Fantastic Mechanics Sean Pace and Robert Sulkin

Sean Pace of Asheville, North Carolina, and Robert Sulkin of Roanoke, Virginia, are imaginative engineers in the studio. Sean Pace creates mixed-media sculptures that often have a complex network of motors and gears. With human intervention they can be set into motion and facilitate surprising activities such painting an abstract picture or shooting a rubber chicken. ...

The Virginia Dulcimer: 200 Years of Bowing, Strumming, & Picking

The dulcimer is one of the most popular symbols of mountain music. This exhibition explores the dulcimer’s long journey from northern Europe, to the mountains of Appalachia, and eventually into the hands of folk musicians across the nation. The Old World dulcimer underwent a dramatic change in Virginia. In The ...

Quilt National: The Dairy Barn Arts Center Biennial

UNShelved: Nick DeFord, Daniel Essig, Travis Head, and Robyn Raines

From all corners of the region, the artists selected for this exhibition together reveal an interest in text-based images, seeing books as art objects, and working with paper in both traditional and alternative ways. In many ways these artists are also astute collectors -of images, publications, stories, and things – which also serve to inform their work. ...

European Modern: Master Artists from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Hand-selected works from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will travel to Abingdon for this extraordinary exhibition. Visitors will have the opportunity to delight in the drawn and painterly techniques that span generations of important European artists as they journeyed away from the defined edges of Neoclassicism and toward the uninhibited marks of the Modern Era. ...

Great and Small: The Tradition of Diminutive Furniture in Our Region

The tradition of making diminutive furniture, or miniature furniture, has origins in Europe and was brought to this region through our early American ancestors. This exhibition will bring together a sampling of nineteenth-century diminutive furniture primarily from Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Commonplace furnishings such as desks, chests, pie safes, and chairs were made on occasion – ...

From These Hills: Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachian Highlands

William King Museum celebrates the diversity of artistic talent in the Southern Appalachian Highlands. From These Hills is a biennial exhibition series begun just one year after the Arts Center opened in the spring of 1992. This biennial exhibition invites artists in all stages of their careers working in Southwest Virginia, Northeast Tennessee, Western North Carolina and ...

Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find: the Comic Art Collection of Shelton Drum

Shelton Drum, owner of the Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find comic book store and founder of the renowned annual Heroes Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, brings William King Museum of Art a vast array of original comic book art from his private collection. With the help of Neil Bramlette, founder of Bristol’s Out of Step Arts Collective, ...

There/Here

This exhibition parallels two architectural research projects: Tyler King’s Richmond-based initiative, from which the exhibit takes its title, and Vivian Coletti’s extensive documentation of Washington County. There/Here began in 2011 with a grant from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts to explore the past, present, and future of forty vacant buildings in downtown ...

An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia

From 1861 through 1865 Virginia stood at the center of a military and social revolution. How we define freedom, liberty, patriotism, and nation today is directly related to the diverse experiences of the individuals who participated in the war. This exhibition encourages visitors to consider how a single event, separated from us by 150 years, so fundamentally reshaped American society that its ...