Redding Center to celebrate one year, plus a mix of upcoming events

I asked Karla Redding-Andrews if she was beaming at the prospects of celebrating the Otis Redding Center for the Arts’ first anniversary Saturday.

She took it a little further.

“My team, family, supporters — everybody, is just overjoyed,” she said.

Redding-Andrews, daughter of the late “King of Soul,” Otis Redding, is vice president and executive director of the Otis Redding Foundation, the organization behind the center. 

The foundation has been effectively at work since the singer died in an airplane crash in 1967. His widow, Zelma Redding, continued carrying out his desire, expressed earlier that year, to be a force for good in Middle Georgia. 

Particularly, he wanted to help underprivileged youth with educational scholarships and launch youth camps geared toward music that also encompassed a variety of life skills for success.

Zelma Redding kept furthering the vision through the years but made those efforts official by establishing the Otis Redding Foundation in 2007.

In recent decades, the foundation has provided music lessons and a variety of summer camps and other programs for different age levels, covering a range of music education and music industry topics.

But their facilities at the north end of Cotton Avenue in downtown Macon were tiny. Handfuls of students could come for lessons each week, but camps had to be held in other locations, which, of course, were not geared for what the Reddings were offering.

Now, at the one-year-old, state-of-the-art,15,000-square-foot facility at the intersection of Cotton Avenue and First Street, things are different.

The center houses seven creative labs, five private lesson rooms, an indoor-outdoor amphitheater, the O3 Recording Studio, named after the late Otis Redding III, as well as a multitude of multi-use, student-friendly spaces.

Macon’s Otis Redding statue, formerly tucked away a little too discreetly in Gateway Park, is now located outside the center at the street-edge of an open‑air courtyard.

The courtyard, with its access to the Zelma Redding Amphitheater, is where anniversary celebrations will be held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

Of course, there will be live music from the Otis Redding Foundation and center students, but there will also be vendors, food, public art, games, prizes and more — all to joyfully revel in the multiplied effectiveness and greater number of students, participants and quality offerings at the facility.  

These community offerings, also made available to area schools, are all due to the Reddings, the center team and the foundation’s supporters.

“My family, team and I are incredibly humbled to make it to this one year of serving and inspiring so many young people,” Redding-Andrews said. “The center is a true testament to my father’s dream of his community having a place that provides access to all young people to be creative and self-empowered to begin their paths to success, wherever that takes them.”

To get involved with the center or support it, visit orcamacon.org.

Upcoming events

Many things are stacking up this weekend and in the days ahead. Here’s a glimpse at just a few.

Soundcheck: Art Exhibit and Bragg Jam 2026 Reveal Party

On, Thursday 6:30-9 p.m. at Tanglewood Art Studios, find out who’s playing Bragg Jam this year and be the first to get tickets at this combination reveal party-art show, where all the art has been created via vinyl records. Painted, mixed-media and three-dimensional works are all present for this one-of-a-kind exhibit, with work from local artists.

Bragg Jam, Tanglewood Studios, 478 Creatives and Downtown Macon have partnered to bring about this unique, cross-arts community-building celebration of the creativity and culture of Macon’s music and art scene. 

Fall Line Brewery will be on hand and there will be live music from Tommy Toledo.

Learn more about Bragg Jam at braggjam.org and look for Soundcheck’s Facebook events page.

Autism Rocks

 Saturday, 3-7 p.m. at the Museum of Arts and Sciences, The Frogs of Calabash and Jackson Griffith are set to headline the fifth Autism Rocks, a family-friendly fundraiser for Central Georgia Autism. 

There will be a silent auction, food trucks, beer, wine and other games and activities along with the music. Kids enter free and general admission is $25.

Central Georgia Autism raises awareness, provides autism therapy scholarships, creates community programs and works in other ways to support individuals and families affected by autism.

Visit centralgaautism.org for tickets and more information.

21st Annual Fired Works Ceramic Festival

The festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily through April 18 in the Round Building at Carolyn Crayton Park.

One of the largest exhibits of functional and sculptural pottery in the state of Georgia, Fired Works provides a marketplace this year for about 40 local, state and regional artists to show and sell their work while also shining a spotlight on Central Georgia’s deep history of pottery-making.

Fired Works is a much-anticipated event for seeing great art and purchasing decorative and practical home items from some of the world’s best potters and ceramists.

The event is free to browse and more information can be found at maconartsalliance.org.

Macon-Mercer Symphony Orchestra

On Monday, 7:30 p.m. at the Piedmont Grand Opera House, the closing concert of the 2025-26 season will feature guest conductor Yaniv Segal to conduct Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. 

Segal has only recently been added to the faculty of Mercer University’s Robert McDuffie Center for Strings as the director of orchestral training and one of the conductors of the Macon-Mercer Symphony Orchestra. 

A conductor, composer-arranger, instrumentalist (violin, viola), recording artist and actor, words like enthusiastic, lively, incisive and convincing have been used to describe Segal.

Premiering in 1937, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 is one of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich’s most often performed works. 

Written under the regime of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, it is said Shostakovich lived with a suitcase packed in case of reprisals against him for his music. 

Mystery surrounds the work, with scholars often debating whether it was a work of compliance or protest. But at its heart, it’s known as a masterful musical creation.

The 2026 winner of the Mercer University Concerto Competition will also be featured as a solo artist during the evening. For ticketing and more information, find the Grand at thegrandmacon.com.

Contact writer Michael W. Pannell at mwpannell@gmail.com. Find him on Instagram at michael_w_pannell.