I’m still in perpetual awe of the homegrown cultural triumph that is Lake City. My ardor is sufficiently substantial I’m convinced it could be the subject of a feel-good major motion picture.

Here’s my elevator pitch. A small South Carolina city is felled significantly by the downturn of the tobacco industry. A local-turned-millionaire regularly visits her hometown and aims to turn it around. The transformative power of art brings together community members of every stripe.

Such is the incredible story of the little town who could be artful. It does so literally through its ArtFields initiative, which has enlivened the city with commissioned murals and sculptures by Southern artists. And has been figuratively artful, too, in its identification of arts as the way to put Lake City on the map again — a gambit that has resulted in a noteworthy flow of national media touting it as a topnotch destination.

Started 10 years ago by philanthropist and Lake City native Darla Moore, ArtFields now boasts a year-round, on-the-ground team that has awarded more than $1 million in prize money to artists. Their works range from contemporary sculptures to vibrant murals, folding in everything from folk art to Afrofuturism.

With that in mind, I journeyed to its latest town takeover. “Southern Voices/Global Visions” is an effort created in partnership between ArtFields and South Arts, an Atlanta-based nonprofit regional arts organization aimed at elevating arts and culture throughout the region.

For the show, the organizations have curated contemporary works “challenging preconceived notions and showcasing the richness, complexity and global relevance of Southern art.” In total the works span 30,000 square feet of exhibition space over four galleries: Jones-Carter Gallery, TRAX Visual Art Center, Crossroads Gallery and The ROB.

Some are fresh from the artist’s studio, while others have been set loose in the world within the past few years. Totaling 41 works, they have been sorted into five themes, and will be on display through Dec. 3. So there is still time to hop in the car, and walk off that turkey, too.

First up is “Global Views of Home” at Jones Carter Gallery, which points to the broader global view that is the contemporary Southern experience. Get a look at the Latin influences of Miami, as captured by Anastasia Samoylova in her “FloodZone” series. Or peer through the Persian silhouettes of Tennessee-based, Iran-born artist Raheleh Filsoofi (and winner of the Gibbes Museum of Art’s 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art Award). In black-and-white videos, you’ll hear new perspectives from the subjects with the curving porthole-like shapes.

We then head to the past, as a Southerner would. At TRAX, Mythically Speaking: Southern Past” burrows deep in this layered terrain. There is Georgia artist Masud Olufani’s mixed-media “Wo-Mende” series, which graces graphite renderings of contemporary African American women of Mende roots with traditional masks worn by their female ancestors in Sierra Leone for ceremonial dance.

Charleston-based artist Colin Quashie’s arresting work, which I first saw a few years back at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, cuts a slick swath along one wall with its graphic design-minded, grayscale treatment of American icons made bracing with overlaid photography of relics from enslavement. Think Louis Armstrong’s much-touted and tooted trumpet topped off with rusted shackles in the work “Gabriel” — or in “Rose Colored,” Harriet Tubman’s famously brave face is treated with iron-forged eyewear, its lenses tinted pink for formidable optimism.

In a nod to New Orleans, Karen Ocker channels the city’s music-stomping grounds. Victorian-looking portraits of musical legends like Professor Longhair and Ellis Marsalis and other local musicians are elevated by frames fashioned from detritus like reclaimed wood, piano spindles, worn fabrics, a horseshoe.

Also at TRAX, we then grapple with the present. “Sounding Off: Southern Present” gathers artists who mine the complex dynamics of the contemporary South. I was first struck by a large-scale work by Louisiana artist Hannah Chalew, whose “Petroplexus” cast a wary eye on her state’s petrochemical industry, combining iron oak galls, ink made from shells, on paper made from sugarcane in a tangled, eerie cautionary tale.

That theme was then carried on by South Carolina artist Kirkland Smith, with two works flanking a doorway into the main exhibit space. Both were made of “post-consumer materials,” visually synthesized into tableau that shifts in your perspective, depending on your distance — or through the lens of an iPhone, as I discovered — like a plastics-based pointillism.

A billowing vibrant American flag is comprised of aluminum can and plastic bottle tops, toy airplanes and figures, claw clips. “The Crying Indian” reworks the iconic commercial of a Native American surveying a trash-heaped nation with a single trailing tear formed from just the sort of detritus that the TV spot damned.

Charleston artist Kristi Ryba displays a life-sized altar, merging her signature style in “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration” that features ornately illustrated, gilded scenes that are replications of Medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, though featuring instead contemporary political leaders, chief among them the former chief of state Donald Trump and his staff.

The journey gains further dimension at Crossroads Gallery, where “Digging Deeper Personal Identity” mines race, gender, age and ethnicity to shed light on how we see ourselves. North Carolina artist Stephen Hayes (who has been commissioned for the Anson Street African Burial Ground project outside the Charleston Gaillard Center) displays work as does Mississippi’s Ming Ying Hong.

At The ROB, “Points of Intersection” lavishes its expansive space with one after the next immersive exhibition, which fold in STEM practices (those merging science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Alba Triana’s “Microcosmos” is a vibrational sculpture installation that loops for 8 minutes and focuses on a single mechanized cymbal in constant motion, projected by a glowing amber spotlight onto a wall.

In an installation by South Carolina’s Michaela Pilar Brown, the artist suspends a branch on which hangs small white homes, with the word “Weeping” on a nearby white wall. Under it, a vintage black chair rests ominously in a sea of shattered blue glass. In “Shift,” Jamey Grimes from Alabama suspends metallic wires along a partition, inviting all to run through them as if they were a rainstorm.

Then in “Digging Deeper: Personal Identity,” the global goes deeply local, as artists mine the reserves of self-definition. South Carolina-based Peter Lenzo shapes ceramics as contemporary jug art, with the work “Gift of Dementia” topping a man’s head with a vessel, its dark glaze dripping down through its blank eyes.

A strikingly mournful work comes from Florida artist Forrest Lawson, who uses sculpture and assemblage to explore the experience of being gay. Through a quiet procession of paper wristbands encased in tombstone-like acrylic markers, he honors the 19 victims of the Pulse nightclub tragedy.

All of the above, naturally, represent just a handful of the featured artists — curated in this review to show the range of locales represented, not to mention the breadth of practices at play in the South today.

Lake City is uniquely up for the task, too, with its calibrated cluster of walkable galleries. Along the way, more art still is splashed on building walls, springing from garden patches and proudly displayed in storefronts, the result of its yearly ArtFields event.

But through Dec. 3 — and until someone makes that feelgood Carolina flick — you’ll find an expansive, immersive, fantastical foray into the South in this gift of a small, wondrously surprising Southern town.