Nebraska arts, live and close to home.
Friday LIVE moves through Nebraska’s cultural calendar with brisk interviews, live music, poetry, theater previews, and gallery talk. It suits listeners who want the practical details of an event and a little time with the people making it happen.
PRESS PLAY
Friday LIVE treats Nebraska culture as something happening in real rooms, on real stages, and inside specific landscapes. The show’s rhythm is brisk. Each segment usually starts with the useful facts: who is performing, what is opening, where it is happening, and when people can go. Nebraska Chamber Players can move from a program title like Darn Good Music into the quiet signals musicians use while playing together. An exhibition such as Hold the Space Between Us can become a discussion of grief, memory, resilience, and finding oneself again after loss. A poetry segment can turn from a local event into a reflection on why every place counts if someone is from there. Friday LIVE has a strong eye for place. Lincoln galleries, Omaha music rooms, Nebraska City arts centers, Wayne State College, the International Quilt Museum, Valentine, Ord, Thetford, and the Sandhills all appear as more than calendar listings. They are treated as cultural ground. The show is also comfortable moving between disciplines. One hour may include chamber music, live songs, poetry, theater, quilts, film, book tours, jazz, and conversations about land stewardship. The interviews are accessible without flattening the subjects. Guests are allowed to use arts vocabulary, historical context, and personal anecdote, while the show keeps returning to what an audience member might notice or need to know. That balance gives Friday LIVE its usefulness. It is not just a preview reel. It is a weekly map of who is making work, where that work is rooted, and how Nebraska’s public culture keeps renewing itself through small venues, local memory, live performance, and careful conversation.
Made for: Friday LIVE is for listeners who follow Nebraska’s cultural scene, from theater and chamber music to poetry, exhibitions, local history, and community events. It also fits anyone who likes public-radio interviews with artists, writers, directors, and guests.
What sets it apart: The show pairs event-service clarity with unusually place-specific conversation. It does not just announce arts happenings; it lets Nebraska artists and guests explain the process, memory, landscape, and local relationships behind them.
The latest news about arts and humanities happenings around Nebraska, as well as talk and performances from those involved.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Friday LIVE makes Nebraska's music scene audible through live performances and conversational previews, while connecting it to the state's wider arts life.
Friday LIVE works like an arts magazine with its microphone planted in Nebraska. Genevieve Randall moves between artist conversations, event previews and performances recorded in studios and public venues, giving music a place within the state's broader cultural life.
A Nebraska arts calendar comes alive, letting you meet the makers before choosing your weekend.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A chamber-music conversation finds its spark in ensemble cues and the private labor behind performance.
Friday Live Extra links chamber music and visual art through the plain work of making art cohere. The Nebraska Chamber Players' conversation with artistic director Joyce Besch and flutist Lindsay Bartlett begins with the modest phrase "darn good music," then opens into…
Live music and plainspoken poetry give this Lincoln broadcast a steady sense of place.
Friday Live makes good use of its setting, opening at St. Paul United Methodist Church in downtown Lincoln before moving into Daniel Christian's "Vanish Land," a song grounded in sanctuary, healing, and the work of finding what was left behind.
A Nebraska arts hour finds its strongest spark in quilts that complicate familiar ideas about art.
Friday Live frames a Nebraska arts hour as a sequence of invitations into close attention. Diane Bartles' look at Evelyn Sharp, Nebraska's Queen of the Air, gives the episode its most immediately human thread, following a woman whose wish to fly led her to earn pilot…
A brisk arts roundup that stays local while widening out to the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Friday Live moves at a quick clip, but it keeps its footing in Nebraska even as it ranges farther out. It touches music in Hastings, an art exhibition in Lincoln, a look at Nebraska City through new and old quilts, and a conversation with a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
A brisk arts morning linking flute music, collaborative poetry, and a human story shaped around artificial intelligence.
Friday Live uses its broadcast from The Mill Coffee and Tea in downtown Lincoln as a tight arts sampler, moving from live music by a pared-down Coro de Flauti and the Brick House duo to more poetry from Nebraska state poet Jewel Rogers, a conversation about Renga, and a…
A grounded Nebraska arts broadcast where comics, roots music, visual art, and workplace questions share the same table.
Friday Live settles into Mill Coffee and Tea in downtown Lincoln with an easy sense of place, using the morning broadcast to move through Nebraska arts, music, and work.
A brisk Nebraska arts hour that turns a Sandhills book release into a wider tour of local reading, film, and theater.
Friday Live sketches a Nebraska arts map through places, books, films, and the people bringing them into public view. Alan Bartels opens with Secret Nebraska Sandhills, his guide to the weird, wonderful, and obscure, and the conversation gets its most useful shape from stops in…
Friday Live broadcasts from The Mill Coffee & Tea in Lincoln, featuring interviews with Nebraska artists and musicians.
This episode of Friday Live features three main segments: an interview with photographer Alan Bartels about his new book 'Secret Nebraska Sandhills', a discussion with theater directors Karim Muasher and Carrie Brown on adapting Mari Sandoz's novel 'Capital City', and a conversation with composer Scott Kirby about his multimedia show 'Main Street Souvenirs'.
This episode of Friday Live on Nebraska Public Media features discussions on music events in Nebraska and an interview with photographer Mike Forsberg about his exhibition on whooping cranes.
This episode features the Capital Jazz Society bringing the University of Nebraska-Omaha faculty jazz combo to perform at Screamers Family Restaurant in Lincoln.
This episode previews cultural events including a documentary screening with director Ivy McDonald, artist Tony Fitzpatrick's visit, and insights from a Nebraska Storytelling Festival participant.
Friday Live Extra pairs Nebraska Chamber Players' final-season "darn good music" concert at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln with Leah Powell Hosseinabad's Wall Space LNK exhibition, "Hold the Space Between Us." Joyce Besch and Lindsay Bartlett explain why the chamber program groups Giacchino Rossini, Paul Taffanel, Astor Piazzolla, and Jean Francais as music they simply wanted to play, and how Piazzolla's bandoneon part becomes a woodwind-quintet transcription.
Friday Live, hosted by Genevieve Randall, broadcasts from St.
This episode features interviews about two cultural events in Nebraska: the Homegrown poetry series with State Poet Jewel Rogers in Nebraska City and Omaha's Culture House and Hip Hop Lab initiatives.
This episode features an interview with photographer and writer Alan Bartels about his new book 'Secret Nebraska Sandhills', exploring the unique and obscure aspects of the Sandhills region, including its wildlife, people, and upcoming book release events.
This episode features an interview with Tyler Rennie about the Beatrice Community Players' production of the comedy play 'The Cottage' and a preview of musician Mei Semones' upcoming show in Omaha.
Friday Live on Nebraska Public Media moves from Genevieve Randall's conversation with Diane Bartles about Evelyn Sharp to a Quilt Museum panel, Ed Love's Nebraska Jazz Orchestra update, Nathan Ertzner's poems, and a review of Natchez.
Friday Live opens from Nebraska Public Media's Lincoln studios with Genevieve Randall welcoming listeners.
Friday Live opens from The Mill Coffee and Tea in downtown Lincoln, with Genevieve Randall introducing a lively mix of music and arts guests.
This episode previews Halloween events including the Anvil Orchestra performing live to Nosferatu, the Hastings Symphony's 100th anniversary, and cultural happenings across Nebraska.
This episode of Friday Live on Nebraska Public Media previews cultural events including a choral concert, Day of the Dead activities, a museum exhibition, and a comedian's show, along with film recommendations.