Downtown Dayton Partnership

Night of the Living Lobstah
2026-03-13 11:00 (America/New_York) | The Barrel House, 417 E. Third St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
Join us for an evening of killer seafood, really good beer, and a DJ who may or may not (probably not, lets be real) be dressed as a zombie lobster.
Our friends from The Naughty Lobstah and Dayton Street Snacks will have our bellies full, and the Jackie O’s homies are taking over the draft board. DJ Johnny Clawmeat spins an all-vinyl set at some point probably in the evening.
Featured Jackie O’s draft:
Mystic Mama – WC IPASea Foam – Hazy IPAFirefly – AmberMatriarch – Triple IPAEndolith – Barrel Aged BarleywineElle – Foeder Aged Saison…and maybe a special something from our keg cellar

Member’s Spotlight Exhibition: Elisha Frontz: vernal equinox
2026-03-13, 2026-03-12 | The Contemporary Dayton, 25 W. Fourth St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
Elisha Frontz: vernal equinox March 4 – 28, 2026 Opening Reception: March 4, 6 – 8 pm Closing Reception: March 28, 4 – 6 pm
Elisha Frontz: vernal equinox features recent work by a Dayton-based artist, musician, and poet. Working with an interdisciplinary sensibility, Frontz allows material investigation and musicality to inform one another. Her process balances technical precision with intuitive gesture, resulting in compositions that feel at once deliberate and emergent. These mixed-media paintings—watercolor on paper combined with sewing patterns, string, and brass tacks—celebrate the vernal equinox, the astronomical beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. As the sun crosses the celestial equator, day and night reach near equilibrium, marking a moment of balance, transition, and renewal that resonates through Frontz’s layered materials and luminous palette. All artworks in this exhibition are available for purchase. Please visit the reception desk or speak to a staff member for more information. Proceeds support both the artist and The Contemporary Dayton’s mission to connect artists and audiences through accessible, engaging contemporary art experiences.

Becoming: 70 Years of Growth, Expression, and Possibility
2026-03-13, 2026-03-12 | Dayton Metro Library – Main Library, 215 E. Third Street, Dayton, OH, 45402
Dayton Metro Library’s newest art exhibit, Becoming: 70 Years of Growth, Expression, and Possibility, will be on display Sunday, March 1 – Tuesday, March 31, in the Main Library’s The 2nd Floor Gallery.
Becoming celebrates the artists of United Rehabilitation Services (URS) and the ways creativity serves as a powerful form of communication, identity, and connection.
For 70 years, URS has supported children and adults with developmental and acquired disabilities as they grow, explore independence, and express who they are. Their artwork reflects a journey of becoming, not as a fixed destination but an ongoing process shaped by experience, curiosity, collaboration, and self-expression.
The exhibit features a wide range of abilities, styles, and mediums. Some pieces were created individually, while others were created collaboratively, emphasizing the importance of community, shared effort, and collective voice. The scale of the work is intentionally varied, ranging from small, intimate pieces to large-format installations, mirroring the diversity of expression within the disability community.
Presented during Disabilities Awareness Month, Becoming invites viewers to look beyond labels and assumptions to see creativity, agency, and possibility. Each piece tells a story, not of limitation, but of growth, imagination, and presence.
For more information, visit DaytonMetroLibrary.org/Exhibits or call the Library’s Ask Me Line at 937.463.2665.

Jamea Richmond-Edwards: Leviathan
2026-03-13 | The Contemporary Dayton, 25 W. Fourth St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
The Contemporary Dayton is proud to present Leviathan, a film by interdisciplinary artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards. Known for her monumental paintings and mixed-media collages informed by mythology, Afrofuturist iconography, and magical realism, Richmond-Edwards brings these influences into a cinematic form in this film. Using music and dance, Leviathan traces the artist’s family history and their enduring connection to Detroit. Raised in a family of dancers and musicians, and drawing on her experience as a competitive dancer and marching band member, Richmond-Edwards infuses the film with movement and sound. The film explores Detroit’s layered histories and evolving landscapes, invoking the mythic Leviathan as a metaphor for the powerful, often untold forces of the Great Migration. Richmond-Edwards is an artist from Detroit who holds a BFA from Jackson State University and an MFA from Howard University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; and The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and more. Her work is held in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program, among others. OPENING NIGHT / Friday, March 13 Member & Sponsor Preview: 5-6 pm Public Reception: 6-8 pm Remarks: 6:30 pm CLOSING RECEPTION / Saturday, June 6 4-6p – Light Refreshments and a final chance to view the exhibition. This exhibition is one of three concurrent exhibitions of new and recent work by Detroit-based artists, curated by Heather Jones, and presented to spark dialogue around the art and artists of our time.

Paul Verdell: Tabernacle
2026-03-13 | The Contemporary Dayton, 25 W. Fourth St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
The Contemporary Dayton is proud to present a new body of work by Paul Verdell. In these gestural paintings, Verdell continues his exploration of loose and instinctive mark making, working with paint and collaged elements. These works become renditions of landscapes both visually and figuratively as the colors and forms subtly echo horizons and map Verdell’s mental terrain. Driven by intuition, his latest body of work delves deep into the realm of abstraction as the artist explores capabilities of medium and mind. Influencing the artist’s conceptual root is both internal discourse—an ongoing attempt to understand himself within a shifting and uncertain world through the act of painting—as well as his Black American heritage. Verdell is a painter based in Detroit. Originally from Long Beach, California, he moved to Ohio as a teenager and received a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2018. He has been awarded residencies at Black Rock Senegal, Dakar, Senegal, and the Macedonia Institute, Chatham, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at The Armory Show, New York; Hurst Contemporary, London; and the Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal, among others. Verdell’s work is held in the collections of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, Cleveland, Ohio, among others. OPENING NIGHT / Friday, March 13 Member & Sponsor Preview: 5-6 pm Public Reception: 6-8 pm Remarks: 6:30 pm CLOSING RECEPTION / Saturday, June 6 4-6p – Light Refreshments and a final chance to view the exhibition. This exhibition is one of three concurrent exhibitions of new and recent work by Detroit-based artists, curated by Heather Jones, and presented to spark dialogue around the art and artists of our time

Jason REVOK: Mutually Exclusive
2026-03-13 | The Contemporary Dayton, 25 W. Fourth St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
The Contemporary Dayton is proud to present new paintings by Jason REVOK. Self-taught, REVOK is known for pushing creative boundaries that began in the street. Although his story begins with graffiti, the artist has spent the last decade focusing on his studio practice and the evolution of process and concept. Refusing to be limited by his early recognition, REVOK allows only certain elements from graffiti culture to transition to his contemporary work—modest materials and industrial tools, ingenuity, his name—but his proclivity towards minimalism and post-painterly abstraction has become the driving force behind his practice. Examining the question of authorship from start to finish, REVOK has developed systematic yet imperfect tools to carry out his vision and has created a number of unmistakable bodies of work. His bold, balanced, geometry is heightened by the personal and imperfect sleight of the human hand. REVOK grew up in Southern California and is based in Detroit. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Pasadena Museum of California Art, as well as in galleries and special projects in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Dubai. His work is held in important private collections worldwide. OPENING NIGHT / Friday, March 13 Member & Sponsor Preview: 5-6 pm Public Reception: 6-8 pm Remarks: 6:30 pm CLOSING RECEPTION / Saturday, June 6 4-6p – Light Refreshments and a final chance to view the exhibition. This exhibition is one of three concurrent exhibitions of new and recent work by Detroit-based artists, curated by Heather Jones, and presented to spark dialogue around the art and artists of our time.

Tony Foster, Exploring Time: A Painter’s Perspective
2026-03-13, 2026-03-12 | The Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park N, Dayton, OH, 45405, United States
Tony Foster, Exploring Time: A Painter’s Perspective
February 21–May 17, 2026, Gallery 120
Between 2007 and 2025, Tony Foster embarked on his 19th Journey, building it around a profound and layered theme: time. Across this body of work, he investigates how time shapes the land—from the quick shifts of light and weather, to the slow rhythms of seasons, to the immense scales of biological and geological transformation. As Foster explains, his aim is “to draw attention to the unseen forces that create place.”
Exploring Time brings together a remarkable series of watercolor diaries that capture nature in motion. His paintings reveal signs of change on multiple fronts: geological upheavals, biological cycles and the marks left by human activity. With a discerning eye, Foster records not only nature’s strength and resilience but also its vulnerability, even in landscapes once dominated by industry and later reclaimed.
In a world where environmental change is often conveyed through striking images of global warming, Foster offers a different perspective, one that considers Earth’s continual evolution and the visible traces of time’s passage. Organized into four themes: geological, biological, human and the fleeting, this exhibition invites viewers to engage with time at every scale, from the span of a moment to the stretch of millennia, while reflecting on the enduring impact of human presence.

Temporary Exhibit: Ordinary Lives
2026-03-13 | The International Peace Museum, 10 N. Ludlow St., Dayton, OH, 45402
“Ordinary Lives imagines Palestinian existence as an unbroken continuum—a lineage of care, memory, and everyday beauty that stretches from ancient ritual to the present moment. Across the gallery, Mona Gazala’s photographic works and George Harb’s intimate family archive come together to affirm that Palestinian life is shaped not solely by survival, but by an enduring inheritance of joy, dignity, and deep interior worlds.

In Gazala’s images, ancestral echoes surface through gestures and objects that bridge archaeology and lived experience. Portraits that invoke ancient forms of veneration and photographs that draw on the quiet symbolism of archaeological fragments work in concert to honor the overlooked, the ordinary, and the deeply rooted. Whether reimagining the visual language of early ancestral practices or elevating humble shards as vessels of story, these works collectively underscore a truth that stretches across millennia: what persists is reverence—reverence for family, land, and the accumulated layers of Palestinian life.

These themes resonate through the collage of George Harb’s archival videos and photographs spanning the diaspora, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and greater Palestine. His extensive family documentation—childhood scenes, celebrations, rites of passage, and landscapes of home—reveals generations living with tenderness, intuition, and grounded connection. It offers a glimpse of Palestinian joy and interiority, sustained independently of external forces and carried forward despite trauma.

Together, Gazala’s contemporary works and Harb’s historical archive form a unified narrative of continuity: a testament to the ancient and ongoing pulse of Palestinian life. Their stories—rooted in ritual, memory, everyday gestures, and deep familial ties—assert that Palestinian presence has never been broken.”

Sandra Aska, Andy Holliday, & Paul Rienzo Exhibits
2026-03-13, 2026-03-12 | Galleries at Sinclair College, 444 W. Third St., Bldg. 13, Dayton, OH, 45402
The Sinclair Community College Art Department is pleased to present works by Sandra Aska, Andy Holliday, and Paul Rienzo in the Burnell R. Roberts Triangle Gallery and Works on Paper Gallery. Capturing moments of perplexity, quirkiness, thoughtfulness, and beauty, Aska gives clay life through her figurative sculptures. Toolmarks and fingerprints left in the works imbue an expressionistic looseness to the forms. She works intuitively by allowing each form to emerge from the clay and invites the viewer to offer their own interpretation. Holliday’s non-representational prints stem from images that are observed, recorded, and repeatedly reprocessed through systems to alter them. Exploring the idea of attention as a measure of value, he gathers an archive of media to process, builds complexity, and subsequently creates the final work through traditional printmaking techniques. Rienzo’s photorealistic still life paintings explore archetypal themes found across cultures and historical periods. The depicted objects are laden with symbolic power and when combined with others from differing cultures and eras, explore the idea of untold myths and interconnectivity. There will be a virtual artist talk via Zoom on February 20, 2026, at 12pm. Visit www.sinclair.edu/artgalleries for details. The exhibitions will be on display from February 10 – March 13, 2026. Galleries are located on the fourth floor of building 13 (located at West Fifth and Perry Streets). The galleries are free and open to the public from 8am–6pm Monday–Friday and 9am–12pm Saturdays. Free and accessible parking is located in Parking Lot K.

RESILIENCE
2026-03-13, 2026-03-12 | Edward A. Dixon Gallery, 222 N. St. Clair St., Dayton, OH, 45402
Resilience opens at the Edward A. Dixon Gallery on February 5th featuring several local artists ranging from a University Student to 30 year career artists. This exhibition is the gallery’s response to Black History month and features images that are powerful, regal and positive. Please, mark your calendars for the Opening Reception on Thursday, February 5th from 5pm-8pm. The exhibition dates are February 5th through March 15th.

Music Bingo Thursdays
2026-03-12 20:00 | The Trolley Stop, 530 E. Fifth St., Dayton, OH, 45402, USA
We have music bingo every Thursday! It’s free to play, lots of fun, hosted by KG, and there are prizes galore. Come check it out!

Open Mic Night
2026-03-12 19:30 - 22:30 | The Barrel House, 417 E. Third St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
Open Mic Night – sign up online, then show up and show out.

Uptown: A Celebration Of Motown & Soul
2026-03-12 19:30 | Victoria Theatre, 138 N. Main St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
Fusing Bruno Mars-caliber stage presence with top-tier vocals and wall-to-wall choreography, the men of Uptown combine the smooth stylings of R&B with the fresh hits of today. Born in New York City (the epicenter of contemporary pop and soul music), the group exudes unparalleled energy with their blend of contemporary radio hits and classic Motown music, with frequent comparisons to icons like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
2026-03-12 19:30, 2026-03-12 17:10, 2026-03-12 14:45, 2026-03-11 19:30, 2026-03-11 17:10 | THE NEON, United States
Birmingham, 1940. Amidst the chaos of WWII, Tommy Shelby is driven back from a self-imposed exile to face his most destructive reckoning yet. With the future of the family and the country at stake, Tommy must face his own demons, and choose whether to confront his legacy, or burn it to the ground. By order of the Peaky Blinders…

Levitt UpClose
2026-03-12 19:00 - 21:30 | Downtown Dayton
Uncover the mystery: Three artists, one secret location… endless memories!
Join us on Thursday, March 12, at 7pm for the next show in the Levitt UpClose concert series! Purchase a ticket for a unique concert-going experience to keep the Levitt Dayton energy going all year. We’ll give you a little information before you buy, but here’s the fun part: we’ll let you know the exact location the day before the concert, and you’ll find out the bands as you hear them at the show!
Ticket proceeds will support free concerts at the Levitt Pavilion Dayton next summer.
Location: Surprise Venue in 45402 zipcode.
The Venue is accessible with elevators.
Seating will be available at the venue – no need to bring chairs.

BYOB – small coolers are permitted.
General Admission Limited tickets available. Tickets – $45
VIP Ticket – $65 includes an exclusive pre-show experience with one of our artists.
Presented by Caresource

Community Workshop – Flourish and Flow: An Oil Painting Journey
2026-03-12 17:30 - 19:30 | The Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park N, Dayton, OH, 45405, United States
Our artist-led workshops are designed to make community connections between our guests, local artists, and The Dayton Art Institute through conversation and artmaking. Flourish and Flow: An Oil Painting Journey Date: Thursdays, April 10, 17 and 24, and May 1 and 8 – 5:30–7:30 p.m Cost: $100 for museum members; $125 for non-members Ages: 18+ In this multi-session workshop series, local artist Jamaal Durr leads participants through an exploration of the fundamentals of oil painting. Sessions will focus on layering, blending, and texture while developing skills through the creation of personalized artwork featuring birth flowers. Jamaal Durr, a Contemporary Artist, is recognized for his figurative works that intimately blend reality and the surreal. Using materials like oil paint, charcoal, and graphite, he explores themes of identity and self-reflection through his timely narratives. Jamaal has expanded his capacity within the realm of Art, having also gained experience as a Curator, Teacher, and Muralist. Jamaal is primarily self-taught, having only received a couple of years of formal training at Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton, OH and a brief stint studying architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Calle Malaga
2026-03-12 14:30 | THE NEON, United States
Maria Angeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman, lives alone in Tangier, Morocco, and enjoys her daily routine. However, her life is turned upside down when her daughter arrives from Madrid to sell the apartment in which she has always lived. Determined to stay, she does everything she can to get her home and her belongings back and, unexpectedly, rediscovers love and sensuality.

Wu-Tang Wednesdays
2026-03-11 19:00 - 23:00 | The Barrel House, 417 E. Third St., Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
Dayton’s legendary Ike B spins old school hip hop and whateva else he wants.

Live Trivia
2026-03-11 18:30 - 20:30 | Yellow Cab Tavern, 700 E 4th St, Dayton, OH, 45402, United States
We are excited to host live trivia every Wednesday at The Yellow Cab Tavern! Since there are a limited number of indoor tables, so please reserve as soon as possible.
Pepper Sprout Productions will be doing 3 rounds of general trivia from 6:30 – 8:30! Win prizes and gift cards! Watch their page on the day of for a clue about the bonus round theme!
You can enjoy pizza from The Pizza Bandit and beverages from The Yellow Cab Tavern!Pizza Bandit’s standard carryout, delivery, and onsite dining will be available from 4-9pm!

Adult Weekday Classes
2026-03-11 18:00 - 20:00 | K12 Gallery & TEJAS, 341 S. Jefferson St., Dayton, OH, 45402
Tuesday and Wednesday weekday classes: Tuesdays (September-May) Stained Glass Classes: 1:00pm-3:00pm Ceramics/Clay Classes: 3:00pm-5:00pm Glassblowing Classes: 3:30pm-5:30pm Wednesdays (September-May) Still Life Oil Painting Classes: 1:00pm-3:00pm Glassblowing Classes: 2:00pm-4:00pm or 6:00pm-8:00pm. Call for Costs.

Lent Taizé Services of Prayer and Meditation
2026-03-11 18:00 - 18:40 | Westminster Presbyterian Church, 125 N. Wilkinson St., Dayton, OH, 45402
February 25; March 4, 11, 18, 25 (Wednesdays) – 6:00-6:40 p.m. Taizé Service of Prayer and Meditation – Westminster Presbyterian Church, 125 N. Wilkinson St., Downtown Dayton – a light supper follows each service.
