Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Steve Semken never earned a degree in writing, business, or computer design. But 30 years after the Iowa City native started Ice Cube Press, the 57-year-old is busier than ever. He loves making people’s dreams come true by publishing their books (including several from the Quad-Cities) but regrets the fact that he can only produce about a half-dozen volumes a year, and receives... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! What if you got a call one day from a stranger saying that you won half a million dollars? Not from a lottery, but in honor of your amazing career, and the money (paid out over five years) carried no strings in how it could be spent? Since 1981, 942 people (ranging in age from 18 to 82) have been named MacArthur Fellows – with so-called “genius grants” from the John... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Less than a year after launching their own musical theater company, Quad-Cities theater veterans (and best buds) Steph DeLacy and Megan Warren are flourishing, as are their students, in 3rd through 12th grades. Double Threat Studios opened their latest musical, “The Addams Family,” Friday night (Oct. 29) at Assumption High School, 1020 W. Central Park Ave., Davenport,... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Music certainly can change lives, but unfortunately it couldn’t save the life of Pierce Cordle. The intelligent, driven, happy 22-year-old guy – who played trumpet since 5th grade – was working a job he loved, in a Peoria hospital emergency room, and was planning to go to med school to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor. But seemingly out of nowhere on Dec. 8, 2016,... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Over two weeks in summer 2019, Alejandro Martinez literally had the whole world in his hands. A Mexican immigrant who made a living as a painter in his home country, he was asked by World Relief Quad Cities director Laura Fontaine to paint a world map mural on one wall of their conference area, at 1852 16th St., Moline, Martinez’s daughter Alejandra – who graduated from... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! How do you solve a problem like diversity in live theater? From Broadway to the Quad-Cities, theatrical organizations of all kinds are wrestling with this thorny issue, now more than ever. Long before the widespread racial reckoning that’s taken place nationwide in the past 17 months (post-George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter, which has only intensified),... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! I am listening to pianist Garrick Ohlsson’s magisterial, towering 2005 transversal of the immortal 24 Preludes by the iconic Romantic composer Frederic Chopin, and the masterful miniatures are unspooled with inspiring tenderness and care, thundering, breathtaking virtuosity, achingly beautiful lyricism, crystalline precision and profound emotion. It’s no wonder that Ohlsson... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Kyle Carter and Geoff Manis are two of the biggest cheerleaders for the Quad-Cities, and within two days of each other this month, they sang the praises on social media of placemaking – the long, arduous, gratifying task of creating and sustaining a unique, impressive, growing community. Carter, executive director of the Downtown Davenport Partnership, posted on Facebook... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Caval Spearman, Jr., a high school senior in Chicago, has been involved in making short films since he was 14. He even started his own media production company three years ago and a YouTube channel. So it was natural for the talented, intense teen to join his first Fresh Films experience this past summer, a free program based at Augustana College that gives high schoolers... Read More

Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! Reading the breezy, illuminating, insightful and downright fascinating new book, “There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America,” you can tell that author Amy Argetsinger gets it. The 384-page book sings – on the 100th anniversary of the beauty competition (it is NOT a pageant anymore), the former Dispatch and Rock Island Argus reporter is a devoted fan and a chronicler... Read More