The latest show by Corrine Smith, running through March 9 at the Morrissey Gallery inside St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, is a chance to see some exciting new color explorations by a painting and collage powerhouse. She has incorporated a wider range of bolder colors that have invigorated her powerful images with even more visual octane.

It took more than six months to clear out the potted plants and detritus from stray cats that choked their future gallery space. That was just the first in a long string of challenges that confronted husband and wife Ron and Sarah Jane Fellin as they infused the Peanut Gallery with life.

After almost eight and a half years, numerous art shows and happenings, and $20,000 of their own money to keep it running, a fire in an adjacent building that was being demolished forced the Peanut Gallery to end its run this past fall.

How do you choose from thousands of paintings, illustrations, and drawings to represent a lifetime of making art? How can one express an artist's wide range of vision in only 53 pieces?

Jeanne Tamisiea came to the Quad Cities to teach at Black Hawk College in 1987, after serving as a traveling art instructor in North Dakota and directing her own illustration and design company. Originally from Iowa, she earned degrees from Drake, Michigan State, and Syracuse. She died in July 2006 at the age of 57, of complications from a viral infection of the heart. (See "Quiet Giant," River Cities' Reader Issue 598, September 13-19, 2006.)

Leonardo da Vinci was famous for improvising poetry while playing the lute. Mozart and Beethoven were legendary for their spontaneous piano inventions. And blues and jazz musicians have always loved the ability to create new combinations of music or words while playing.

Accidentally on Purpose: Improvisation in African Textiles & African-American Quilts, a magnificent exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, demonstrates this gift of improvisation, of turning a traditional form into a fresh and unique creation. And like great musicians, these quilt artists sew a piece together with their own original and surprising harmonies.