Events Calendar

✨🎩 Calling all young magicians! 🎩✨

For the 6th year, UAB Arts in Medicine & the Department of Occupational Therapy are bringing the magic back with Every Day Magic Camp! 🎭

This FREE camp, designed for children with disabilities (ages 9-18), is led by illusionist Kevin Spencer and the Hocus Focus program. Campers will learn 2-3 magic tricks each week, building confidence, motor skills, and c#everydaymagic

🔮 Virtual Camp 1: May 26 - June 27
🔮 Virtual Camp 2: July 7 - August 1
🔮 In-Person Camp: July 11 - August 8 (at UAB)

Each camp ends with a magical performance for friends and family! ✨

📩 Spots are limited! Email artsinmedicine@uab.edu to register today!

#MagicCamp #6YearsOfMagic #InclusiveArts#UABArtsInMedicine #HocusFocus #EveryDayMagic

Come participate in a zumba class with a unique twist: zydeco music! Get your blood pumping and have a great time while you get in shape!

Instruction by Libby, every Thursday at The Magnolia Ballroom. Admission is $10.

What: Zydeco Zumba Fitness
When: Every Thursday, 5:30pm
Where: The Magnolia Ballroom
2198 Columbiana Rd Suite 100
Birmingham AL 35216

Learn more about the Birmingham Zydeco Cajun Club here: https://birminghamzydeco.com/events

U.S. Army Captain Jack Ludwig, a military doctor stationed in Oregon, begins writing to Louise Rabiner, an aspiring actress and dancer in New York City, hoping to meet her someday if the war will allow. But as the war continues, it threatens to end their relationship before it even starts. Tony Award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig (he wrote "Fox on the Fairway" which we performed a couple of years ago) tells the joyous, heartwarming story of his parents’ courtship during World War II and the results are anything but expected.

Electromagnetic Field Gothic is a conceptual typeface project by artist and designer Ryan Meyer. What started as a mark-making style that visualizes the pervasive electromagnetic field, became a system of letterforms and symbols displayed as type specimens on wall objects. The drawings are made with bleach, staples, and graphite on black paper or fabric. As the bleach oxidizes the black dyes, it creates a chemical burn aesthetic that references a symbolic “burning sensation” from EMF exposure. For several years Meyer has been building a visual vocabulary around the themes of EMFs and artificial light. He is interested in the way they are thoroughly woven into both technological progress and the degradation of human and environmental health.

Meyer was raised between the suburban Deep South and the road. He received his MFA from the University of California at Davis and has shown work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Graphic Design at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His art practice is research-based and is constructed from diverse topics and experiences. He often uses various forms of storytelling, data visualization, and graphic design to examine themes of technology, ecology, health, decay, ruderality, and the Anthropocene. Learn more about Ryan Meyer at ryanmeyerart.com or on his Instagram page @ryanmeyerart.

Electromagnetic Field Gothic is latest show in BPL’s Art for Everyone series. The exhibition is made possible by a grant awarded to the Friends Foundation of the Birmingham Public Library by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Portraits of Ghosts features new works by artist Thomas Rooney, who works in the languages of overpainting, printmaking, and painting in order to explore the many facets of the human experience. According to Rooney, Portraits of Ghosts “is an exploration of interconnectedness and interdependence. I am interested in how the majority of oneself and one’s personality, their history and the consequences of their decisions and actions, is unobservable. Representing these invisible qualities, my work is an illustration of and metaphor for people’s interior worlds and intangible past actions, history, and relationships. Being an impression of an individual’s consciousness imprinted on a time and place, the word ghost serves as a descriptor for the unseen effects we cause and connections we develop and maintain.”

Thomas Rooney was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where he currently resides. He received a BFA in printmaking from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 2023 Rooney was the recipient of the John Dillon Scholarship in Printmaking and the Virgina Rembert Liles Scholarship at UAB. Portraits of Ghosts is Rooney’s first solo show. Learn more about Thomas Rooney at tprooneyart.com and @tomporoonopolis.

Portraits of Ghosts is latest show in BPL’s Art for Everyone series. The exhibition is made possible by a grant awarded to the Friends Foundation of the Birmingham Public Library by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Calling all Swifties, DJKJ Live will be playing all the hits from Taylor Swift plus some fan favorites.

Runaway Gin: A Tribute to Phish | May 30th, 2025 | Avondale Brewing Co. | Standing General Admission | Rain or Shine | All Ages | No Chairs | No Pets | Contact Venue with ADA Inquiries

At 6'6", 360 pounds, and 15 years sober, Sam’s comedy is real, ridiculous, and unexpectedly heartfelt. He’s been featured on NPR’s Live Wire, The Bob & Tom Show, and his debut special Round Trip hit #1 on the iTunes Comedy Charts.

You’ve never seen a show quite like this—raw, honest, and absolutely hilarious.

Birmingham Opera Project (BOP) is a student-focused performance collective dedicated to making opera accessible, inclusive, and boldly rooted in the Birmingham arts scene. We create intimate, high-quality productions that pair student performers with professional musicians and creatives, providing valuable real-world experience in a collaborative and supportive environment.

Our 2025 season features a compelling double bill: Suor Angelica by Giacomo Puccini and Trouble in Tahiti by Leonard Bernstein. These performances explore themes of grief, isolation, and human connection through two strikingly different musical lenses.

At BOP, we believe that opera should reflect the voices of its time and place. We support emerging artists with paid opportunities and prioritize storytelling that is emotionally honest, theatrically engaging, and accessible to new audiences. Whether you're a lifelong opera lover or brand new to the art form, our work invites you to experience opera in a fresh, deeply personal way.

Experience the phenomenon that took the world by storm. In the beautiful mountainous kingdom of Arendelle, Princesses Anna and Elsa grow up sheltered inside their castle, isolated from the world and increasingly distant from each other. When Elsa is crowned queen, the magical powers she?s desperately tried to conceal from her sister take control, and she flees into the mountains. As a ferocious winter descends on Arendelle, Anna sets off on an epic journey to find Elsa and bring her home ? with the help of hardworking ice harvester Kristoff, his loyal reindeer Sven, and a happy-go-lucky snowman named Olaf. This powerful tale of sisterhood and true love includes all the film's beloved songs along with new music written exclusively for the stage.?

Disney's Frozen the Musical

Skyler Davis, Gerald Saranthus, & AudioPhile at The Nick May 30th

Iron City Comic Con is a two day event being held on May 31st & June 1st, 2025, in the East Halls of the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex (The BJCC) in Birmingham, Alabama. Iron City Comic Con will feature guests from movies, television, anime, animation, video games, comic books, and cosplay. Celebrity guests will attend both days (unless otherwise noted) and be available for autographs and pictures (autographs and pictures not included in entry fee). Other featured events are costume contests, Q&As with guests, fan panels, workshops, video game tournaments, tabletop game tournaments, and much more. Vendors and artists from across the country will attend and sell everything from t-shirts and comic books to swords and art. Fan groups from around the state will set up displays devoted to their favorite fandoms and franchises. Cosplayers from across the region will appear in costumes both bought and created and compete for prizes in costume contests. Come join the fun that is Comic Con!

Grab lunch, socialize and join me for the art opening of Jon Osborne on Saturday, May 3 from 11am to 3pm. Osborne is a celebrated Contemporary Artist here in the Birmingham community and abroad.
For the month of May, he’s the featured artist at Rojo (Side Room).

For the art opening event, 20% of sales will go to Intoto Creative Arts https://www.intotocreativearts.org/, a non-profit that provides opportunities for artistic expression, healing, and connection for people affected by social and economic hardships.

Brian and Alan will be doing some choice Dead, as well as some finely selected acoustic favorites from JGB, Phish, Old and In the Way, and others.... TUB LOVE!!!

Congress is moving forward with a bill that could drastically cut Medicaid and SNAP, end extra financial help for HealthCare.gov coverage, and block Alabama from receiving $619 million in federal funding to expand Medicaid coverage.
Join us for a town hall to learn what’s at stake for Alabama families, rural hospitals and grocery stores, and working people — and what you can do to take action.
We’ll break down:
What this means for the 1 in 5 Alabamians who depend on SNAP for food security, many of whom are families with children, older adults, or people with disabilities

How the proposed cuts would impact Medicaid, ALL Kids, and HealthCare.gov coverage

How this affects pregnant women, seniors, and low-income adults

Ways to get involved and raise your voice
This event is free and open to the public. Whether you're enrolled in Medicaid or SNAP, use HealthCare.gov, or care about access to health care and food security in Alabama, your voice matters.

Location: East Lake United Methodist Church
7753 1st Ave. South
Birmingham, AL 35206

Join Create Birmingham at Amari Curb Market for the fifth workshop in The Jefferson County Memorial Quilt Project! Create Birmingham, in partnership with the Jefferson County Memorial Project, Bib & Tucker Sew-Op, The Black Cherry Tree Project, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, invites you to take part in this powerful community initiative.

The Workshops

Aiming to foster productive dialogue around race, justice, and community unity, this project will host six free, public sewing workshops in communities across Jefferson County, during which participants will create individual squares of what will become the Jefferson County Memorial Quilt. Participants will be provided with sewing kits and instruction from Bib & Tucker Sew-Op, while educational programming surrounding the nature and importance of this history and the project will be led by The Black Cherry Tree Project during a portion of each workshop. Each individual square as well as educational programming for the workshops will be designed using research provided by the Jefferson County Memorial Project from their Victim Archives. In addition to developing educational material, JCMP will produce a visual manual for participants that will include partner information, quilting instructions, historical references, and drop-off locations for finished squares.

What to Expect

Each sewing workshop is two hours long, and participants should prepare to stay the entire time. The sessions will be facilitated collaboratively by Jefferson County Memorial Project, The Black Cherry Tree Project, and Bib & Tucker Sew-Op. At the beginning of each workshop, participants will receive a brief introduction to the project and an overview of the history and ramifications of lynching in Jefferson County by JCMP and TBCTP. Following the introduction, participants will sew their quilt blocks, which will be led by Bib & Tucker Sew-Op. Sewists will have the option to stitch a stenciled block or to create their own design using scrap fabric, embroidery floss. fabric markers, and sewing notions. All materials will be provided, but participants are welcome to bring their own. At the end of each workshop, participants can turn in their completed block, or take it home to finish.

Happy Hour Happening is part one of our Spectra Choreographer's Series : Sloss Furnace. You will experience multiple works in progress from our competing choreographers that are followed by a guided feedback session where you will get to share what you saw, and get to hear more about what the pieces are about. Each choreographer will come with one or two questions to ask the audience where you will get to provide valuable feedback. At the end of the show you get to cast your vote for your favorite creation. The top four choreographers will win the chance to expand their work and have it performed at Sloss Historic Landmark on September 13, 2025. This final show you'll be able to see how your feedback enhanced the choreography! How cool is that?!

Experience the phenomenon that took the world by storm. In the beautiful mountainous kingdom of Arendelle, Princesses Anna and Elsa grow up sheltered inside their castle, isolated from the world and increasingly distant from each other. When Elsa is crowned queen, the magical powers she?s desperately tried to conceal from her sister take control, and she flees into the mountains. As a ferocious winter descends on Arendelle, Anna sets off on an epic journey to find Elsa and bring her home ? with the help of hardworking ice harvester Kristoff, his loyal reindeer Sven, and a happy-go-lucky snowman named Olaf. This powerful tale of sisterhood and true love includes all the film's beloved songs along with new music written exclusively for the stage.?

Orion Sun is in love with the process. “I feel like my most shallow and my deepest self when I’m in the recording process, because I’m digging deep but to everyone in my life, that’s all I can talk about,” she laughs.” And so after two years in creation mode, it’s no surprise that she’s still coming to terms with what life looks like outside of the studio. “Not being there feels weird, I feel weird! But I went to a flea
market today for the first time,” she says proudly.

The child of two artists, raised in South Jersey, now based in Los Angeles, Orion has cultivated a huge cult following with her singular lane of intoxicatingly intimate alt R&B and warmly analogue aesthetics. Featured on the opener of Fred Again’s latest album USB, having supported Daniel Caesar on his 2023 tour, been sampled by Bryson Tiller and amassing almost 5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, all as an independent artist, the 28-year-old is primed and giddy to release her self-titled album Orion. The name alone signifies the gradual build up to this moment, she explains. “[Orion] is a hunter and that mentality, you know, you need patience when you’re out there. You could be there for days. Waiting for that perfect sound, that perfect feeling.”

Following three critically acclaimed projects of her own in A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams (2017), Hold Space For Me (2020) and Getaway (2022), though Orion is not her debut, in many ways it feels like it. Sparked by a big, deep heartbreak (unlike the times she thought she was heartbroken before), Orion embarks on a journey of self-discovery, grief and growth. “It [was] time to get to know me again as an adult,” she says. And the result is a meditation on love in all of its raw, tangled beauty and ugliness too. “I just wanted to be as bare bones emotionally as I possibly could
because I was curious about what was on the other side of that.” Citing the poem at the end of first single ‘Already Gone’ as a soul-baring moment she had to stand “ten toes down” on, even when it felt revealing. On the track, she laments ‘all my scars bleed, I feel weak and ugly.’ “I don’t feel that way now but the beautiful part of all this is that it’s all fleeting, even the good stuff. It’s kind of magic when you are able to push past those emotions and capture them because I listen back now and I’m like
‘we made it!’”

Upcoming single ‘Sweet’ sits at the opposite end of that spectrum, relishing in the addictive
saccharine highs and crashes of living in delusion, with symptoms akin to a sugary binge. Self-produced front-to-back, it’s hypnotic and oozing - heady with the haze of ‘what if’s. “It follows Mary Jane on the record, and I wanted to put those two back to back because it's the part of the album where I'm just falling into my vices,” she unpacks. “Imagining a world where you weren’t difficult, I wasn’t difficult, if it actually went well. Equating that mindless delusional vibe to overdosing on all the sweets, mukbang style.” ‘Take My Eyes’ is a mournful yet hopeful respite, stripped back to just pure vocals and patient chords before strings eventually soar. “I thought it was really important to have a moment of stillness sonically on the record because that was the only thing that really saved me in terms of, not only moving on but being open to love again in all of the ways,” Orion says. The ask on this one is simple, to show her what you see through your eyes one last time. To be grateful for
the smallest moments with someone, like birdwatching or a passing breeze or gazing at the stars, that we only view from the past.

Nature is a significant thread through the project, tying in everything from Orion’s own name to image-making lyrics about the moon and sun, flowers, astronomy, landscapes and the wildlife within them. Orion admits to a work-in-progress theory that the Earth is the Garden of Eden and technology is the barrier that keeps us from fully accessing it mentally,“to the point where it’s ‘shocking’ that going for a walk is grounding,” she laughs. “I gravitate towards reminding myself and my family and friends that it starts here, it starts outside.” On the album artwork, painted by New Zealand artist Malene Reynolds Laugesen, that same belief is present: in the moon reflected in the water, the Orion constellation, the forest of hair and the booming metropolis that makes up her mind. Like nature, it’s a piece that’s equal parts majestic and grounding, gentle and powerful.

Other highlights on the project include single ‘These Days’, summarised by Orion as a ‘Stella Got Her Groove Back’ moment with inflections of vulnerability. Sonically it flows seamlessly between vignettes, the production balmy and sprawling. Her signature vocals both soothe and ache and her lyrics poetically grasp at dreamlike scenes. ‘Gannie’ is a song dedicated to her grandmother: “giving thanks and reverence to the ones before you and your family, that feels like the sun to me,” she says. It’s a reference to one of the inspirations behind her name, Nicolas Poussin’s painting ‘Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun’ in which the blind giant is on a journey to seek out the one thing that can restore his vision, the sun. “This has been a journey,” she admits. “In order to see the light and be the light, you have to sit in the darkness for longer than might be comfortable for you. You gain a lot of insight. So I kind of took that vibe and put it sonically in the album too.” The tracklist flows from a dark, brooding place and ends with a lightness on what she describes as “the brightest song.” Her
barometer for when a track or project feels done is when that catharsis is complete follows that same rhythm: “when it just heals something in me and I’m able to not think about anything and I can just feel.” The idea that it might do the same and provide that comfort for someone else is all she could ask for.

At its core, Orion is a heart split open, examined and mended; moulded into something new. And as it washes over you, there’s a sense that it’s not only fuelled by but infused with love in all its forms - for self, for others, for the world around us - crafted by an artist who has met and knows herself on a deeper level than we’ve seen yet. “Personally, I [still] think love is the best thing that I have done in my life,” Orion beams. “It’s one of those things that I’m never tired of exploring. It seems endless in terms of things that I learn, how they can be applied. Even outside of romantic love... I get close to some
answer to some question that I don’t even know yet, every time I release art about love, talk about love or share and show love.”

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I Feel Different Every Day, the sophomore EP from Fayetteville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter chlothegod, is a document of a woman in her 20s, understanding who she is and who she has yet to become. She was able to explore her rage, her messiness, and her exhaustion to new degrees, and the songs on the EP are startling and affecting in their candor, self-awareness, and in the effort chlo puts into uncovering and examining her own flaws. “While working on the new project, I was able to experiment with my own voice, along with the words I said — the things that I meant when I said them. Even just the literal volume in which I sing on my new project feels symbolic to me.” That newfound emotional safety, paired with the validation of seeing her introspective songs resonate while performing on two North America tours in support of her debut, Nearly Straight, enabled a sense of artistic freedom while she worked on her latest EP. “I’ve finally allowed myself to revisit things that happened earlier in my life and let them out for the first time.”

As much as self-reflection can be painful, it’s also freeing, and I Feel Different Every Day takes the work of self-improvement seriously while still maintaining an ability to laugh along the way, with a winking sense of humor across project singles like “Why Would I” and “Digging Around,” and a nod, ultimately to the community that she’s found and which has supported her and allowed her the confidence to share this personal exploration. “My community helps me manage my expectations of handling my mental health and forgetting the idea of ‘solving myself’,” she says. “I had to be able to rely on other people in moments where I couldn't really rely on myself. Doing so built up a sense of confidence in myself to be able to say those things out loud in public.

Experience the phenomenon that took the world by storm. In the beautiful mountainous kingdom of Arendelle, Princesses Anna and Elsa grow up sheltered inside their castle, isolated from the world and increasingly distant from each other. When Elsa is crowned queen, the magical powers she?s desperately tried to conceal from her sister take control, and she flees into the mountains. As a ferocious winter descends on Arendelle, Anna sets off on an epic journey to find Elsa and bring her home ? with the help of hardworking ice harvester Kristoff, his loyal reindeer Sven, and a happy-go-lucky snowman named Olaf. This powerful tale of sisterhood and true love includes all the film's beloved songs along with new music written exclusively for the stage.?