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.
