Centre for the Living Arts Rolls Out Packed August-October Schedule in Downtown Mobile

The Centre for the Living Arts at 301 Conti Street in downtown Mobile announced a busy late-summer and fall calendar, with classes, workshops, artist talks and film screenings running from August through October as part of its ongoing Futures Project. The schedule makes the downtown arts center one of the busiest cultural venues on the Gulf Coast for the stretch of the year when many organizations go quiet, and it mixes free family programming, paid studio classes, visiting-artist talks and an outdoor film series into a single three-month run.

August: hands-on classes return

Pre-K and Kids Studio classes resumed the week of Aug. 7, with free sessions for children ages 3 to 5 every Wednesday from 11 a.m. to noon, tied to the center’s Futures Project exhibition. The weekday morning slot gives parents and caregivers of toddlers a free, structured art activity in the middle of the week, and tying the youngest sessions to the exhibition means the children are working with and around actual contemporary art rather than generic crafts. Older kids and adults had plenty of options too: “Caricatures in Clay” with artist April Hopkins ran Saturdays Aug. 10 through Sept. 7 ($90), a five-week stretch that lets students develop a hand-built sculptural practice week over week.

Alison Schaub taught a digital photography class around Cathedral Square on Aug. 10 ($20), taking students out of the classroom and into one of downtown Mobile’s most photographed blocks, where the cathedral itself, the surrounding historic buildings and the park’s live oaks give beginning photographers real subject matter to work with. Family printmaking workshops were set for Aug. 31 ($15), an afternoon format that puts parents and children at the same worktable. The monthly Art Lounge & Yoga night with teachers from Kula Yoga Community continued on fourth Fridays for a $3 admission plus yoga donation, the center’s standing experiment in combining a gallery setting with a movement practice, and one of the lowest-cost recurring events on any downtown calendar.

September: John Cage, sci-fi cinema and big-name talks

September opened with a free John Cage birthday party workshop led by Futures Project artist Tom Leeser of CalArts on Sept. 7, followed by a DIY Cage-quote T-shirt session that afternoon. Cage, the composer and artist whose chance-driven work reshaped American art in the 20th century, is a fitting anchor for a Futures Project that leans experimental, and a birthday-party format turns a legendary figure into a hands-on afternoon for anyone who shows up.

The CLA Art Park on lower Dauphin Street hosted an outdoor screening of the 1924 Soviet sci-fi landmark “Aelita: Queen of Mars” on Sept. 8 with a live improvised score ($5), and Leeser returned Sept. 10 with Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” ($5). The double feature pairing is a film-history deep cut: “Aelita” is one of the earliest full-length science fiction films ever made, famous for its constructivist costumes and sets, while Marker’s “La Jetée” is the 1962 short told almost entirely in still photographs that later inspired “12 Monkeys.” Presenting both with Leeser — a CalArts faculty artist whose practice bridges performance and new media — gives Mobile audiences a curated program that larger cities program only in dedicated cinema spaces.

Two free artist talks anchored the month. Urban planner and public-space artist Candy Chang, co-founder of Civic Center and Neighborland, spoke at Ben May Public Library’s Bernheim Hall on Sept. 19. Chang is best known for “Before I Die,” the participatory public project that began on an abandoned New Orleans building and was recreated by communities in thousands of places worldwide, and her work sits exactly at the intersection of public art and civic life that the Futures Project explores. New Orleans new-media pioneer Dawn DeDeaux discussed her installation “Aboard the Mothership: Postulations on Myth and Math” at the CLA Main Gallery on Sept. 26, bringing a Gulf Coast artist whose decades of work in digital and installation art have made her one of the region’s most recognized experimental figures.

The month also included an ASL-interpreted ceramics studio for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students (RSVP by Sept. 18) and a five-week acrylic painting course with Lucy Gafford starting Sept. 23. Gafford is a familiar name in Mobile’s arts scene as a working painter and muralist, and the acrylic course format gives adults a structured progression across five weekly sessions. The interpreted ceramics studio continues the center’s practice of building accessibility into the schedule itself rather than treating it as an accommodation to arrange case by case.

October: film series with the library

The Futures Project film collaboration with Ben May Public Library carried into October with free screenings of “Minority Report” (Oct. 5), the climate documentary “Chasing Ice” introduced by the Mobile Bay Sierra Club’s Carol Adams-Davis (Oct. 10), Pixar’s “WALL-E” (Oct. 12) and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” introduced by South Alabama Film Festival creative director Carson Kennedy (Oct. 19).

The October film slate is a deliberately themed lineup of films about futures — predicted, feared and imagined. “Minority Report” carries Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story of pre-crime policing, while Pixar’s “WALL-E” delivers the same questions in family form, which is why the library collaboration schedules it as the all-ages entry. “Chasing Ice,” with its record of climate photographer James Balog’s multi-year time-lapse capture of glaciers retreating, gets the introduced screening treatment from the Sierra Club’s local chapter, turning the film into a community conversation rather than a passive viewing. And Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” the granddaddy of cinematic futures, closes the series with Kennedy’s introduction supplying the film-history context that a silent-era landmark benefits from.

A tar-paper painting studio for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students closed out the accessibility programming Oct. 13, a second interpreted session in six weeks that pairs an unconventional painting surface with the center’s standing commitment to serving the Gulf Coast’s Deaf community. Art Lounge & Yoga returned Oct. 25, keeping the fourth-Friday rhythm that has made it one of the center’s most dependable recurring events.

The Futures Project and what it does for Mobile

The Futures Project, the exhibition framework that ties the quarter together, is the Centre for the Living Arts’ signature program, built around contemporary artists whose work engages what comes next — technologically, environmentally and socially. Hosting it at 301 Conti Street places the show inside the Space 301 gallery that anchors the center’s operations in the heart of downtown, steps from Dauphin Street’s entertainment district and Cathedral Square. The programming strategy visible across the August-through-October calendar is the same one arts organizations nationwide have adopted: free entry points (the Pre-K classes, the Cage birthday, the talks, the library films) drawing broad audiences in, with modestly priced workshops ($15 to $90) supporting the center and giving committed students a deeper experience.

The calendar also functions as a map of Mobile’s cultural partnerships. The Ben May Public Library collaboration runs through both months and two venues, the Mobile Bay Sierra Club supplies an introduction for the climate documentary, the South Alabama Film Festival supplies one for the silent classic, Kula Yoga Community supplies instructors for the monthly movement nights, and visiting artists from CalArts and New Orleans anchor the September talks. Each partnership extends the center’s reach into a different slice of the local audience, and each event lands in a downtown that has spent two decades building itself into the region’s walkable cultural core.

For residents, the practical takeaway is that the fall calendar offers something nearly every week from August through October at a price from free to $90: weekday mornings for preschoolers, Saturday studios for families and adults, Thursday-evening-scale talks for the intellectually curious, and outdoor and library screenings for film fans. The Centre for the Living Arts has long occupied a specific niche in Mobile’s arts landscape — contemporary, experimental and community-oriented — and this schedule is that mission laid out week by week, from a toddlers’ Wednesday morning in August to the last Art Lounge & Yoga night in late October.

The spacing of the schedule also rewards anyone who follows it month to month. The five-week classes — Hopkins’s Saturday clay caricatures through Sept. 7 and Gafford’s acrylic course starting Sept. 23 — bookend September in a way that lets a student move from sculpture to painting without overlapping commitments. The Wednesday morning Pre-K sessions continue without interruption across all three months, and the fourth-Friday yoga nights hit Aug. 22, Sept. 25 and Oct. 25, giving the calendar its recurring spine while the special events rotate around it.

The visiting-artist component deserves particular attention because of who is being brought in. Leeser’s residency through the Futures Project means Mobile audiences get repeated contact with a working CalArts faculty member across multiple events — the Cage birthday workshop, the T-shirt session, the “La Jetée” screening — rather than a single drive-by lecture. Chang and DeDeaux, meanwhile, represent two different models of public art practice: Chang’s participatory, community-sourced projects that invite entire cities to contribute, and DeDeaux’s technology-driven installations that wrestle with scale, myth and science. Putting all three in one season, free of charge, is the kind of programming that usually requires a university or a major city museum.

Why it matters downtown

The cumulative effect of a calendar like this on a downtown is easy to underestimate. Every free Wednesday morning brings parents with strollers to Conti Street; every $5 film night brings an evening crowd to lower Dauphin; every artist talk fills Bernheim Hall or the main gallery with people who then eat and drink nearby. Cultural economists call this the foot-traffic dividend of arts venues, and it is why municipal leaders consistently count a center like the CLA among downtown Mobile’s anchor institutions. The August-through-October run means that dividend is paid weekly through the whole stretch of the year when school is starting and fall events compete for attention.

The schedule also demonstrates the quiet work of making contemporary art ordinary. A toddler finger-painting under an exhibition piece, a Deaf student shaping ceramics in an interpreted studio, a family screen-printing T-shirts with quotes from an avant-garde composer — none of these requires prior knowledge or money, and together they normalize contemporary art for an entire cross-section of the city. That is the Futures Project’s deeper function, and the reason the center front-loads accessibility into every month’s lineup rather than reserving its building for ticketed shows.

Residents who want the full picture should keep the three-month arc in mind: August for classes, September for the visiting artists and the Art Park films, October for the library film series and the closing yoga night. With events ranging across mornings, afternoons and evenings, and prices from free to $90, the Centre for the Living Arts has put together the most varied fall calendar of any arts venue in the area — and done it in a way that lets nearly anyone in Mobile walk through the door at 301 Conti Street and find something made for them.