Sponsored by VisitMartinsville, Brightspeed, Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Lynwood Artists, and What's Your Sign.
The Foster Gallery features work by student artist Lily Ebrahimi, the winner of the Piedmont Arts Guild Special Student Award in “Expressions 2025.”
Ebrahimi is a versatile artist with a diverse background in dance and visual arts. She is a senior at Community High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and a former dancer with both the Southwest Virginia Ballet and Star City School of Dance. Her artistic training includes studies at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.
Her work has been exhibited throughout Virginia at Left of the Center, Piedmont Arts, the Pulaski Center for the Arts, the Bath County Arts Association Exhibit, and the Clifton Forge Masonic Theater. Her painting, “The Last of the Cherry Tomatoes,” won a silver medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2026.
Raised in a family of prolific artists, she has developed a keen eye for color, texture, form, and design. She is eager to build upon her existing skills and expand her knowledge, looking forward to what the future holds for her as a developing artist in the years ahead.
Admission Free
Sponsored by VisitMartinsville, Brightspeed, Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Lynwood Artists, and What's Your Sign.
"Expressions" is an open-entry exhibition presented annually by Piedmont Arts and Lynwood Artists. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, artists were asked to submit work focusing on the theme “America 250.”
The exhibition offers an innovative and meaningful artistic experience for both artists and the community by transforming the milestone of America’s 250th anniversary into a platform for contemporary creative expression. The exhibition invites artists to explore the concept of revolution in both historical and modern contexts, encouraging new interpretations of freedom, identity, progress, and the evolving American experience.
Guests will encounter a wide range of perspectives and artistic voices, revealing how revolutionary ideals continue to inspire creativity and conversation today. By bringing people together through art, the exhibition underscores the ongoing revolution of thought that defines the American spirit.
Admission Free
Sponsored by Lucy Coleman, Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Lynwood Artists, and What's Your Sign.
Twelve artists explore collage and assemblage as a coping mechanism, a siren call, or a cautionary warning about collective concerns that impact our culture. Whimsical to macabre, refined to raw, poetic to strident, these intimate works pack a hefty punch that belies their small scale.
Assembled from discarded but highly curated materials, each artist presents a unique collection of works that speak to the challenges posed by unprecedented times. The collections focus on environmental, emotional, and societal stressors, addressing climate change, COVID-19, grief, identity, and politics.
The exhibit includes work by Judy Bowman, Elaine Crivelli, Len Davis, Kristy Deetz, Virginia Derryberry, Reni Gower, Craig Hill, Errin Ironside, Sue Johnson, Axelle Kieffer, Edwin Shelton, and Michele Stutts.
This exhibit was organized by Wylie Contemporary, Inc., and curated by Reni Gower.
Admission Free
Sponsored by Lucy Coleman, Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Lynwood Artists, and What's Your Sign.
Chris Gregson is an abstract painter who intuitively completes each work, painting without a map and guided by sensation. His imagery is born in this uncharted space, where perception and reflection drift. While journeying down these paths, he makes work that is indebted to its location: a familiar studio in Virginia, a garden-facing studio in Paris, and a small apartment in Brooklyn. Nature is another constant influence, one he describes as "my first and last companion."
To create each painting, he employs layers of marks-influenced by the elegant cursive letters featured on Parisian shop signs-and gestures that build to form aesthetic fields of color. He writes: "In these gestures, I found freedom from the strict geometries that once held my hand, stepping instead into a process of gestural movement from which the images emerge."
The title, which translates to "A New Order of the Ages," pays homage to his high school Latin studies and is a reference to our current moment and the influences in his latest work, namely the "blood red, sky blue, rapeseed fields of spring, the rainbow carnival of clown parades, and the silencing of prairie breezes."
Gregson studied at the former New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design. He began exhibiting his abstract paintings in the 1990s. His art can be found in private, corporate, and public collections, including Markel Corporation and the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. Since 2022, he has made work about his life in Paris, made possible by residencies at the Cite Internationale des Art that year and in 2023 and 2025. He is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Admission Free
The Lynwood Artists Gallery features work by Virginia Foothills Quilters Guild. This biennial group exhibition includes everything from wearables to wall hangings to good, old-fashioned bed coverings. This year's exhibit is themed "Happy 250th Birthday, America."
The Lynwood Artists Gallery is curated by Lynwood Artists, an organization for practicing artists in the Martinsville-Henry County area. Its members share a desire to stimulate understanding and enjoyment of fine art and the artistic process, while providing area artists with opportunities to exhibit and further develop their talents.
Admission Free
“The Art of the Quilt” is a vibrant celebration of contemporary fiber art. The exhibition brings together more than 80 quilted works created by artists from across the southeastern United States, showcasing the remarkable diversity of artistic voices and quilting traditions in the region.
Inspired by the theme “Journey,” artists used a wide range of techniques, styles, and personal narratives to reflect on the many journeys that have shaped their lives, whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or creative.
The exhibit features traditional bed quilts, art quilts, wearable textiles, and innovative mixed-media pieces. Each work demonstrates how quilting has evolved into a sophisticated art form, using color, texture, pattern, and stitching to tell compelling stories and express individual perspectives.
This biennial exhibition is curated by master quilter Linda M. Fiedler and Betty Blessin.
Celebrate groundbreaking, internationally renowned photographer and painter Willie Anne Wright, whose remarkable career spans more than six decades. Presenting 63 photographs and nine paintings by the Richmond, Virginia, native, this is the first major exhibition to explore the trajectory of her impressive 60-year career.
From playful and irreverent scenes of everyday life to ethereal evocations of the past, Wright's experimental paintings and photographs examine pop culture, feminine identity, the pull of history, and the shifting cultural landscape of the South.
With a focus on photography’s role in shaping collective understandings of history, place, and gender, the exhibition draws from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' recent acquisition of Wright’s work, including more than 230 photographs and 10 paintings, as well as a comprehensive artist archive.
This exhibit was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center.
Admission Free
Aggie Zed explores imagination and the human experience through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Her sculptures range from copper-wire and ceramic horses and intimately scaled human-animal hybrids to mixed-media constructions she calls “scrap floats,” conceived as entries in a speculative parade of the future. Her drawings and paintings reflect a lifelong interest in the beauty and strangeness of dreams set against the complexity and quiet oddities of the human condition.
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, she grew up in a large family on Sullivan's Island, riding ponies and donkeys on the beach. As a child, she watched her father repair television sets and played for hours with cheap plastic horses and cowboys that had no moving parts. She holds a fine arts degree from The University of South Carolina. After college, she lived in Richmond, Virginia, and supported herself painting by designing and building ceramic chess sets. She lives with her husband in Gordonsville, Virginia, where she keeps animals, including chickens that defy anthropomorphism.
Admission Free
With a passion for turning junk into joy, Tex S. Crawford's curious and creative spirit has led him to transform repurposed materials into works of art for over two decades. His cut tin creations vibrate with bright colors, often detailed with dizzying petroglyph-like illustrations. While his preferred medium is reclaimed roofing tin, he also creates paintings and sculptural assemblages constructed from found objects. His vibrant and fantastical world is one in which wildlife, dinosaurs, flying saucers, and creatures of the imagination coexist.
Admission Free
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