Public Events Calendar

Enjoy a night of Bollywood dancing, hosted by the Indian Students Association.

Student projects from the College of Design's introductory design and drawing studios will be showcased from April 13–21 in locations throughout the first and second floors of the Design building.

A public reception and studio open house will be from 5:30–7 p.m. Thursday, April 16.

The “Core Exhibition Spring 2026” will feature a current selection of two- and three-dimensional projects completed this spring semester in the Design Studies 1020: Design Studio I and Design Studies 1310: Drawing I courses in the college’s first-year Core Design Program.

Student work will be on display in the atrium, room 111, the Pickard Chilton Gallery (first-floor corridor of the King Pavilion), second-floor hallways, and Design Studies classrooms 226, 230, 234, 240, 246, 252, and 258.

DSNS 1020 and 1310 studio classrooms will be open during the reception.

ISU Theatre presents "Peter and the Starcatcher"

Classes meet every Sunday in room 3512 in the MU. Drop-ins are welcome!

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of Marty Supreme!

Speaker: Brian Wright
The Beatles’ global popularity was the single most significant development in popular music of the mid to late 1960s, so much so that it is difficult to fully convey the immensity of their impact. Over the course of their short career, they had seventeen No. 1 hits in the UK and twenty in the US. Millions and millions of young people bought their records, and their commercial success was so vast and unprecedented that it fundamentally altered the direction of both the British and American music industries. To this day, music historians continue to obsess over the trajectory and significance of the Beatles’ career. Yet relatively few have explored Paul McCartney’s development as a bass player.  

Building on the work of Jack Hamilton, Andrew Kellett, and Andy Babiuk, this presentation chronicles the wider cultural, social, and technological factors that shaped McCartney’s bass playing across the Beatles’ recorded output, from their early days in Hamburg up through Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). In particular, it chronicles how McCartney’s fascination with American pop styles, especially African American styles, led him to develop his own melodic approach to bass playing, as well as the inherent complexities of his cross-cultural borrowing. 

Dr. Brian F. Wright is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas, where he specializes in the history of American popular music. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Case Western Reserve University and is a former research assistant for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. His book-length history of the electric bass, “The Bastard Instrument,” received the 2025 Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Book Award, and his work has appeared in the “Journal of the Society for American Music and the Journal of Popular Music Studies,” as well as in “Vintage Guitar and Bass Player Magazine.”

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Music and Theatre Department, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Iowa State Softball vs Iowa
Streaming Video: https://www.espn.com/watch/player/_/id/0003fc86-da8f-4d6a-8bf6-e2b6aacc…
https://cyclones.com/calendar.aspx?game_id=18505&sport_id=7

ISU Student Singers compete in the preliminary round of the annual CYCLONE VOICE competition!

Speaker: AJ Jacobs
2026 First Amendment Days Keynote
Part of the America250 lecture series.

A.J. Jacobs is a best‑selling author and famously adventurous “human guinea pig” whose immersive, often hilarious experiments explore the edges of behavior, belief, and culture while uncovering deeper insights about how we live and learn. Blending philosophy, Gonzo journalism, and performance art, he has outsourced his entire life to a team in Bangalore, attempted Radical Honesty, read the entire "Encyclopedia Britannica", lived for a year following every rule in the Bible, and conducted countless other curiosity‑driven quests. His books combine sharp wit with thoughtful reflection, revealing what these extreme experiments teach about gratitude, creativity, empathy, and human nature. A sought‑after speaker, Jacobs brings humor, insight, and a spirit of playful inquiry to audiences of all kinds.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.

The University Book Store will be onsite selling the speaker's book at the event.
Co-Sponsors: Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Center for Cyclone Civics, University Library, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Treat your senses to a harmonious combination of visual and musical arts. Iowa State University Museums is proud to present a musical performance in partnership with the ISU Opera Studio within the Department of Music and Theatre. With a combination of song and art, see the Art on Campus Collection in a new light through a selection of student vocal performances that each pair with a different work in the Art on Campus Collection.

In partnership with the Office of Sustainability, join University Museums for Iowa State’s Earth Day Celebration, where campus and community organizations come together to showcase sustainability in action. Visit the University Museums table at Iowa State’s annual Earth Day Celebration to learn about upcoming programs and explore how art and nature connect through the Anderson Sculpture Garden — now featuring a New Perennial Movement Garden rooted in sustainable design. 🌱✨ Enjoy free giveaways and treats while they last!

The Department of Landscape Architecture, in collaboration with the Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, is hosting a viewing of "Sitting Still," a 90-minute documentary that features preeminent landscape architect Laurie Olin — one of the world's most influential urban designers — and his profoundly social vision.

Olin's life story of growing up in Alaska on the edge of the American frontier, challenging belief systems around designing in nature, and his lifelong work transforming environments for social good are the launching pad for "Sitting Still." Part portrait of the artist and part exploration of social concerns, the film looks at the critical importance of humanity in design in order to create more livable cities. Olin and other design visionaries — including Frank Gehry, Billie Tsien, and Walter Hood, among others — bring into sharp focus the marks we make upon the land and why they matter.

Speaker: Gary Wells
A True Crime ISU Series Lecture

Confident eyewitness identification testimony in court has long been highly persuasive to judges and jurors. Starting in the late 1970s, however, lab-based experiments by psychological scientists started uncovering highly troubling concerns with eyewitness identification evidence. The legal system largely ignored this growing eyewitness science until mid-1990s when forensic DNA testing was developed and used to exonerate large numbers of innocent people who were convicted by juries. Approximately 70% of these DNA exonerations involved mistaken eyewitness identifications and Wells uses some cases he has been involved with that illustrate key problems. Wells then describes the progress made by psychological scientists in helping the legal system improve ways to collect, preserve, and interpret eyewitness identification evidence and how this has changed crime investigator and courtroom practices.

Gary L. Wells is an internationally recognized research psychologist whose work has shaped how legal systems handle eyewitness evidence. For decades he has combined laboratory research, field studies, policy work, and direct training for police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges. Wells has authored over 150 scientific articles, received major national awards (including lifetime achievement recognition), led federal and national panels (including Department of Justice), secured substantial funding from NSF and other agencies, and disseminated his findings to the public via mass media (e.g., New York Times, 60 Minutes). Courts and law enforcement agencies frequently consult him on improving identification procedures.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Psychology Department, Sociology and Criminal Justice Department, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Speaker: Justice Christopher McDonald
America's founding charter was not designed to produce consensus. It was designed to make disagreement governable. This address by Iowa Supreme Court Justice Christopher McDonald explores the Constitution's deliberate architecture of tension, the judiciary's growing centrality to the resolution of those tensions, and the ongoing dialogue between state and federal courts that embodies the Founders' vision of productive institutional competition.

Justice McDonald was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Des Moines. He graduated from Des Moines Lincoln High School, and he earned his undergraduate degree from Grand View University. Justice McDonald earned his law degree, with highest distinction, from the University of Iowa College of Law in 2001. At the College of Law, he received the John F. Murray award given to the class valedictorian and was elected to the Order of the Coif academic honor society.

After graduating from law school, Justice McDonald served as a law clerk to the Honorable David R. Hansen, United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Justice McDonald worked in private practice at Faegre & Benson and Belin McCormick and then as National Litigation Counsel for an international life and annuity company. In 2012, he was appointed to serve as a judge of the District Court, Fifth Judicial District of Iowa. In 2013, he was appointed to the Iowa Court of Appeals. In 2019, he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Cyclone Civics, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Don't miss GRANDMA MOJO's, Iowa State's premier improv comedy troupe, for nights of hilarity, every other Wednesday all semester!

Speaker: Matty Glasgow
This reading and lecture by poet and community organizer, Matty Layne Glasgow, invites us to consider the paradoxical—how we might deconstruct established taxonomic categories of genre, science, and cultural identity to help us innovate new practices that can embrace the queer and fluid, the lyric, joyful, and connective.

Rethinking established taxonomic categories can create an imaginative space that not only obscures and “queers” rigid binaries, but also helps us cultivate kinship relationships that can transcend difference—whether those differences be gendered and cultural, or species-based. Through this reimagining, we can find creative practices that foster community and forge new intersections of experience that connect, rather than enforce previous separations of identity and subculture.

Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of the award-winning poetry collection "deciduous qween", published by Red Hen Press in 2019, He is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston where he teaches poetry and nonfiction. A 2022-2025 Black Earth Institute Fellow, Glasgow co-edited the About Place Journal’s “Strange Wests” and served as Editor of Quarterly West, as well as the coordinator of the Wasatch Writers in the Schools program in Salt Lake City.

A graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State, Glasgow also received a PhD in Creative Writing & English Literature from the University of Utah where he was awarded a Vice Presidential Fellowship, a Jeff Metcalf Humanities in the Community Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center. Matty’s poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from "Crazyhorse", "Copper Nickel", "Denver Quarterly", "Ecotone", "Gulf Coast", "Houston Public Media", "Kenyon Review", the "Missouri Review", "Pleiades", "Poetry Daily", "Third Coast", and elsewhere.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.

The University Book Store will be onsite selling the speaker's book at the event.
Co-Sponsors: Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Recharge with Yoga in the Garden! As the end of the semester approaches, take a break and reset with a free yoga session in the Anderson Sculpture Garden. Let the creativity around you inspire your movement and calm your mind. No experience needed—just bring your mat and meet in the Christian Petersen Art Museum (1017 Morrill Hall) before we head to the great outdoors! Museum Meetups are free and open to all. In the event of inclement weather, the event will be held indoors.

Speaker: Melinda Myers
Nationally known gardening expert, TV/radio host, author & columnist Melinda Myers has over 40 years of horticulture experience and has written more than 20 gardening books, including her most recent Midwest Gardener's Handbook, 2nd Edition. She hosts the “Melinda’s Garden Moment” radio program and The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” instant video series. Myers is a garden columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms and hosted “The Plant Doctor” radio show for over 20 years and 7 seasons of “Great Lakes Gardener” on PBS.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Horticulture Department, Natural Resource Ecology and Management Department, Reiman Gardens, University Library, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Cece Winans’ More Than This Tour will be one of the most comprehensive tours of CeCe’s entire career! Each night will feature the worship moments you have come to expect, Goodness of God, Believe For It, and Alabaster Box; while also introducing you to the new standards, That’s My King, Holy Forever, Come Jesus Come, and more.

“I pray that this new tour, More Than This, will remind people of God’s greatness, not just His goodness. I want God to give us more of Himself and in return we give Him all He deserves,” says Winans. “We are praying with expectation of what is coming and we hope you’ll join us." What should attendees expect when they arrive for the concert?

Concert attendees should expect a night of worship that is unapologetically honest, celebratory, and unifying, where the full body of Christ can come and worship our King, Jesus, TOGETHER!

Tickets go on sale now at 10am at the Stephens Ticket Office or at www.ticketmaster.com.

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!

The M-Shop brings in Iowa punk-pop favorites Lipstick Homicide along with Des Moines rockers Bat Problem!

Join us for a 4K route around campus to raise awareness for suicide prevention. The event will feature live music, a resource fair, face painting, honor beads, and speakers. Coffee and baked goods will be available for purchase from The Bell Bottom Cafe and the Piece and Freedom Bakery.

Explore new stories and create your own at the Brunnier Art Museum! Activities and crafts for children and families will focus on imagination and storytelling. Enjoy the exhibition Tell Me a Story and the many works of art on view. Participants are encouraged to come dressed as their favorite fairytale character. Activities geared for grades K-5; all are welcome. Stop by any time during the three-hour window, while supplies last. No admission fee or registration. Free, easy parking.

Registration includes a T-shirt and snacks. Online registration is open until April 24 at noon. In-person registration will be available at the event.

Run or walk to support Stead Family Children's Hospital and the local families treated there. The First 150 registrants will get a t-shirt!

SUB and The Pride Alliance present the Spring Drag Show!

A retirement reception will be held for Arne Hallam, senior associate dean for finance and operations in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of economics, to honor his 43 years of service to the university. Hallam will retire on June 30.

Iowa State Soccer vs UNI
https://cyclones.com/calendar.aspx?game_id=18593&sport_id=12

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!

SUB and The Pride Alliance present the Spring Drag Show!