September 12-December 12, 2025
Opening Reception September 12, 2025, 6-8pm

Curator Off Duty is open to any and all artists living in Virginia. This exhibition invites artists of all ages, skill levels, and backgrounds to submit a work of art to be shown at Olin Hall Galleries. The only curatorial criteria is that each submission must fit within one cubic foot. Curator Off Duty aims to unite the Virginia visual arts community through diversity and inclusion.

SUBMISSIONS OPEN UNTIL AUGUST 21, 2025

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

Shared Studio offers space, materials, and educational resources to all artists and creators in the communities of Southwest Virginia and beyond. Paired with the fall exhibition Curator Off Duty (C.O.D.), Shared Studio allows visitors to explore different artistic mediums and techniques and they will have the opportunity to create a work of art that can be submitted and added to the exhibition. While Shared Studio will provide a variety of materials that can be borrowed and used in the space, visitors will also have access to the Resource Center where they can trade their gently-used art supplies for materials they can take with them for their next creative endeavor.

Shared Studio focuses on fostering an inclusive and creative environment for artists and creators of all ages, skill levels, and backgrounds who are interested in learning new techniques, working on existing projects, or meeting other artists in the community.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SHARED STUDIO

January 23-March 22, 2026
Opening Reception January 23, 2026, 6-8pm

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