Author Archives: Deanna Isaacs

Landscape architect Clifford Miller and historian David Wendell are standing at the edge of a clearing in a wooded yard in Highland Park having a polite disagreement about whether this is a good example of the genius of Jens Jensen. Wendell thinks it is. He points to the open area, the curving lines, the stepped […]

The deal hasn’t gone down yet, but it looks like architect Paul Schweikher’s home and studio won’t be bulldozed to make way for an expanded water treatment plant after all. The village of Schaumburg is about to fork over a half million dollars to buy this little-known treasure, rescuing it from the clutches of the […]

Back in the early 70s, when Dan Troiani’s wife, Kathy, was still just his girlfriend, she dragged him to Adler Planetarium. Troiani had lived in Chicago all his life but had never been to Adler, or to a sky show anywhere else. A science-shy film major at Columbia College, his interest in space was limited […]

Just for a second or two, no longer than it takes to pull out a machine gun and mow down five or six people, School of the Art Institute Film Center director Barbara Scharres sounded like Monica Lewinsky. It happened while Scharres was attempting to explain her attraction to Hong Kong cinema, which, she says, […]

Anthony Molinaro was a graduate student at Northwestern University two years ago when his performance at the Naumburg International Piano Competition, which included Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 (the one that sent David Helfgott over the edge), wowed the judges and jump-started his career. It was a performance fueled by a passion for music that […]

Freelance curator Alfonso Morales was poking around a warehouse on the grounds of Mexico City’s giant printing company Galas de Mexico a couple years ago when he made the find of a lifetime. Morales had been talking to Cesareo Moreno of Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum about mounting an exhibit on calendar art and […]

It’s a long climb to the rehearsal room where Michael Pisaro is scheduled to play his new composition, Pi–four flights up in the second-oldest building on the Northwestern University campus. There’s no elevator to this space from another century, a high-ceilinged octagon with half-moon windows and stenciled walls, dominated by a shiny black baby grand. […]

Having spent 30 years behind a camera, Rockford photographer Lynn Sanders knew a prince when she saw one. At a family outing at Medieval Times in 1993, she found herself riveted by a face she knew the camera would love: high cheekbones, straight nose, and strong chin, set off by green eyes and a mass […]

There’s a big picture of Sandra Bernhard in the window of the Kabbalah Learning Centre in Wilmette. Bernhard is one of the celebrities who’ve recently adopted this ancient system of Jewish mysticism, says the center’s rabbi, Yehudah Grundman. Roseanne is another. Neither strikes me as the soul of tranquillity, but I guess that’s the point–if […]

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Ed Paschke Sr. had to drop out of school and go to work during the Depression. He got a job driving a truck for a Chicago bakery, met his bride there, and was launched on a lifelong blue-collar and small-business career that included construction work, farming, and demolition. In […]