Illinois Art Station

The second annual Further Jazz Festival includes an 8-piece band playing Oliver Nelson's 1961 landmark album, "Blues and the Abstract Truth," led by Oliver Nelson, Jr.

Leslie Carrara-Rudolph is best known as Sesame Street's Abby Cadabby. She takes a break from fairy training to bring comedy cabaret, puppet-making and a sock called Lolly Lardpop to Bloomington-Normal and Peoria. Carrara-Rudolph and Normal native Paul Rudolph will sit down to talk about their journeys to Sesame Street at the end of the four-day residency next month.

Peoria artist Peytin Fitzgerald's "Falling in Between" is on view at Joe McCauley Gallery at Heartland Community College. Fitzgerald is a printmaker and self-taught textile artist who learned how to sew as a grad student during COVID. The show explores what is passed down intentionally — and inevitably — through generations.

A new gallery at Illinois Art Station called #3YearsIn3Lines encourages youth to reflect on the long arc of their pandemic experiences. The community-sourced exhibition will be contributed to a COVID-19 archive at the McLean County Museum of History.

A crowd gathered in Miller Park on Saturday to celebrate a new public art piece about "Creating Safe Spaces." More than 40 youth artists worked with local arts organizations and police officers to create the colorful, large-scale painting while community building.

Youth art camps are already filling up at Illinois Art Station. As the art center rounds the bend on one full year since moving into their new home on Vernon Avenue, new leadership by a familiar face in the Twin Cities arts scene is returning the non-profit to its community roots and reigniting the Youth Mural Project for the first time since 2019.

Illinois arts organizations lost, on average, 31% of their revenue to the pandemic in 2021, according to recent data from Arts Alliance Illinois, and they are on pace to match those losses over the first six months of 2022. WGLT surveyed area arts leaders with one main question: Are the arts doing OK?

Illinois Art Station's new facility at 101 E. Vernon Ave. in Normal opens in September, with plans for a Pop Into IAS artmaking event and grand opening celebration and fundraiser.

Illinois Art Station's new facility at 101 E. Vernon Ave. in Normal opens in September, with plans for a Pop Into IAS artmaking event and grand opening celebration and fundraiser.

Illinois Art Station is on the move and making plans for an expanded future in Bloomington-Normal. Established two years ago and initially associated with…