoughts and Prayers is a space for speculation, satire, and critique—a place to see the world not as it is, but as it might appear from the outside looking in.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ARTIST JACOB SMITH