Welcome to the Annual Manual for the Arts.

In years past, the River Cities' Reader has published a music guide each summer. We've expanded our vision this year with this inaugural Annual Manual for the Arts.

The impetus behind the Annual Manual for the Arts is that there has been no single resource for the arts in the Quad Cities, whether you're a consumer of the arts, one of their practitioners, or someone who wants to become one of their practitioners.

In the new exhibit at Quad City Arts, the concept of the private journey is illustrated by two artists. But by showing only the means of literal transportation - vessels and roads - the artists create something universal to help us consider our own spiritual travels.

Joan Webster-Vore presents dream-like paper vessels of poetic beauty, while Fritz Goeckner shows large, softly bright digital color photographs of rural highway landscapes that offer the everyday in a new and beautiful way.

Artists Ralph Iaccarino and Silvia Engel are wonderfully matched in an attractive show at the MidCoast Fine Arts Gallery at the Mississippi Valley Welcome Center in LeClaire. Iaccarino paints light and musical colors in a flat space, while Engel works in a shallow space with luminescent three-dimensional colors.

While Dennis Kendall Hall's work captures numerous famous people and aspects of pop culture, it would be inappropriate to think of his work within the confines of Warhol-ian Pop Art. Andy Warhol focused on celebrity, persona, packaging, façades, and mass production. Hall's work has a sensitivity that more frequently captures the beautiful and eccentric personalities of the "real" world instead of the glossy unreality of the "glamorous."