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Here comes the second (and final) weekend of the annual Big Medium-organized spectacle of creative goodness, with hundreds of private studios and galleries opening their doors all across the sunrise side of our busy city, for your pretty-much-nonstop ops for shopping, schmoozing, interactive presentations, workshops, parties, and afterparties into the wee hours of each night. Discover new artists. Rekindle old relationships. See our preview-with-recos right here – and here – and here – and here – but also check the EAST website for a vast panoply of details as they develop, and go ahead, citizen: Be a part of the art deep in the slightly arrhythmic heart of Texas.

In this new Mickle Maher show, at a community theatre audition for a new adaptation of The Three Little Pigs intended for adult audiences, "two sisters set out to search for an actor to play the role of the Wolf. As they struggle to cast the right actor, they're quickly confronted with the darkness inside the audition room – and themselves." A setup like that is compelling enough; knowing it's scripted by the man who brought us There Is a Happiness That Morning Is and The Strangerer and so many other hefty shards of hilarious and cutting brilliance that, well, hell – we like good theatre, what can we say? And this one's directed by Mark Pickell for Capital T and features Jill Blackwood, Kathy Catmull, John Christopher, Robert Pierson, and Rebecca Robinson. UPDATE: And now this production's been reviewed by our own Robert Faires.

Right there in the middle o' EAST, the Rude Mechs present the latest of Kirk Lynn's series of improvements on what that Bard of Avon did back in the day, taking "Shakespeare’s least-produced works and adapting them with Rude cunning to share the raw power of what a Shakespeare play must have felt like on opening night." Have at thee, Henry the fuckin' VIII! Directed by Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw.

This new art park – "dynamic and ever-evolving," we're told – is simultaneously a music installation and fundraising campaign engineered by Soundwaves Art Foundation at the community-forward Mosaic Sound Collective. It's a growing powerhouse of cross-disciplinary creativity, and it's opening to the public during this year’s East Austin Studio Tour.

ZACH’s adaptation of the Dickens classic is a family-friendly spectacular, a musical sleigh ride through rhythm and time, infusing the traditional Victorian story with a score that spans all genres and eras. Directed by Dave Steakley, with musical direction by Allen Robertson.

The Asian American Resource Center presents four exhibitions that reflect on community, cultural heritage, and nature in various mediums: "Colours of Life: An Indian Perspective" by Shruti Mehta; "Pink Lotus" by Marcella Kourkova; and the group shows "Everything That Matters" and "Abstractions of AVAFest."

Another vibrant part of this year's AVAfest, this world premiere from Thinkery & Verse and Teatro Vivo explores new dimensions of Latinx military service, featuring soldiers and citizens who expect military service to reinforce their identity and ideas about family, patriotism, and even sexuality – but the military is often a place that mixes up the moral compass and sense of self and invents a new identity.

Although they're under-chronicled, ranch women work from dark to dark, keeping step with hired hands, brothers, fathers, and husbands – blazing trails through unforgiving scrub, cooking supper, feeding bulls, taking care of grueling daily routines. Photojournalist Banta's new book covers that, and then some.

Rick Steinburg relies on his artist’s intuition to create artworks that combine a love of found objects and materials with a loose, spontaneous painting style. Ruth Keitz is a paper collage artist living in the Rio Grande Valley, creating her work with discarded materials from the modern world.

This annual four-day swing dance extravaganza has seven live bands – the Jonathan Stout Orchestra, Rent Party, Michael Gamble and His Rhythm Serenaders, Jonathon Doyle Swingtet, Hal Smith’s Swing Central, the Pro-Band Jam, and the Dirty River Dixie Band – playing for dancers from around the world. And you could be among those dancers yourself, you happy hoofer!

This exhibition chronicles the daily life and art of Bear Lopez, East Austin resident of 60 years, a steadfast witness to the transformation and gentrification of our city's sunrise side. Artists Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan met Bear at the Austin American-Statesman’s printing warehouse where Lopez has been working for more than 20 years without a single day off, delivering papers. What kind of life is that? There's more to the story than you might expect.

This 10th annual event offers two nights of debauchery, "with more breasts and thighs than your Thanksgiving dinner." Featuring everything from classic to neo burlesque, pole and aerial performance, Spanksgiving is sure to become your new favorite holiday quicker'n you can say "Latrodectus mactans."

The willful self-destruction of humanity by Earth’s most formidable species – humans – is the topic of New Orleans-born and Dallas-raised photographer Tia Boyd. Through a series of portraits, Boyd reveals "a surviving race of godlike women warriors who have come to terraform the planet for future inhabitants." And here's our full review of the show.

Yippee ki yay, space cadet, it's time to head 'em off at the Pass Nebula as the State History Museum presents an exhibition that spans more than 150 years of Western and science fiction history and features 100-plus artifacts (including props from Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, and other skiffy media fare). And our arch-geek himself, the estimable Richard Whittaker, also a part-time Sith Lord, reviews the show for you here.

Davis Gallery joins with Westcave Outdoor Discovery Center and Travis Audubon Society to present this exhibition focused on the natural world. Featuring work of surpassing beauty by Margie Crisp, David Everett, Billy Hassell, and William B. Montgomery, it's a survey of respect for the Lone Star State's natural brilliance – as seen through four distinct lenses. Oh, look – here's our review of the show.

The show's name is a play on Systema Naturae, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus' monumental work that documented the entire system of classification that's still in use for all biology. The show's creator is the man who, with his wife Moya, runs the gallery in which it's displayed; and who created The Resonant Lung; and who reformed, in discrete parts, the warped and buckled floor from an ancient warehouse into an abandoned Austin church; and who – well, it's Colin McIntyre, of course, with a series of works that explore imagined lifeforms with varied morphology, rendered via sinuous, flowing forms forged in steel and blazing with the liquid-metal sheen of nickel plate. And then there's that … viscous, pulsating abomination in the center of it all.

Mary Shelley's monstrous masterpiece, as adapted by Patrick Sandford, is presented by Different Stages with Norman Blumensaadt directing and Sam Grimes as the unfortunate results of Dr. Frankenstein's tampering with natural forces beyond control.

Please, Mr. Custer, I don't wanna need to remind you that this Owen is one of the stars of Screen Gems' Think Like a Man Too and that he played Zach the Barber on Tyler Perry's House of Payne. Come on down and see why Ebony magazine has proclaimed him "Black America’s Favorite White Comedian."

Sarah Fox's new show at this excellent Eastside gallery is about the nature of little boys and the men that they become. "It is an exhibition," says the artist, "that I made in an attempt to be a better mother and to create a safer world for my son."

This new show, curated for EAST by Leslie Moody Castro, features work by 14 artists whose creations formally and playfully challenge the notion of space and how to interact with it.

The Visual Arts League of Shalom Austin JCC presents four artists whose works display different techniques of abstraction: Patti Troth Black, Diane Sandlin, Jane Fier, and Ashley Mayel.

Ragnar Kjartansson's moving images are the latest to get the big-screen treatment in this ongoing series from your friends at UT's Landmarks program.

This group show highlights creations by six Texas-based artists working in a variety of mediums and techniques: Larry Goode, Thomas Athey, Connie Miller, Jill Robinson, Lyle Adair, and Nicole Jeffords.

The Brazilian artist Lucas Simões "thinks of his new works as drawings, even though they carry no graphite and have some dimensionality. He draws with an industrial laser, cutting angular or curved shapes into blackened steel plates, essentially turning them into elaborate paperclips that pinch, pull, and compress his trademark stacks of tracing paper." It's like … a little metal shibari for sheets of pulp? Ingenious, to be sure, and visually intriguing.

And how suite it is, to have composer Graham Reynolds presenting the Austin premiere of his downright shit-kickin' magnum opus, with guitarist Redd Volkaert, pedal steel player Ricky Davis, and 11 other musicians bringing the piece to full sonic fruition at the HighBall (and partying thereafter).

Brooke Burnside, Diego Mireles Duran, and Carlos Rosales-Silva use use their unique perspectives to understand the residues of colonial histories and expand the Western cultural vocabulary to include the traditions of their homelands and ancestors, the visual and the spatial offering an alternative to the codified and inequitable linguistic and logical mathematical approaches that most educational structures are built on.

Called "Chameleon Dreams," because they'll be "projection-mapping the hell out of the Native venue" to "transform everyone into beautiful walking canvases," and so they want you to come dressed in white. Also, there will be a flood of booty-rockin' music, drinks, and snacks amid a series of art installations. So: Much dancing, rampant Instagrammability, the whole modern club scene thing, you know?

Hardly a better gallery in town to be affiliated with Austin Design Week than Phillip Niemeyer's 12th Street temple of graphic expression, we reckon, and here is its relevant exhibition, a group show of creative practices that overlap cultures – primarily professional design and fine art, but also politics, business, spirituality, and social change. And see our effusion about the show's vivid components right here.

The artist Rehab El Sadek continues her exploration into issues related to immigration, belonging, communication, and language, using sound installation, photography, and the written word to inspire consideration of residential spaces and our relationship to them and to each other. Visitors to this intimate Eastside gallery are invited to add their own reflections on where they live and where they have felt most at home. Note: The closing celebration features a reading by Naomi Shihab Nye and friends.

That's right, one of Austin's best little galleries is back – bigger and better than ever, now in a new space south of the river. And what a way to inaugurate this fresh venue – with a sort of sequel to last year's excellent "Witches" show, this one curated by Laurel Barickman and Katie Cowden and featuring a plethora of artists drawing their subjects from folklore and occultism's darker spaces and from deep inside the shadows of human nature. They're embracing – and displaying – all of it here, though: the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the holy and the evil in everyone. The devil, as we know, is in the details.

And so a Haze – the 2015 winner of the Laughing Skull Comedy Festival, no less – drifts in from Brooklyn this weekend to settle upon the Velv's storied stage, with Austin's own Ashley Overton opening.

This is the launch of the author's new short story collection.

This fierce Rita Anderson play, about the women and other unsung heroes in the Civil War, explores a part of history not previously dramatized. Find out what happens – maybe what actually happened – when an African American "deserter" wanders into the camp of the Irish Brigade near Gettysburg. Directed by Christina J. Moore for Mélange Theatre Company.

Austin Playhouse celebrates the holiday season with the romantic musical comedy, set in the 1930s, about two feuding shop clerks who can’t seem to find common ground, but by night write beautiful love letters to their "secret admirers." And who do you suppose those turn out to be? (Note: Not Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan, although this play was made into the movie You've Got Mail.) Starring Joey Banks and Sarah Zeringue, directed by Scott Shipman with musical direction by Lyn Koenning.

From griffins and giants to demons and dragons, monsters have enthralled people throughout time. In medieval art and literature, these fanciful creatures give form to fears, curiosities, and fantasies of the unfamiliar and the unknown. This new exhibition, organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, presents a lively array of monsters that appear in more than 50 illuminated manuscripts from the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Each of the three sections of the exhibition – "Terrors, Aliens, and Wonders" – will explore the ways monsters functioned as the embodiment of power, the representation of marginalized groups in society, or the inspiration for awe.

This installation presents new work that expands Lily Cox-Richard’s research into the contextual history of materials, making visible unseen systems that dictate materials’ production, value, and use, and engages larger questions of natural resources, labor, the specifics of place, and the politics of viewership.

The complex relationship between contemporary art and anthropology shapes the subject of "The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn," an 11-artist exhibition representing a wide range of media – including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. And here's our own Robert Faires with a full review of the show.

This experimental sci-fi show, written by Siri Gurudev, features queer people of color in a dystopian world where community, love, and rebellion allow trans posthumans to thrive. Directed by kt shorb for Generic Theatre Company. And here's our full review of the show.

Yeah, no, this is a monumental showing of work – including a series of paintings commissioned for the exhibition – by one of the best, most provocative artists working on this planet. The former Austinite (he taught at UT for 20 years) Michael Ray Charles "is known for art that investigates the legacy of historic racial stereotypes of African Americans. Since the 1990s, he's created complex, layered paintings that challenge stereotypes, power dynamics, and social and cultural hierarchies." Ah, words can't even – but our Arts Editor Robert Faires offers a fine preview right here.

In this solo show, the Austin-based artist has manipulated wire into subtle shapes alluding to the human figure, his works seeming to dance between two and three dimensions as they cast their complex shadows, further complicating as well as explaining their form.

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez and Betelhem Makonnen explore immigration and transnational identity, political repression, and the impact of silence in family narratives.

"Seriously cool Native American art."

That Welsh rocker Jon Langford and the Belgian artist Jo Clauwaert share a double bill of visual exhibitions at this South Congress bastion of folk art, bringing a bifocal look at contemporary culture via painted portraits and more.