“Didn’t we have real iguanas in Dallas?” “Yes!” says Preston Lane. “And they were nightmares. They hissed, they bit, they pooed. The actor who had to bring them on stage, his arms were covered in scratches, but the minute they got under the stage lights, they thought it was the sun and they completely stopped moving.

The scale of the transformation happening at Winston-Salem’s premier contemporary art venue really manifests in the Main Gallery, where workers toil over two new freestanding walls and a concrete floor encrusted with carpet glue.

When Ricky Needham works, he works silently, except for the occasional breath sucked noisily through his teeth. He bends over a drafting table on a recent weekday morning putting the final touches on “Kings Flying Over the Holy City,” a fanciful depiction of two crowned figures flying a magic motorcycle over a dome-capped skyline.

The Open Space Café Theatre doesn’t have a fancy arts district address. You won’t find it among the high-end boutiques, white-tie restaurants and parking valets that have taken to revitalized downtown Greensboro like termites to deadwood.

Shalini Chatterjee spent the summer of 1989 hand painting animation cells at New York University. Nineteen summers later the former film student cradles an oversized videocassette inside her West End office and muses on the march of moviemaking technology.

“We considered work that shares some of the same metaphysical associations as the garden,” she says. “The idea was to bring together a group of artists who are working with the themes of growth and decay.” Carpenter organized the show like a garden, dividing the gallery into plots that each artist could cultivate as they pleased.

There’s something you should know about the stage at Time Out: If you cross it during a drag king performance, you will be slapped. The bartender issues this warning twice before the first king ever sets foot on the polished parquet placemat that passes for a stage at the tiny lesbian hangout on Bellemeade Street in Greensboro.

As much as I love movies, I have to admit that it took me awhile until I liked Westerns. Once I did, however, I took to westerns like a horse to water. In many ways, it is the quintessential American genre. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about filmmaker Sam Peckinpah — a reflection, perhaps, less on the western films in which he specialized than the mindset he frequently found himself in. (I can dig it.) For fans of westerns, something very special is coming to town this week.

In addition to the artwork displayed on cars at the Heavy Rebel Weekender on Trade Street in Winston-Salem was an equally artistic display of tattoos; canvases walking around all weekend.

The latest exhibition at the Weatherspoon - TRANSActions: Contemporary Latino and Latin American Art - is about as cohesive as any collection spanning two hemispheres, three continents and 10 countries can be.