A Year for the ArtsGet Ready for PRAx's 2024-25 Season

Tickets are on sale now for the 2024-2025 season at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx). Built around the theme “Water and Watersheds,” the lineup includes performances by PRAx’s inaugural artist-in-residence, jazz luminary and five-time Grammy Award winner Esperanza Spalding.

To launch the season, PRAx partners with the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences to present Rising, a performance combining music, dance and spoken word to reflect on rising temperatures, sea levels and humanity’s increasing awareness of how changing oceans affect us. The exhibition How to Carry Water will be on display in the Stirek Gallery from Sept. 20 to Dec. 21, with artists from multiple disciplines exploring alternative methods for witnessing the human relationship with water.

As part of the partnership with Spalding, a cohort of OSU students from various artistic disciplines will work with the Portland-based artist on a yearlong collaborative installation.

What’s so cool about Esperanza Spalding is that she’s this big, iconic figure, one of the greatest jazz musicians of this generation; she has a giant global stage and iconicity, but her work is deeply rooted in community.

She created her most recent album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, after spending several months in three communities in the U.S. , collaborating with musicians, researchers and health care practitioners. Spalding’s OSU residency will be focused on a similar project, and she will give two public performances with her dance company, Off Brand G, April 17-18, 2025, in Detrick Hall.

“What’s so cool about Esperanza Spalding is that she’s this big, iconic figure, one of the greatest jazz musicians of this generation; she has a giant global stage and iconicity, but her work is deeply rooted in community,” said Peter Betjemann, Patricia Valian Reser executive director of PRAx.

PRAx stands for Patricia Reser Arts, with the “x” signifying the center’s intersections between the arts and other academic disciplines. The center is named for Patricia Valian Reser, OSU alumna and volunteer leader, who has given $36 million to the OSU Foundation for the arts, including $25 million for PRAx. See the full season lineup of dance, music, theater and more.