Flexible Chronological Posting for Art Gallery Upcoming, Current and Past Shows

I’m wondering if anyone has a solution for more flexible display when posts are dependent on future dates as well as current and past.

An example is an art gallery business that needs to show all of the above in a flexible manner. Specifically, I need to show a current exhibition for a set amount of time (kind of like featured or sticky), while showing future exhibits separately (plus past exhibit posts too in an archive section).

Problem is that WP defaults to showing posts in ascending or descending order based on when the posts was created which will not be the order of display. Also, I cannot set the date of posts as the date of the exhibition since WP defaults to not showing posts that are set in the future.

The result is a system that doesn’t easily support a more complex multi-date post environment. Any ideas, solutions or examples for a more flexible methods of posting dated content in past, present and future sections?
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THINGS TRIED

I’ve looked at all of event calendar plugins. Unfortunately there seem to be so many problems with all of them and it’s a round peg square hole situation. They also are set to two very limited displays: generally ugly calendar layout and plain list. I need flexible display in home and sub-page areas with large images for current exhibitions, thumbnail grids and slide show elements for teasing future shows (all of which makes posts a more flexible choice).

I also tried using More Fields to set a date field for the exhibition posts and then sort three different categories (Current, Upcoming, Archived) in their associated custom template pages based on that field. This way the actual date of the post is ignored and the custom field date is used to display content chronologically instead. It works but is complicated to implement and I have to make the client use (and display the dates as): 2011-07-18 in order for it to sort properly. Unfortunately, Americans have to double-take and think about that display since we’re used to 07/18/2011 or July 18, 2011.