Winner of Best Documentary and Best Director prizes at the 2015 San Diego Black Film Festival, and a Best Documentary nominee at the American Black Film Festival, the visually breathtaking An American Ascent serves as the latest presentation in River Action's annual QC Environmental Film Series, the movie's October 3 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum sure to demonstrate why the MAC Weekly called the work “grand, beautiful, and challenging,” as well as “a mountain of a film.”

Outdoor views of the Quad Cities will be admired and enjoyed in a Bettendorf venue when the Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy, through October 30, houses its exhibition Paint the River: Fifth-Annual Plein Air Paint Out – a collection of works by local artists all created outside, and all executed on subject matter along the Mississippi from the I-80 Bridge to the Centennial Bridge on both sides of the river.

Unusual, fantastical, and downright creepy elements of Quad Cities architecture and culture will be explored in an October 2 book discussion at the Davenport Public Library's Fairmount Street branch, with authors Michael McCarty and John Brassard Jr. highlighting Bigfoot, a banshee, and more in their new publication Eerie Quad Cities.

An 1882 stage classic that the New York Times, in 2018, called “suddenly as timely as a tweet,” Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People will be presented, in a modern-day re-imaging, at Davenport venue the Mockingbird of Main September 30 through October 9, its exploration of the impacts of pollution and moral complacency perhaps even more relevant now than it was in the 19th century.