PUBLIC PROGRAMS
AND EVENTS
Use the calendar to view upcoming as well as past events, or scroll down to see what’s coming soon!
Looking for CLASSES? Please visit our classes registration page.
UPCOMING EVENTS,
PROGRAMS, AND CLUBS
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
VMFA Faking It Lecture with Donald Schrader
VMFA Faking It Lecture with Donald Schrader
This lecture will be an introduction to the scandalous and strangely delightful subject of forgery in the visual arts. This lecture is free to attend and open to the public. Wine and refreshments will be provided. This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is supported, in part, by the Paul Mellon Endowment and the Jean Stafford Camp Memorial Fund.
DONALD SCHRADER received his PhD degree from the University of Virginia in 1993, specializing in Italian Renaissance Art. He taught Renaissance and 17th century subjects at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Mary Washington, retiring in 2017. He has lectured regularly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and in the Museum’s statewide program for many years.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Book Signing with Roger Courtenay
Book Signing with Roger Courtenay In partnership with Spelled ink Bookstore
Meet Roger Courtenay, the author of Coming in to View. This book signing is free to attend and open to the public.
Coming in to View: Explorations of Radical Shifts in Beauty Outdoors
Nature, and the world around us, is changing, evolving, rapidly, fluidly. Metamorphosing in front of our eyes with climate, political, social, economic and environmental upheaval. Our personal appreciation of landscapes encompasses all those places we may have touched, visited, or seen. Inevitably, a radical shift in our notions of beauty in the outdoors is underway across all types, from inner city to wilderness. Landscapes confront and influence our physiological, psychological, and aesthetic relationship with the natural world. We question what we see. How does the ambiguity of the present and future view relate to past appreciation? What does the future hold for our love of the outdoors? Environmental, artistic, design and planning realities are already conditioning responses across the planet’s amazing landscapes. This book’s narrative arc of 17 separate essays travels through landscapes from the National Mall in Washington DC to the remote highlands of Mongolia. Uncovering the strains and indications of change in what we now experience outdoors, anywhere, everywhere, whether familiar or unfamiliar, these essays seek to open our eyes to new prospects of landscape appreciation.
Author Bio
Roger Courtenay is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Sojourns in Quebec City, then Edmonton, Alberta, started his professional career, which led to practice in San Francisco and then Washington DC as a principal and vice president at EDAW and AECOM. His practice has focused on public works in the urban design, cultural, social, health and academic campus, and historic preservation spheres, across the USA and Canada, and on numerous USA embassies and consulates overseas. A life of international travel for business and pleasure, and long ‘addictions’ to backpacking, hiking, whitewater canoeing, riding and skiing have afforded access to a range of remote-to-urban landscapes in countries around the world - 35 at last count - and underwritten a wide appreciation and investigation of landscapes vernacular and designed. Roger’s education includes a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Arts (Sociology) from the University of Guelph, and a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,. Alongside practice, travel and writing, for the last eighteen years he has been busy at the working face of rewilding the small family farm in the rural Piedmont of Virginia.
Studio Conversations
Formed in 2020, Studio Conversations brings together local artists who share an interest in discussing their creative process and engaging critically with one another’s work. Led by a professional practicing artist and educator, the group meets monthly in a setting that encourages thoughtful conversation, careful observation, and constructive feedback. Members present artwork that is either completed or still in progress, and artists working in all media are welcome. Because discussions are grounded in the fundamentals of design and visual language, the exchange of ideas remains relevant across disciplines and levels of experience. The group was created to help artists sharpen their visual awareness, strengthen their ability to articulate ideas through the language of art, and deepen their understanding and appreciation of others' work through sustained dialogue and critique.
Preregister here or show up on the day of and pay.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
VMFA Lecture: Stories of an Abandoned Virginia with John Plashal
VMFA Lecture: Stories of an Abandoned Virginia with John Plashal
Come experience a unique photographic journey through the beautifully decaying rural places within our state with which so many Virginians have become fascinated. Local photographer and professional storyteller John Plashal has commemorated these abandoned gems by capturing their beauty and delivering them to you in a presentation full of powerful imagery and emotional stories. Experience the “unseen” side of Virginia with all of the houses, churches, schools, asylums, diners, and secret societies that have been “frozen in time” and now documented and photographed in Mr. Plashal’s coffee table book titled “A Beautifully Broken Virginia.” This talk is sure to satisfy your curiosities and captivate your imagination with exploration tips and photography advice. Appreciate them now . . . for soon they will be gone . . . but still, they stand . . . beautiful . . . but broken.
This is a free public event. Wine and refreshments will be provided. This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is supported, in part, by the Paul Mellon Endowment and the Jean Stafford Camp Memorial Fund.
Studio Conversations
Formed in 2020, Studio Conversations brings together local artists who share an interest in discussing their creative process and engaging critically with one another’s work. Led by a professional practicing artist and educator, the group meets monthly in a setting that encourages thoughtful conversation, careful observation, and constructive feedback. Members present artwork that is either completed or still in progress, and artists working in all media are welcome. Because discussions are grounded in the fundamentals of design and visual language, the exchange of ideas remains relevant across disciplines and levels of experience. The group was created to help artists sharpen their visual awareness, strengthen their ability to articulate ideas through the language of art, and deepen their understanding and appreciation of others' work through sustained dialogue and critique.
Preregister here or show up on the day of and pay.
Studio Conversations
Formed in 2020, Studio Conversations brings together local artists who share an interest in discussing their creative process and engaging critically with one another’s work. Led by a professional practicing artist and educator, the group meets monthly in a setting that encourages thoughtful conversation, careful observation, and constructive feedback. Members present artwork that is either completed or still in progress, and artists working in all media are welcome. Because discussions are grounded in the fundamentals of design and visual language, the exchange of ideas remains relevant across disciplines and levels of experience. The group was created to help artists sharpen their visual awareness, strengthen their ability to articulate ideas through the language of art, and deepen their understanding and appreciation of others' work through sustained dialogue and critique.
Preregister here or show up on the day of and pay.
VMFA Time Garden & Dances for Wormwood Lectures
This lecture presents two recent collaborative artworks operating at the intersection of dance, virtual environments, and artificial intelligence. We will watch clips of the videos and performances and work-in-progress footage, discuss the technical and creative processes behind both pieces, and analyze how they reflect our current technological culture and society. This is a free public event. Wine and refreshments will be provided. This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is supported, in part, by the Paul Mellon Endowment and the Jean Stafford Camp Memorial Fund.
Time Garden is a suite of 3D dance animations imagining a cybernetic future in which bodies, minds, and identities become fragmented across physical and digital spaces. We speculate: what myths will our new chimeric intelligences tell? What gods will they worship? What rituals of movement will they perform in a joyful or funereal act of familiarizing and refamiliarizing themselves with sensation? The presentation details the project's technical workflow: integrating movement artist Scotty Hardwig's motion capture data into the Unity game engine; mapping that movement onto avatars navigating virtual environments built from human anatomy by Zach Duer; and transmitting the avatar data to Max/MSP, where composer Charles Nichols maps it to musical parameters to manipulate a vocal score.
Dances for Wormwood situates virtuality and artificial intelligence within live dance performance. At midnight, a dancer embarks upon a summoning using his webcam and witching herbs. He brings forth Wormwood, a creature-system that grows in power and desire, offering divine answers to the human condition. The piece tests the possibilities and limits of large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI) in movement performance. In this lecture, we detail how the system generates poetic and literary interpretations of the movement it observes, functioning as a witness, collaborator, manipulator, and unstable oracle.
We’re Closed this Week
The Arts Center will be closed this coming week for our annual deep clean and for the 4th of July holiday. The team will be working on a few projects that will help keep The Arts Center going all year round!
During the week, we will not be offering studio appointments, classes, or any other clubs or programs. We will reopen to the public with our regular hours on Tuesday, July 7th at 10am.
Should you have any inquiries, please email us at info@artscenterinorange.com
Teen Art Sessions: Artivity with the Arts Center at the Main Orange County Library
Join us in a partnership with the local libraries for “Unearth the Story" Discovering Historical Perspectives and Applying Personal Reflections through Art, hosted by artist Laura Chalfant.
In celebrating "America 250" we look back at global events and how these events led to the development of our democratic society. Students will research and reflect on Natural and Historical events and express these reflections through Abstract Art.
Join the fun at the Wilderness branch library. This is a free teen event for rising 6th-12th graders. Registration required here.
Teen Art Sessions: Artivity with the Arts Center at the Gordonsville Library
Join us in a partnership with the local libraries for “Unearth the Story" Discovering Historical Perspectives and Applying Personal Reflections through Art, hosted by artist Laura Chalfant.
In celebrating "America 250" we look back at global events and how these events led to the development of our democratic society. Students will research and reflect on Natural and Historical events and express these reflections through Abstract Art.
Join the fun at the Wilderness branch library. This is a free teen event for rising 6th-12th graders. Registration required here.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Teen Art Sessions: Artivity with the Arts Center at the Wilderness Branch Library
Join us in a partnership with the local libraries for “Unearth the Story" Discovering Historical Perspectives and Applying Personal Reflections through Art, hosted by artist Laura Chalfant.
In celebrating "America 250" we look back at global events and how these events led to the development of our democratic society. Students will research and reflect on Natural and Historical events and express these reflections through Abstract Art.
Join the fun at the Wilderness branch library. This is a free teen event for rising 6th-12th graders. Registration required here.
Mentorship Award Showcase
Mentorship Award Showcase
Join Alex Caton and the recipients of the 2026 Mentorship Study Award as they play their final concert on Saturday, June 20th, at 3 PM at The Arts Center in Orange. Jake Smith, Sylvie Weidman, and Alex will take you through their 6 months of rigorous and fun study, and you will hear about all the work they accomplished, all the places they played, and the people they met sharing traditional music. There will be a program of incredible Old Time Appalachian and Irish tunes and songs, plus a few special guest musicians. There may also be some spontaneous dancing to participate in or watch- so bring your friends and families to support traditional music in our area. The event is free, but donations are much appreciated.
Juneteenth Add to this World Sidewalk Chalk Mural with OCAAHS
Juneteenth Add to this World Sidewalk Chalk Mural with OCAAHS
Join the Orange County African American Historical Society and the Arts Center in Orange as we celebrate freedom, heritage, and community at our annual Juneteenth Celebration!
Theme: Hidden Figures, Living Legacy
Showcasing Orange County African American Historical Trailblazers
Learn about the lives and legacies of:
• Gussie Taylor – Educator & Civic Leader
• Nanny Helen Burroughs – Educator & Founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls
• Dr. Isaiah Jackson – Founder of Jackson Town & Community Leader
• Dr. Henry Potter Cobbs – General Practice Physician
Special Presentation by Bruce Monroe
"Growing Up During Jim Crow and the Transition to Integration"
Enjoy an afternoon of:
Speak with Local Authors
Community Tent with Historical Displays
Ice Cup Giveaways
Street Art Project for Families (presented by The Arts Center in Orange)
Adult & Kids Games
Live Music & More
Bring your family, friends, and neighbors as we honor the rich history and enduring legacy of Orange County's African American community.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Opening Reception Grills Gallery
Art Exhibition Opening Reception: Lee Nixon
Join us for Lee Nixon’s opening reception in our new Grills gallery. There will be a dedication, and light refreshments will be provided. This is a free public event. The exhibition will be on display until August 1, 2026.
Opening Reception Morin Gallery
Art Exhibition Opening Reception: Subsoil
Join us for the opening reception of Subsoil: An Exhibition by Stephanie Germosen Salazar in our Morin gallery. Light refreshments will be provided. This is a free public event. The exhibition will be on display until August 1, 2026.
Poetry & Prose Reading
Prose and Poetry Reading in collaboration with Byrd Whistle literary magazine and Spelled Ink Book Store
Join us for an evening of poetry and prose in an intimate and welcoming setting. From heartfelt storytelling to powerful spoken word, this event celebrates the written word in all its forms. Whether you’re an avid reader, a writer, or simply curious to listen, all are welcome to experience an inspiring night of creativity, conversation, and community.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Irish Jam Session
Bring your instrument and come join us for an open Traditional Irish Music session on Saturday, May 30th, from 3-5 PM. Irish Fiddler and The Arts Center of Orange artist Alex Caton and her mentee, Sylvie, will be running the jam, and all levels are encouraged and welcome to join.
This is a free event open to the public.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Flower Flash for Historic Garden Week
The Arts Center is celebrating Historic Garden Week with a one day only pop up floral installation called a flower flash.
This is a free public outdoor installation for everyone to enjoy.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Opening Reception
Young Visions Art Show
Each month we have new exhibits! Come to our Opening Reception to see what’s new at The Arts Center.
Free and Open to the Public
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.
Orange Painting Club
The Orange Painting Club meets every Wednesday at 11am. Whether you’re a beginner or have painted for years, this art club is for anyone who wants to explore watercolor painting with other community members.
Drop in and join the club! No formal membership or registration is required.