Artist-in-residence program highlights Danville’s growing public art scene — and the city’s continuing revitalization

Paint, drawings, text and trash converge in a set of recognizable but incongruous images, organized in four frames inside Nate Hester’s studio space on Craghead Street in Danville. 

A bird and bird cage, a tic-tac-toe board, Harry Potter, Shrek’s head on Wonder Woman’s torso, Donald Duck, a discarded tie-down strap, an Oreo logo, the phrase “Bad Bad Boy.”

“I don’t expect you to necessarily get this,” Hester said. “But I do expect you to be able to look at it and have some foothold of understanding. … Even if they don’t love it, I want people to vibe with it and be able to find some connection point.”

Kids who come into the studio space during its open hours on Saturday mornings recognize the cartoon characters and pop culture references, Hester said. 

“It’s not like minimalism or conceptual art galleries, where you go in and you just can’t figure it out,” he said. “Here, there’s something recognizable. Middle America is not lost.”

Hester is Danville’s current artist-in-residence, part of a local program that was founded last year. 

An artist-in-residence is a professional artist who works for a set period of time with a host organization, usually a museum, gallery or university, to create art and engage with the public. 

Danville’s program, however, is privately run. It was established by Rick Barker, a local developer who is credited with transforming the 500 block of Craghead Street in the River District.

On this block, the studio space is open to the public on certain days so that the community can meet Hester, check out his art and learn how artists make a living.

That public engagement is the priority of Danville’s artist-in-residence program, Barker said. 

Barker created the program to ensure that art would be a piece of the city’s ongoing revitalization, alongside the efforts around economic development and workforce preparation. 

Hester’s work, which spans multiple media, has been shown in galleries across the country, and he has permanent collections at Harvard University and the New York Public Library.

“He creates master drawings, then embellishes them with paint, found objects and even gold leaf, with the occasional foreign language script to add layers of interest,” Barker said in a statement. “Then, these images from his framed works literally jump off the page to become reinvented as custom wall papers and fabrics, papier-mâché and small ceramic sculptures.”

Hester has participated in many artist residency programs, both domestically and abroad. Within the past 18 months, he has held residencies in France, Italy, Japan, New Orleans and New York.

But he was familiar with Danville: His father grew up in the city, and Hester was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and spent the summers at his grandfather’s tobacco farm in nearby Roxboro, North Carolina. 

Danville’s program and studio space measure up to his international experiences, he said. 

“The facilities here, the promotion and connection for the program, it’s comparable to any of the places that I’ve been in Paris or New York or Rome,” Hester said. “It’s really world-class.”

Starting an ‘unexpected’ program in rural Virginia

A lifelong lover of art and architecture — and the preservation of both — Barker said he always imagined public art as part of the redevelopment of the 500 block of Craghead Street. 

It couldn’t come first, though. Public art was further down on the laundry list of priorities when it came to fixing up the blighted, vacant former tobacco warehouses up and down the block. 

“My goal for the 500 block was to take a row of condemned buildings in which no one saw value and look a little harder and say, ‘Actually there is value. Let’s not dismiss this too quickly,’” Barker said. “My lofty goal at the beginning was to provide museum quality restoration to these buildings, knowing that it would be challenging financially.”

That process began 10 years ago, when Craghead Street was “a slum,” Barker said.

A native of the city, Barker is the founder and CEO of Danville-based distribution service Supply Resources, which is now headquartered on Craghead Street. He describes himself as a preservationist and said he was drawn to the historic brick buildings of Danville’s former warehouse district. 

After opening his company’s headquarters on Craghead Street, Barker eventually acquired nine other buildings on the block. Rick Barker Properties, the property management company that is headquartered in the same building as Supply Resources, was created to manage these acquisitions. 

Initially, Barker planned to buy and renovate the Craghead buildings into retail spaces and then rent them out to tenants. 

“I found out quickly that being a landlord there wouldn’t pay for these projects, because I couldn’t get tenants to come to the slum with me,” he said. “So I thought, OK, maybe one way to change this perception would be to change the visual perception.”

Barker began working with the city to make aesthetic upgrades — things like facade facelifts, improved sidewalks, storm drainage, lighting and even plants.

The effort, over many years, was largely successful, and Craghead Street is now home to apartments, restaurants, a brewery and a science center. 

Barker’s wish for public art materialized later, after much of this redevelopment was already completed. In 2023, he launched Vantage Art Flats, an art-themed set of Airbnbs in a former tobacco warehouse on Craghead Street. 

“There, instead of original art only on the inside of the building for guests to enjoy, we began to put it outside,” Barker said. 

A large, red plastic elephant stands at the entrance of Vantage, facing the street, accompanied by other plastic animal sculptures created by Italian art group Cracking Art. 

Named Eldridge, the elephant stands where the Eldridge Drug Store used to be, Barker said. 

“It’s amazing the response that that elephant draws,” he said. “In the past three years since he’s been there, I don’t think there’s been a day that someone’s not taking a photograph.”

Some people just see it as a big plastic elephant, Barker said. That’s fine with him — as long as they’re interested. 

“You don’t have to call it art, that’s not important,” he said. “What I like is the engagement.”

That engagement is also the idea behind the artist-in-residence program.

One of the Airbnb suites is reserved for the current artist and is attached to a studio space with doors that open directly onto the sidewalk of Craghead Street. 

During its first year, the program hosted three artists for eight weeks each, providing an apartment at Vantage, a studio/gallery space and a $6,000 stipend for materials. Total, the package is valued at $10,000, a cost covered entirely by Rick Barker Properties. 

Hester’s residence has been longer; he started April 1 and will continue to the end of the year, Barker said. 

“We’re so impressed with Nate and his work and his message that we wanted to support that further,” Barker said. “We wanted him to continue to do more work and to provide enough space for him to do large-scale work.”

As 2026 begins, the program will begin looking for its next artist-in-residence through an online application process. Barker said the process has drawn candidates from across the globe, working in a variety of media. 

Each of the artists-in-residence in Danville so far has worked with different media and techniques, he said. One created handmade papers, one made costumes out of recycled material and another was a mosaic tile artist. 

The program doesn’t require the artist to sell art, or to leave a piece of art behind for the property — though most of them have created artwork to add to Vantage, Barker said.

The only requirements are that the artist hold gallery hours on Saturday mornings, when the public is invited to come see the art, and to engage with the community — for example, presenting master classes for area art teachers.

“The idea is, you can engage with a professional artist about their medium. They can tell you about the art, how they make a living, how they market art,” Barker said. “The contribution we’re trying to make is putting creatives in the 500 block to be a demonstration for locals and visitors to see creative people working with their minds and hands.”

‘Elevated street art’

Hester’s eclectic, frenetic art style is a far cry from his initial work as an American landscape painter — though there are through-lines, he said. 

He started drawing at an early age, while going to work with his father, a Danville native and landscape architect.

“We would go to these sites, and he would say, ‘You can’t design for a space until you understand it,’” Hester said. “So we would sit on the curb and do watercolors of a place.”

Eventually, Hester’s art diverged from traditional landscapes, because he “got more interested in the psychology landscape of America.”

His work features recognizable American images, arranged in unexpected ways across many media. In addition to framed pieces, the Craghead Street studio has sculptures, wallpaper, furniture, crocheted items, plates and tote bags featuring Hester’s work. 

The works displayed are available for sale, although the studio space does not function as a gallery with commission, Hester said. Prices for individual pieces can be found on this website. 

According to his artist statement, Hester “channels a visual language that blends black-and-white, streetstyle, pop-punk collage and delicate, figurative rendering.”

“The result is an alternate vision of the hearth — a surreal ecosystem where everything belongs to everything.”

Hester first came to Danville to be an art professor at Averett University in 2023. He taught there for one academic year before the school downsized the program and cut his position. 

While searching for a place to live in the city, he came upon Vantage Art Flats and the artist-in-residence program. 

He was impressed and surprised, because it’s unusual for small cities — and rural places in general — to have this level of commitment to the arts, he said.

Some prestigious artist-in-residence programs are in very remote areas like Roswell, New Mexico, but most are nearer to big cities. 

There are more than 400 artist-in-residence programs in the U.S. and over 1,500 worldwide, according to Americans for the Arts, a national nonprofit for advancing the arts in the U.S.

“Everything is in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago,” Hester said. “It’s unusual for a program like this to be in rural America, in a mid-sized, Main Street, USA, town. What Rick’s done here is special.”

Hester said his style isn’t place-specific, but when he participates in artist-in-residence programs in different communities, the locales influence his work. Danville particularly resonates with him, he said.

He’s used items he’s picked up around Danville — like a tie-down strap that he found while running near the Danville Regional Airport and belts from the local Goodwill — in some of his pieces. 

“I have a sort of elegant, refined but also gritty, down-home aesthetic,” he said. “It’s great for me to be in Danville for that reason. … It has this glitz but also this grime. And my work is about that sort of high-level rendering of street art.”

Even the studio space, he said, which is in an old tobacco warehouse, now has an elegance to it, with steel doorways and large glass windows.

The space is the most impressive thing about the program, Hester said. 

“The facility is just second to none,” he said. “It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it’s afforded me the ability to build out my vision three-dimensionally. … When I was traveling internationally, I only had room to take paper and pencil and little stuff like that.”

A larger space, two doors down from the studio, holds Hester’s sculptures. He gives tours of that space upon request.

Part of the fun of the sculptures is coming up with their names, Hester said. The full set of sculptures is called “When Magic Ruled,” with individual pieces called “I shot myself with a bottle rocket last July Fourth,” and “When I finally got around to baking her cupcakes, I didn’t have enough flour.”

The public’s reception to his work has been warm and positive, Hester said, and he plans to hold public-facing events and workshops this fall and winter. 

Public art a sign that Danville is out of ‘survival mode’

Art and artwork have a part in economic growth and revitalization, said Shane Brogden with the River District Association, a nonprofit organization that works to spur redevelopment in the city.

“Art serves as a major catalyst for community revitalization,” Brodgen said in an email statement. “Creative installations and the presence of working artists are a great way to bring people downtown, where residents and visitors can witness the creativity in action.”

The RDA has recently been involved with a mural project on North Main Street and with the Vibrant Windows program, which transforms vacant River District storefronts into galleries showcasing the work of local artists. 

These projects, as well as Hester’s work, add “vibrancy and energy to our downtown core,” Brodgen said. When outside artists like Hester make Danville their home and workspace, even temporarily, they become part of the city’s transformation, he said.

Not only is it possible to include public art in Danville’s renaissance, it’s important, Barker said. It might be unexpected in such a small market, he said, but it’s a signal that the city is truly thriving. 

Barker grew up in Danville, at a time when the city was “in survival mode, doing its very best to break even.”

Now, those times are over, he said. The city’s rebirth has been characterized not only by economic growth, but also by a renewed emphasis on things like recreation and quality of life. 

Public art can be part of that, Barker said. 

“It’s a luxury to be able to think about, after we survived the highest unemployment in the United States, what do we want to do now? Who do we want to be now?” he said. 

“Our display of public art is no attempt to be sophisticated, but I hope there’s something inspiring there, to say that we can finally think about doing more and doing better.”

It can also help educate the public about how an artist makes their living. When residents and visitors come into the studio space, Hester said he often talks about how he markets his work.

He said he’d love to become an international artist based in Danville. Since moving to the area, he has “fallen in love with a hometown girl” and welcomed a daughter. 

Social media allows artists to market their art from anywhere, he said. 

“I’d like to live in an old historic house on Main Street, have a small warehouse, and sell my work in Paris and Tokyo,” Hester said. 

Right now, most of Hester’s sales are reproduced prints of his original work, which sell on Etsy and other online stores for $250 or less. Small originals sell for $400 and large originals for $4,000, he said. 

Hester’s work is also featured in galleries in New Orleans, New York, Portland and Washington, D.C. Sales at those galleries account for about $75,000 a year, he said. 

At a time when the art market is “at a 30-year low,” Hester said he’s appreciated the flexibility of Danville’s program. 

Barker said this was always the goal — to provide a stipend for artists so that they can spend their time in Danville making what they want, not necessarily what the market is demanding. 

“I’ve always been impressed with artists,” he said. “Most of what I do is commercially driven, meaning that if I spend my time working on something that doesn’t sell, I stop doing it immediately. … Artists are often so committed to what they do, that they will do it whether it sells or not. I don’t think most people have that capacity.”

He said he hopes the program is valuable for both the public and the artist. 

“If you’ve never had the experience of meeting a live artist, it could be pretty interesting,” Barker said. “It’s very grounding.”