Joseph Holston's cubist abstractionist style has evolved over a fine arts career spanning over thirty-five years. A critically acclaimed artist, he has exhibited at the Washington County Museum of Fine Art in Hagerstown, Maryland; the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum, Washington, D. C.; the Fort Worth Museum of Fine Art, Texas; the Afro-American Museum, Philadelphia; the Arts Program Gallery at the University of Maryland University College; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; North Carolina A & T State University; Delaware State University; the APEX Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida; and the DuSable Museum, Chicago.

He has also exhibited and been a guest lecturer at DePauw University, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the University of Dar es Salaam, Howard University, Delaware State University, Bowling Green State University, Villa Julie College, and the Visual Arts Center of N. W. Florida. He has also been artist in residence at North Carolina A & T State University, and at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His work has been commissioned by North Carolina A & T State University, the AFL-CIO, the Miller Brewing Company, the National Urban Coalition, the National Medical Association, Gallo Winery, and the Washington Urban League.

Works by Joseph Holston are included in numerous museum, institution and private collections. Among these are the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Washington County Museum of Fine Art; Butler Institute of American Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design; the Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, Maryland; the King-Tisdell Cottage Museum, Savannah, Georgia; the Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas; DePauw University, Howard University, the University of Maryland University College, the University of Vermont, the AFL-CIO, Washington, D. C.; the Hubert H. Humphrey Collection, the Evans-Tibbs Collection, the Donald Byrd Collection, the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, the David and Thelma Driskell Collection, and New York City’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture