Renowned conductor-composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who served as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra from 1960 to 1979, returns to Orchestra Hall to conduct three concerts October 18 to 20 that showcase Mozart's spectacular Jupiter Symphony, Brahms' warm-hearted Symphony No. 2 and the premiere performance of Skrowaczewski's own Fantasy for Flute and Orchestra, which features the Orchestra's principal flutist, Adam Kuenzel, as soloist.

New work by Minnesota-based artist Ta-coumba Aiken and others will be featured in an exhibition opening November 16 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "Call and Response" is a celebration of creativity, painting, and community.

A day of family fun is stirring at Move Your World, the Walker Art Center's Free First Saturday event from 10 am–3 pm Saturday, October 6.

Some artworks offer escape: fanciful worlds, soothing aesthetics, images and ideas made to calm and comfort. Others nudge us to question and reflect on realities facing us as individuals and as a society. The latter definition of art guides the Walker Art Center exhibition Brave New Worlds, which considers the present state of political consciousness, expressed through the questions of how to live, experience, and dream.

The Walker Art Center's Target Free Thursday Nights in October are highlighted by the panel discussion Brave New Art: Artists and Political Consciousness (October 4, 7 pm). Featuring a panel made up of artists from Brave New Worlds (opening October 4), exhibition curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond moderate the discussion about what constitutes a brave new world, and making art as an act of courage.

This exhibition, the second in the Changing Hands series organized by the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, features approximately 150 works of art by more than 130 artists from areas west of the Mississippi including the Plains, Plateau, West Coast, Western Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii.

October tours at the Walker Art Center offer a chance to see the latest exhibition Brave New Worlds (opening October 4), a groundbreaking show about art's responsibilities in times of adversity.

Tunisian-born singer and oud (Arabic lute) virtuoso Dhafer Youssef's hypnotic, Sufi-inspired music connects the ancient with the modern, the East with the West in an enticing coalescence of culture. Youssef draws on the evocative sound of his Islamic heritage, combining it with new directions in European jazz and "a voice that could stop wars" (Songlines) to create timeless atmospheres of sound.

The Bay Area art-pop trio Deerhoof brings its joyously eclectic sound to the Walker Art Center's William and Nadine McGuire Theater at 8 pm Tuesday, October 2. Mixing precision with rawness, sweetness with edge, improvisational firepower with tightly constructed song structures, Deerhoof's inimitable sound is rooted in the power percussion of drummer Greg Saunier and the angular, drivingly complex guitar work of John Dieterich.

Tourists often ask for the bathroom in the Minneapolis airport. It is because they want to see the stall made famous by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's arrest in a sex sting.

One of America's most accomplished pianists, Garrick Ohlsson, makes his triumphant return to Orchestra Hall for concerts October 11 to 13 that also mark the Minnesota Orchestra debut of young Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, Osmo Vänskä's successor at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

The Minnesota Orchestra, led by Music Director Osmo Vänskä, opens its third season of "Close-to-Home" concerts in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, on Sunday, October 7, with a performance of Beethoven's buoyant Second Symphony, Sibelius' Rakastava suite, a brief musical rendering of a Finnish lover's tale, and a work for organ and orchestra by Félix-Alexandre Guilmant.