From the waves to the redwoods, it's all happening here.

Monday, September 28th, The Spoken Experience meets at a new time: 1 p.m. This community of readers gathers on the fourth Monday in the Capitola library to read a featured poet’s work. For September, the focus will be on the poems of the incomparable Sharon Olds. Local poets Paola Bruni, Elaine Fletcher Chapman, and Jessica Cohn facilitate the conversation, and you'll enjoy the company of the nicest bunch of people you could meet on any Monday. Join us!

FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes New York Times bestselling author Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn't Dead) for a reading and signing of The Nudge, a new horror novell...

Join Nurture Santa Cruz & Points for Wellness for an evening of supportive conversations about endometriosis and the challenges of it.

We will be hosting the Open Studios Preview Exhibition, showcasing the work of all the 330+ Santa Cruz County Open Studios Artists who are participating in the program

FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Miriam Pawel for a reading and signing of her new book California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the Universi...

We will be hosting the Open Studios Preview Exhibition, showcasing the work of all the 330+ Santa Cruz County Open Studios Artists who are participating in the program

To mark the opening of Carlos Motta: When Time Stands Still, a poetic and aesthetically rich exploration of the historical and aesthetic manifestations of difference and marginalization that inform current anti-immigration politics and climate injustices, we invite you to a seated performance from 5-6 pm by internationally renowned vocal artist and composer Samita Sinha. For the performance, an embodied response to Motta’s evocative artworks, Sinha will draw in her Indian vocal training to create a multivalent and experiential language of vibration, offering a challenge, both beautiful and expansive, to the perceptual frameworks that normalize oppression. Following the performance, from 6-8 pm, will be a celebration for the opening of Victor ‘Marka27’ Quiñonez: Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There), a multimedia exhibition with paintings, sculpture, and installation exploring issues of migration and belonging— and which gained national attention after it was abruptly censored by the University of North Texas. These opening events are free and open to the public. Samita Sinha‘s performances and compositions have been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Western Front, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust and others. She has received awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, National Performance Network, and New York State Council on the Arts.

Join us Friday, October 2, from 5:00–8:00 pm for the opening party of “Far Out,” Santa Cruz Art League’s Open Studios Satellite Preview Exhibit! Celebrate the artists participating in the 41st annual Open Studios Art Tour and get an early look at work from the North Coast and Santa Cruz Mountains before those “Far Out” studio doors open on October 10. Browse original artwork, meet fellow art lovers, and discover artists and studios to visit during the countywide tour. All work is for sale, and everyone is welcome. Free admission. Exhibit On View: Friday, October 2 at 5pm - Sunday, October 18 at 5pm First Friday Opening Reception: Friday October 2, 5 - 8pm

Join us for a community event honoring Domestic Violence Awareness Month through socializing, creative projects, and our art exhibition!

Join us Friday October 2, 5-6 pm, for a performance by internationally renowned vocal artist and composer Samita Sinha followed by an opening celebration from 6-8 pm of our fall exhibitions: Carlos Motta: When Time Stands Still and Victor ‘Marka27’ Quiñonez: Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There), with the artists in attendance. 5-6pm Performance Samita Sinha will draw on her Indian vocal training to respond to new and recent artworks by Colombian-born artist Carlos Motta on view in When Time Stands Still, including a video in which the vocalist is featured. This and other works, including sculpture, installation, and endurance-based performance video, poetically—and powerfully— manifest the historical and aesthetic productions of difference and marginalization that inform current anti-immigration politics and climate injustices. Performing within the exhibition, Sinha will offer an embodied response through the multivalent and experiential language of vibration. 6-8pm Celebration Following the performance will be a celebration for the opening of Victor ‘Marka27’ Quiñonez: Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There), a multimedia exhibition with paintings, sculpture, and installation exploring issues of migration and belonging— and which gained national attention after it was abruptly censored by the University of North Texas. These opening events are free and open to the public. Samita Sinha‘s performances and compositions have been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Western Front, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust and others. She has received awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, National Performance Network, and New York State Council on the Arts. Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice documents the social condit

Santa Cruz First Friday at Gallery 125 at The Tannery from 5pm to 7pm. Paintings, prints, sculpture, pastels, cards, at all sizes, styles, and price ranges. Come see us!

The Resource Center for Nonviolence is honored to host four artists for this year’s Arts Council Santa Cruz County Open Studio Art Tour. We hope you can join us for this special First Friday event to preview artwork by Lilie Pham, Isabelle Quinn-Rodriguez (isabellaqrodriguez.com), Arthur Waidhofer (arthurjw.com/art), and Karina North (karinakarinacabo.wixsite.com/northcanvas-gallery). Light refreshments will be served. Doors open at 5:30 PM.

Join Thrill the World Santa Cruz for free community dance classes and spooky Halloween performances! Learn Michael Jackson’s iconic “Thriller” choreography—no dance experience required—and join us for the official worldwide Thrill the World dance on October 24 at 3 PM in Downtown Santa Cruz.

We will be hosting the Open Studios Preview Exhibition, showcasing the work of all the 330+ Santa Cruz County Open Studios Artists who are participating in the program

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons. ABOUT THE ARTIST: Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is a renowned visual artist working at the intersections of contemporary art, graffiti, vinyl toys, fashion and design, and art activism.

Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still features new and recent installations, videos, and sculptures highlighting the artist’s preoccupation with the historical and aesthetic productions of difference and marginalization that shape the present. The selection of artworks in the exhibition explore the unsettling experience of living in a time that seems violently stuck on repeat. Archetypal figures from art history (a fool, a siren, a witness, a victim) reappear in the current moment as containers of time, bringing the past of imperialism, colonization, and displacement into a present marked by the rise of anti-immigration politics, climate injustice, and other forms of disposability. Some works challenge this violent repetition of time. The clock moves, if gruelingly, in an endurance-based video performance, No One, 2025. For forty-six minutes, the artist undertakes to keep his eyes open, witnessing, withstanding, confronting, and resisting the bombardment of images, both historical and otherwise, that normalize harm. In another video work, Gravity, 2024, performers enact rescue carries, supporting each other until they can’t bear the weight. Together, the artworks act as a proposal about how to rethink time—how to slow time—with a poetic and aesthetic cadence that might counter the numbing reverberations of living in the present. When Time Stands Still is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to create a future free of prisons. About the Artist Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic communities, challenging normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work has been the focus of several survey exhibitions.

Local author Kimberly Gomes will share her new book, A Road of Her Own. In this work of Autofiction, meet Mira. She writes about the dead. Now she’s ready to finally live. At twenty-nine, Mira is stuck writing obituaries, caring for a once-wild, now-blind mother, and living in a fish-scented apartment that smells like failure—until a last chance artist fellowship offers a shot at something more. With a camera in her hand and nothing left to lose, she hits the road alone, crossing America’s national parks, skydiving, unraveling, and meeting women who remind her what it means to want, to risk, and to live. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. Light refreshments will be served. Registration is recommended, and walk-ins are welcome. Register at https://santacruzpl.libnet.info/event/16461290. KIMBERLY GOMES is a writer, songslinger, and creativity coach. She’s the author of the poetry collection Love Notes to the Body (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Her debut novel, A Road of Her Own, was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Black Lawrence Press Prose Book Award. Her work has been named a top personal essay of 2021 by Entropy Magazine, and has been featured in The San Francisco Chronicle and Sunset Magazine. When she’s not creating, you can find Kimberly hiking mountains, plotting her next passport stamp, and swing dancing with people she loves. ___ The views and opinions expressed by presenters in Santa Cruz Public Libraries programs are their own and do not constitute an endorsement by Santa Cruz Public Libraries or its member jurisdictions. Los puntos de vista y opiniones expresadas por los presentadores de programas en las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz son propias y no constituyen en un respaldo o reflejo de la postura de las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz ni de sus jurisdicciones miembro.

Come celebrate the launch of REFUGE: Voices of Courage & Resilience for Our Fractured World at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz. This anthology brings together more than 100 writers and artists responding to the emotional, political, and spiritual challenges of our time—including 22 writer and artists from Santa Cruz County. We’ll spend the afternoon bringing the pages of REFUGE to life, sharing a selection of writing and art that reflects the heart and breadth of the collection. REFUGE combines essays, poetry, photography, painting, drawing, fiber art, sculpture, and other visual work. Its contributors explore grief and uncertainty, resistance and creativity, beauty and wonder, and the ways people continue to find meaning and hope in these difficult times.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons. ABOUT THE ARTIST: Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is a renowned visual artist working at the intersections of contemporary art, graffiti, vinyl toys, fashion and design, and art activism.

Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still features new and recent installations, videos, and sculptures highlighting the artist’s preoccupation with the historical and aesthetic productions of difference and marginalization that shape the present. The selection of artworks in the exhibition explore the unsettling experience of living in a time that seems violently stuck on repeat. Archetypal figures from art history (a fool, a siren, a witness, a victim) reappear in the current moment as containers of time, bringing the past of imperialism, colonization, and displacement into a present marked by the rise of anti-immigration politics, climate injustice, and other forms of disposability. Some works challenge this violent repetition of time. The clock moves, if gruelingly, in an endurance-based video performance, No One, 2025. For forty-six minutes, the artist undertakes to keep his eyes open, witnessing, withstanding, confronting, and resisting the bombardment of images, both historical and otherwise, that normalize harm. In another video work, Gravity, 2024, performers enact rescue carries, supporting each other until they can’t bear the weight. Together, the artworks act as a proposal about how to rethink time—how to slow time—with a poetic and aesthetic cadence that might counter the numbing reverberations of living in the present. When Time Stands Still is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to create a future free of prisons. About the Artist Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic communities, challenging normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work has been the focus of several survey exhibitions.

Salsa By The Sea is a free, weekly outdoor salsa dancing event held near the wharf on Beach Street, at the Ideal Bar patio. The event runs all year long (except when it rains). Some weekends are Bachata by the Sea, with more bachata music played than salsa.

The Travelling Book Club welcomes local author Nina Simon to discuss her newest book, My Sister is Going to Kill Me. Join us for a fun afternoon with local author Nina Simon. Copies of Nina's book will be available for purchase and signing. Light refreshments will be provided. Registration is strongly recommended. Register at https://santacruzpl.libnet.info/event/17198593. My Sister is Going to Kill Me is a fun, family-centered whodunnit about two sisters who work together to find a killer as they raft down the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Nina Simon writes crime fiction about strong women. She is the New York Times-bestselling author of Mother-Daughter Murder Night. This big-hearted whodunnit was a Reese's Book Club pick, an Anthony Award winner, and a "best of 2023" selection for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, CrimeReads, and LibraryJournal. Before turning to fiction, Nina wore many hats: NASA engineer, slam poet, game designer, museum director, and nonprofit CEO. Her work on community participation in museums, libraries, parks, and theaters has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NPR, and the TEDx stage. Nina lives off-the-grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains and enjoys weird adventures in wild places. More information can be found on her website, ninaksimon.com. The views and opinions expressed by presenters in Santa Cruz Public Libraries programs are their own and do not constitute an endorsement by Santa Cruz Public Libraries or its member jurisdictions. Los puntos de vista y opiniones expresadas por los presentadores de programas en las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz son propias y no constituyen en un respaldo o reflejo de la postura de las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz ni de sus jurisdicciones miembro.

Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still features new and recent installations, videos, and sculptures highlighting the artist’s preoccupation with the historical and aesthetic productions of difference and marginalization that shape the present. The selection of artworks in the exhibition explore the unsettling experience of living in a time that seems violently stuck on repeat. Archetypal figures from art history (a fool, a siren, a witness, a victim) reappear in the current moment as containers of time, bringing the past of imperialism, colonization, and displacement into a present marked by the rise of anti-immigration politics, climate injustice, and other forms of disposability. Some works challenge this violent repetition of time. The clock moves, if gruelingly, in an endurance-based video performance, No One, 2025. For forty-six minutes, the artist undertakes to keep his eyes open, witnessing, withstanding, confronting, and resisting the bombardment of images, both historical and otherwise, that normalize harm. In another video work, Gravity, 2024, performers enact rescue carries, supporting each other until they can’t bear the weight. Together, the artworks act as a proposal about how to rethink time—how to slow time—with a poetic and aesthetic cadence that might counter the numbing reverberations of living in the present. When Time Stands Still is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to create a future free of prisons. About the Artist Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic communities, challenging normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work has been the focus of several survey exhibitions.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither from here, nor there”), is a phrase commonly used by bilingual, bicultural communities. In the exhibition the phrase becomes a bold declaration of dual belonging against a violent notion of nationalism and identity. Through paintings, immersive installations, sculptural works, and a curated soundscape, Marka27 invites gallery goers into a vibrant, layered world where street culture meets Indigenous tradition, and personal memory collides with collective truth and activism. Curated by internationally recognized curator Kate Fowle, this exhibition is organized in partnership with The Center for Art & Advocacy and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons. ABOUT THE ARTIST: Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is a renowned visual artist working at the intersections of contemporary art, graffiti, vinyl toys, fashion and design, and art activism.

An evening of poetry and community showcasing emerging and established writers of color in Santa Cruz County. This is a free event.

Enjoy a screening of the video-performance Under the Mantle of an Idocile Dream (Bruna Castro, Brasil, 2026), followed by a conversation between Denise Carrascosa and Gina Dent around the historical, political and spiritual relations between Afro-Brazilian ancestrality, visual arts and abolition feminism in Brazil. Denise Carrascosa is a writer, lawyer, and full professor of literature at the Federal University of Bahia, in Brasil. Gina Dent (Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Professor of Humanities and Faculty Director of the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In partnership with the Writers of Color Santa Cruz County, the MAH presents an evening of poetry, music, and art. Featuring up-and-coming and established artists, each writer shares a unique experience. With the mission to nourish a community of writers of color, audiences will learn, relate, and empathize. The group began in 2021, meeting over Zoom, where they read one another’s writing and supported each other’s work. Although the group’s members come from a diversity of backgrounds, they share similar experiences and creative processes, whether it be in how they navigate imagining their homeland or writing in multiple languages, as just a few examples. -Shelly Novo; Good Times Santa Cruz

Join us for a screening of the video-performance Under the Mantle of an Idocile Dream (Bruna Castro, Brasil, 2026), followed by a conversation between Denise Carrascosa and Gina Dent around the historical, political and spiritual relations between Afro-Brazilian ancestrality, visual arts and abolition feminism in Brazil.