In 2017, a barge drifted along the Chicago River. It wasn’t carrying the usual Ozinga concrete or gravel; instead it floated a museum. Produced by the Floating Museum, an interdisciplinary collective comprised of architect Andrew Schachman, artists Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and poet avery r. young, the museum barge showcased artwork from dozens of […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture
The sacred and profound in Stephen Burks’s ‘Spirit Houses’
“Each morning I make my way to the large east-facing windows overlooking the Harlem River. Sage, photos of my Beloveds, candles, water and items too sacred to name adorn my makeshift altar—an antique wooden liquor stand turned ‘spirit house.’ . . . Imbued with the stories it holds and lives it has lived, my altar […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Book by block
When I think of summer reading I think of book challenges from my local library. I’d sign up as a kid and track my reading habits for the chance of winning something fun like tickets to Six Flags or—more likely—a special bookmark or T-shirt. I never got the Six Flags tickets, but I always had […]
Posted inGhost Light
‘Don’t just say it—do it’
On Tuesday, September 12, Enrich Chicago released the results for its first racial equity report for the arts sector in the city: “Work Remains To Be Done: A Baseline Survey of Chicago’s BIPOC Arts & Culture Workers.” Enrich Chicago, founded in 2014, is a collaborative composed of arts and culture organizations and funders (nearly 40 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Iridescent illusions
The minute you step into the gallery, the clock starts ticking: you only have 30 seconds to experience María Burundarena’s world—if you choose not to return, that is. The line outside the door says otherwise. People are lining up, eager to get back in for another half-minute solitary experience that is what you make it—a […]
Posted inTheater Review
Petty lives of desperation
When The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway’s Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic drama. The story of lonely 40-year-old spinster Maureen Folan and her hypochondriacal and controlling mother, Mag, cut like a chainsaw through any […]
Posted inTheater Review
A superb View
When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe understands it’s actually a piece about self-deception leading to self-destruction and thus is as much of a punch in the gut as it was when it […]
Posted inTheater Review
Ring of Fire lacks dramatic heat
Let’s begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the rousing, Academy Award-winning 2005 movie, I Walk the Line, did on the silver screen: bring us Cash in his power and glory […]
Posted inTheater Review
A tale of two poets
Water People Theater’s last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, written by and starring artistic director Rebeca Alemán under the direction of Iraida Tapias. Alemán’s story of a Venezuelan human rights reporter struggling to regain her memory […]
Posted inTheater Review
Camp carnage
Several years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult waters with 1982’s Little Shop of Horrors, adapted from Roger Corman’s 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors. The film is famous, among […]
Posted inTheater Review
The love language of dance
It’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theatrical dance. So director Wayne Mell and choreographer Susan Pritzker have done a creditable job in staging a show that’s all about theatrical dancing. […]
Posted inTheater Review
Dark comedy goes nuclear in Cat’s Cradle
Heather Currie directs John Hildreth’s laugh-a-minute adaptation Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire about the U.S. nuclear program and all-around ignorant hubris. The story is told in flashback by a writer, possibly named Jonah, or maybe John (Tony Bozzuto), trying to write a book about the end of the world while perhaps living through said event. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Finding poetry in flyover country
“A writer of nonfiction discovers their own authority by telling. The good essays tell. They pronounce. They manifesto. They ask and wonder and feint and layer.” So proclaims author Sonya Huber, in a few-years-old article for LitHub, about unlearning long-accepted rules of writing. Huber puts these proclamations into action in her forthcoming essay collection, Love […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Black Light Cinema Project’ brings film to the forefront
“Black Light Cinema Project” opened July 7 at the South Side Community Art Center with a focus on belonging, home, archival materials, and the self. The topic of identity saturates both galleries, although with different content, allowing them to juxtapose one another while working in unison. The Center’s 1893 mansion, a former home in the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A new home for experimental literature
“We are identifying ‘micro-movements’ and allowing others to explain them to us,” says Jourdain Barton, a cofounder of Chicago’s TEMPER Press. Born to foster experimental writing, TEMPER emerged from such a micro-movement: a bond shared by Barton and her grad school classmates Geoffrey Billetter and Nat Holtzmann. To them, micro-movements are smaller, unidentified capsules of […]