Author Archives: Ulysses Smith

Lora Chamberlain stepped up to the mike on the Gunther Murphy’s stage, excited to report the latest returns for her presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich: Hawaii, 30 percent; Idaho, 6 percent; Utah, 7 percent–states, it’s true, about as sparsely populated as the fund-raiser Chamberlain was hosting. But though only 20 or so people showed that Thursday […]

To read Eugene Wildman’s new short story collection, The World of Glass, you’d never guess that he once considered plot the bane of literary fiction. Hot on the heels of the 1967 appearance of the Anthology of Concretism, the first American collection of visual poetry, which he compiled as editor of the Chicago Review, Wildman […]

Before Syd Harris started photographing Chicago workers in the 1950s, he was one himself, logging 20-some years in the stockyards and behind the wheel of a beer truck. But he’d also fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war and helped run the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in […]

Though he grew up in Athens, Andreas Georgas didn’t hear about rembetika, the music commonly known as the “Greek blues,” until 1994, when he was 18. He was studying piano at Roosevelt University when some American friends put on a rembetika concert. He liked it so much he joined the group for its next show, […]

At his first one-man show, at Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1990, artist Stephen Warde Anderson was the toast of Chicago. “They put me up in a fancy hotel,” he remembers. “Had the opening and a big dinner afterward with a dozen people. They said, ‘It did well. Here’s another check for $1,000.’” Anderson sold 30 […]

Friday 3/29 – Thursday 4/4 MARCH 29 FRIDAY Puppeteer Damien Hinojosa says his current show, Carnival of the Dead–which he organized and directed with his sister Raven–is a bit like a Latin American street carnival: “festive but also a little macabre.” It was inspired, he says, by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano’s Century of the Wind […]

Friday 1/18 – Thursday 1/24 JANUARY 18 FRIDAY “The director of a clinic preapproved this work,” says Chicago painter Mary King of her watercolor and acrylic works on paper, “but later substance abuse counselors wanted it removed, stating, ‘It’s about child abuse!’ and ‘Penises are everywhere!’…Some of the items they called penises were arborvitae bushes.” […]