Art in Roanoke

08/27/2026

Attending Hoot and Holler: Our Stories. Out Loud. Thursday evening? We’ll be there taking ideas for Plan 26! 

08/26/2026

That's 26 days. Every single thing we showed you this month, the murals, the parade, the endowment, the art out in the parks, started as somebody's answer on a survey in 2011.

Your turn. The survey is open through the end of August at roanokearts.org/plan.

08/25/2026

“Creating every day the place we want to be.” That’s the line Roanoke’s arts and cultural organizations chose for themselves, and it explains why this work keeps turning up where you might not look for it: in neighborhood investment, in what happens in the parks, in how the city describes its own ambitions.

There’s still time to add your piece. The survey is open through the end of August at the link in our bio.

ItsHereRoanoke

08/24/2026

The Roanoke Women's Foundation spent an evening last week on the question this whole campaign keeps circling: why fund the arts? Their Education Committee hosted the panel at Hollins University, moderated by RWF member Kianna Price Marshall.

City grants are one piece of how arts and culture get paid for here, and a room full of local funders working through the same question is another. That's the case for a cultural plan getting made by people who don't work for the city.

Plan 26 is taking ideas through the end of August at roanokearts.org/plan.

📷 Roanoke Women's Foundation

08/23/2026

Not every idea needs a line item in the millions. Artist-designed "I Voted" stickers. Painted signal boxes. Poetry stamped into new sidewalks. Small, visible, and everywhere. The kind of thing you notice on a Tuesday.

Drop your small idea in the comments and we'll log it with the rest. Yes, all of them!

🎨 The new Louisiana "I Voted" sticker designed by New Orleans artist Terrance Osborne, from the Louisiana Secretary of State

08/22/2026

That's "Dancing in the Moonlight" by Jordan Parahdise Sculpture, nine and a half feet of painted steel that stood in Elmwood Park for the 2017-18 Art in Roanoke exhibition. Parah described the work as "utilizing contrasting forms and colors constructed in a harmonious manner to create harmony out of diversity." The theme that year was City in Motion.

One of the bigger ideas on the table, submitted in 2011 and submitted several times again for Plan 26, is to make it permanent: an art park. A public space built around making things, not just looking at them. Other cities have tried it, and the results tend to become the most-photographed block in town. Should Roanoke have one? Where? The survey has room for coordinates.

📍 Making a Trader Joe's run to Charlottesville? There's Ix Art Park.

Here are a few others we 💙:

📍 The Gravely-Lester Art Garden by Piedmont Arts in Martinsville, built with an NEA Our Town grant, the same program that funded our Parks and Arts.

📍 WNC Sculpture Park in Lenoir. Twelve acres, about a hundred sculptures, free, dogs welcome, working blacksmith studio on site.

📍 The Trails at the Visit MSV in Wi******er. Ninety acres, free, three miles of paved trail, and an interactive mobile hanging inside a renovated farm silo. They call it Virginia's largest art park.

📍 The Museum Park at North Carolina Museum of Artin Raleigh is 164 acres and 4.7 miles of trail that run straight into the city's greenway system. Free, dawn to dusk, forever.

📍 Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in Wilson. Thirty kinetic sculptures welded from scrap and reflectors, spinning and clanking under floodlights until midnight.

📍 And the one a Roanoker actually named in their survey response: the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park at Newfields in Indianapolis. A hundred acres, free, dawn to dusk.

The survey is open through the end of August, link in our bio.

🗿 "Dancing in the Moonlight," Jordan Parah, painted steel, Art in Roanoke's City in Motion exhibition, 2017-18.

08/21/2026

There was a giant paper mache bee with googly eyes at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute yesterday, and yes, it was with us.

The Roanoke Cultural Endowment and the Arts Commission spent the day at the Nokie Resource Fair, and Local Colors had the table right next to ours, so the arts and culture folks ended up anchoring one corner of the room together. Look closely and you'll spot Opera Roanoke, Mill Mountain Theatre's 2026 season, Center in the Square, the O. Winston Link Museum, and Blue Ridge Literacy's citizenship classes on one table.

That corner is the 2011 plan working. When hundreds of Roanokers helped write it, a recurring theme was for arts and culture organizations to stop competing and start showing up together. Fifteen years later it looks like a few tables pushed into the same corner, everybody pointing people toward each other.

Plan 26 is taking ideas through the end of August at roanokearts.org/plan.

08/20/2026

Did you know Roanoke has a Youth Poet Laureate program (a sentence the 2011 plan helped make possible)? The people who'll live with Plan 26 longest are currently in homeroom.

Know a teenager with opinions about Roanoke? This is their invitation too. Pass it on!

Elani Spencer is Roanoke's first ever Youth Poet Laureate. Watch as...

08/19/2026

Most annual reports are a slog. Ours has giant puppets in it, plus a dragonfly the size of a car and a mouse who writes a newsletter. Worth a flip-through even if you never read this kind of thing.

Have thoughts about what should be in next year's? That's what the survey is for.

https://roanokearts.org/year/

08/18/2026

Every August, the Arts Commission goes before City Council to lay out the coming year's work plan and account for what actually got done. Yesterday was that meeting, and the link below is timestamped to our part if you want to see what a year of this work looks like from the inside.

Next August, that same report will cover the first eight months of Plan 26 in action. What ends up in it depends on what people tell us this month. The survey is open through the end of August at roanokearts.org/plan.