ArtsWave has announced the lineup for its 2026-27 Flow series, a season-long run of Black art experiences that will carry ticket holders across four Cincinnati stages between September 2026 and June 2027. The Flow Pass opens with a jazz tribute to John Coltrane at the Aronoff Center and closes ten months later with the world premiere of an opera about civil rights icon John Lewis at Music Hall.
The season kicks off September 10, 2026, when NEA Jazz Masters Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves take the Aronoff Center stage to mark the centennial of Coltrane's birth. As reported by Cincinnati CityBeat, the performance ties into the pair's Blue Note Records tribute album, "Dedicated to You", which revisits Coltrane's 1963 collaboration with vocalist Johnny Hartman, according to Blue Note Records.
Flow launched in 2020 alongside local community leaders with the goal of building a dedicated, diverse audience for Black artistry across Greater Cincinnati's major cultural institutions, per ArtsWave. Each Flow Pass event opens with a Flow Social reception featuring food, drinks, and conversation among pass holders, artists and community leaders, before moving into the featured performance or exhibition. ArtsWave President and CEO Alecia Kintner said Flow lets people experience leading Black artistry in Cincinnati and help grow it.
A Season Built Across Four Stages
After the jazz opener, the Flow Pass carries subscribers to the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in February 2027 for Carlyle Brown's *The African Company Presents Richard III*. The play dramatizes the true 1821 story of New York's African Grove Theatre, the nation's first Black theater company, which faced legal harassment and mob violence while competing against a rival white theater, according to background from Red Bull Theater.
The series then moves to the Taft Museum of Art for the Robert S. Duncanson Experience. Painted between 1850 and 1852 by Duncanson, the first Black American artist to achieve international acclaim, the eight landscape murals in the museum's entry hall are formally designated as National Historic Landmarks and are recognized as the most significant pre-Civil War domestic murals in the country, per the Taft Museum of Art. The museum has hosted an annual Duncanson Artist-in-Residence program since 1986 through the Duncanson Society, a tradition that began with inaugural resident and poet Nikki Giovanni, according to ArtsWave.
Opera Closes The Season With A Local World Premiere
The Flow season concludes June 18-20, 2027, with the world premiere of Cincinnati Opera's "John Lewis: Good Trouble" at Music Hall. The opera, with music by Maria Thompson Corley and a libretto by Diana Solomon-Glover, weaves together Lewis's 1960s civil rights activism, including sit-ins and the Selma march, with his 2012 role as an elder statesman in Congress, as detailed by BroadwayWorld. The production is the second commission in Cincinnati Opera's Black Opera Project, a three-year initiative backed by the Mellon Foundation to expand the operatic canon with new works by Black creators, following the summer 2026 premiere of the Afrofuturist opera "LALOVAVI".
Cincinnati CityBeat reports that the Flow series is presented in partnership with arts organizations across the city, with the Cincinnati Arts Association, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Cincinnati Opera and Taft Museum of Art all participating in the 2026 season. The four Flow Pass events span jazz, theater, visual art and opera, spotlighting Black artistry across disciplines rather than confining it to a single venue or genre.
Pricing Ties Into ArtsWave's Centennial Year
The 2026-27 Flow Pass is priced at $195, or $180 for members of ArtsWave's Circle of African American Leaders for the Arts, according to Movers & Makers. The pricing coincides with ArtsWave's centennial year, and pass holders will get bonus access to the organization's 100 Days of Arts celebration in spring 2027. Circle membership requires a $1,500 annual leadership gift that funds grants targeted at elevated multicultural arts programming across the Tri-State region.
The series sits atop a broader funding structure that keeps its host venues running. ArtsWave awarded nearly $9 million in Sustaining Impact grants in July 2026 to 46 regional organizations, Hoodline previously reported, including $2.3 million to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and $683,850 to Cincinnati Opera. That general-fund support underpins the same institutions now hosting Flow's jazz, theater, visual art and opera programming for the coming season.
