Community Calendar

DINOSAUR! has made their way back to CSC! Get ready to come face-to-face with jaw-dropping fossils, thrilling prehistoric discoveries, and hands-on Jurassic fun for explorers of all ages.

The ROAR of prehistoric fun is her, don’t miss it!

An unforgettable journey of enduring love and triumph over adversity, The Color Purple is a landmark musical from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker. This epic story follows Celie, a young African American woman who courageously navigates a life marked by abuse and discrimination to discover the strength to break free and find her own voice. The Grammy-winning score of jazz, gospel, ragtime and blues promises to fill your heart and awaken your soul.

Artist Talk: April 25, 2-3 pm
Workshop: April 30, 6-8 pm

Through the Ether is a group of mixed media works deeply influenced by and connected to film editing. April collects and stores unrelated images from different modalities and mediums—3D modeling, photographs, paintings, advertisements. She removes the color, texture, and context from which they originate. These elements form a visual depository or footage bin, from which she uses the montage process to construct a new landscape independent of their source. This reconstruction process resembles building a scene in a film. However, it creates an emotional landscape unto itself, devoid of the requirements of narrative and story—nullifying the necessity of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

About April Simmons: April received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in film. She worked as an experimental non-narrative filmmaker and as a film editor for both nonfiction and fiction films. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center (Views), Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago, among others. April taught film production, theory, and history at the university level for nearly two decades. She began working in digital photo collage and mixed media in 2022. Her work has been shown at The Galleries at Cabarrus Arts Council (“Liminal”) and at The Mint Museum (“Coined in the South”) in Uptown Charlotte.

The Charlotte Braille Trail Community Reveal pulls back the curtains on a paradigm-shifting outdoor experience two years in the making!Join us for this celebratory community event to learn more about the trail and Lions Services’ work to design a world where vision status is never a barrier to a life of choice, career, and connection. You’ll have a chance to explore this multisensory outdoor space, experience the everyday barriers our blind and low vision neighbors encounter, and tour the Lions Services’ facility, where we leverage custom engineered accessible technology and rely on a highly skilled, majority blind or low vision workforce to manufacture products that protect our troops.

About the Braille Trail: The Charlotte Braille Trail is not your ordinary trail. This innovative community project blends nature, art, and technology into a multisensory experience designed for everyone.

Threading through a tactile, fragrant landscape, the trail ensures blind and low-vision residents have safe, walkable access to public transit, paired with an accessible recreation and exercise space. From the musical "Bloom Circle" to interactive light and sound sculptures, the trail serves as a vibrant community hub where everyone—regardless of how well they can see—can engage their senses and connect with the heart of the city.

The Charlotte Braille Trail is an initiative of Lions Services Inc., designed to create inclusive infrastructure and open the doors to everything Charlotte has to offer for our blind and low vision neighbors.

Step back 66 million years and journey through the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs in Dinosaur Evolution—a thrilling immersive experience that brings the Cretaceous world to life. Witness feathered raptors on the hunt, armored giants defending their turf, and the mighty T. rex at the top of the food chain. But even these perfectly evolved creatures couldn’t escape Earth’s most devastating extinction event. Stunning visuals and cutting-edge science reveal how evolution shaped the dinosaurs—and how birds, their modern-day descendants, continue their legacy. It's a prehistoric adventure that will inspire the next generation of paleontologists and conservationists alike.

DINOSAUR! has made their way back to CSC! Get ready to come face-to-face with jaw-dropping fossils, thrilling prehistoric discoveries, and hands-on Jurassic fun for explorers of all ages.

The ROAR of prehistoric fun is her, don’t miss it!

An unforgettable journey of enduring love and triumph over adversity, The Color Purple is a landmark musical from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker. This epic story follows Celie, a young African American woman who courageously navigates a life marked by abuse and discrimination to discover the strength to break free and find her own voice. The Grammy-winning score of jazz, gospel, ragtime and blues promises to fill your heart and awaken your soul.

Artist Talk: April 25, 2-3 pm
Workshop: April 30, 6-8 pm

Through the Ether is a group of mixed media works deeply influenced by and connected to film editing. April collects and stores unrelated images from different modalities and mediums—3D modeling, photographs, paintings, advertisements. She removes the color, texture, and context from which they originate. These elements form a visual depository or footage bin, from which she uses the montage process to construct a new landscape independent of their source. This reconstruction process resembles building a scene in a film. However, it creates an emotional landscape unto itself, devoid of the requirements of narrative and story—nullifying the necessity of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

About April Simmons: April received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in film. She worked as an experimental non-narrative filmmaker and as a film editor for both nonfiction and fiction films. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center (Views), Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago, among others. April taught film production, theory, and history at the university level for nearly two decades. She began working in digital photo collage and mixed media in 2022. Her work has been shown at The Galleries at Cabarrus Arts Council (“Liminal”) and at The Mint Museum (“Coined in the South”) in Uptown Charlotte.

"Cold Mountain Field Notes"
Dr. Christopher Bundrick, USC Lancaster Professor of English

In August of 1997, Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" became the number one bestselling book on The New York Times fiction list—a place it occupied for many weeks. Critics raved about its evocative language, its complex take on historical context, its echoes of Homer's Odyssey, but most of all its immersive realism. Follow along as Dr. Bundrick discusses his attempt to rediscover aspects of Frazier's work, immersing himself in the story by recreating parts of the three hundred-mile walk the narrator's made from Raleigh to Cold Mountain, North Carolina.

Presented in person and virtually. To attend via Zoom, register via this link: https://bit.ly/3NvcVeO

Step back 66 million years and journey through the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs in Dinosaur Evolution—a thrilling immersive experience that brings the Cretaceous world to life. Witness feathered raptors on the hunt, armored giants defending their turf, and the mighty T. rex at the top of the food chain. But even these perfectly evolved creatures couldn’t escape Earth’s most devastating extinction event. Stunning visuals and cutting-edge science reveal how evolution shaped the dinosaurs—and how birds, their modern-day descendants, continue their legacy. It's a prehistoric adventure that will inspire the next generation of paleontologists and conservationists alike.