Days of the Week
Author Archives: Deanna Isaacs
Posted inNews & Politics
Nowhere You Are Not
“This is going to be about the not happy ending,” Sandra Gilbert says. She has just stepped to the podium at Roosevelt University’s O’Malley Theatre and the audience for her Chicago Humanities Festival lecture is getting its first good look at her: a middle-aged woman with dark, bobbed hair squinting into the spotlight. The seating […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cool and Collected: an off-the-cuff connoisseur
Eugene R. Klompus has been collecting cuff links since the day his adolescent eye was smitten by a pair of marcasite sparklers dancing on the sleeves of a favorite uncle. After 40 years, he owns a mind-boggling 30,000 pairs, thousands of singles, and uncounted related trappings like tie bars, money clips, and detachable collars. Klompus […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Aiko Nakane’s passion for paper
When the U.S. government decided to round up Japanese Americans at the start of World War II, Aiko Nakane and her husband, a minister, were living in Palm Springs. “They came for the leaders first,” Seattle-born Nakane says. “My husband was taken right away.” Soon they wanted everyone. The order, on as little as a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Nancy Hild’s animal magnetism
“I’m trying to live this really consistent life,” Nancy Hild says, waving a cigarette toward her roommates the bulldog, the bunny, and the four hens. Hild and her menagerie share a Wicker Park loft where she ponders the follies of the flesh-eating world and renders the animals immortal in portraits worthy of 17th-century patricians. Hild […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Houses of the Future Today
No visit to Jim Morrow’s All-Steel Historic Home would be complete without a swing past the Century of Progress Architectural District in nearby Beverly Shores, where you can see four model homes from the 1933 World’s Fair. It’s a trip back to the future and a glimpse of Lustron’s inspiration. The four houses were part […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chesterton, IN
Chesterton grew up as a railroad town, but the train doesn’t stop here anymore. The big event seems to be the annual Oz Festival, held in September and featuring some of the real Munchkins from the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz. Chesterton also has a year-round Oz Fantasy Museum (route 49 and Yellow Brick […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Super Home
It was rat-proof, rust-proof, fire-proof, and termite-proof. But Lustron’s house of steel never had a chance.
Posted inArts & Culture
Group Efforts: gods in peril
Gwen Lux was 20 years old when she brought the gods to Michigan Avenue. It was 1929, and Lux and her husband Eugene had been commissioned to create sculpture for a 16-story skyscraper going up at 520 N. Michigan. The building’s architects, Frederick J. Thielbar and John Reed Fugard, wanted embellishment that would complement the […]
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Thrift Shopping: gifts of a certain vintage
When Pee-wee Herman got busted for patting his pecker in a public porn house a few years ago he sent the market in Pee-wee products into gyrations. As gifts for kids, all those grinning dolls in skimpy checked suits and red bow ties were suddenly so much dead meat. But on the adult circuit they […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: an artist’s life
Artist Stephen Deutch is mostly head and hands now. At age 86, like one of his own sculptures, he’s been pared down to the essentials, his spare, arthritic body just a connecting link. His face is hawklike, intense, and his hands are huge, with knuckles like walnuts and fingers as flat and long as paddles. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Graphic Confessions
HOLLIS SIGLER: THE BREAST CANCER JOURNAL at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through November 6 I knew Hollis Sigler was in trouble when I saw the compliments Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner paid another artist, Kay Rosen. Working his way through current shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Artner dealt with Rosen first. He […]
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Art People: Darrel Morris embroiders his past
Darrel Morris heard about the horrible fate of three-legged chicks–pecked to death by their own mothers–long before he turned it into embroidery. It was back when he was a kid, growing up on the hardscrabble remains of a family farm in rural Kentucky, trying desperately to fit in well enough to survive. His father was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Mary Brogger, heavy metal mama, gets pragmatic
Mary Brogger was cruising the spines at Myopic Books last winter–a conceptual artist on the prowl for concepts–when she picked up William James. Eureka! It was love at first read. “No absolutes, truth depends on practical outcomes, process is all;” she says, rattling off the charms of James’s old line on pragmatism. “I was predisposed […]