Update as of Mon 8/15/22 at 11:30 AM: Unfortunately Monday Night Foodball has been canceled tonight due to illness. Next Foodball is still on for Mon 8/22, and future dates are available here.
The Chicago Black Artist Union is a grouping of Black Chicago creatives from several disciplines who joined together to share their artistry with a variety of Chicago audiences, support each other with new opportunities, and build community with each other. The union was conceived by multi-instrumentalist Isaiah Collier in 2020, and came to fruition soon after with the help of choreographer Kennedy Banks and a group of Collier and Banks’s regular collaborators including composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid. Today’s An Unacquainted Orchestra performance is the union’s first official show of the summer, and will feature Collier as conductor with a group of union affiliates that, like the audience, won’t know in advance who is playing. The outdoor show is also a vigil in honor of the violinist, conductor, and professor Terrance Gray, who passed away in June. Gray was a founding member of the Chicago Sinfonietta as well as associate conductor of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, and his legacy of teaching and musicianship fostered the same sense of community that the union seeks to achieve. The music starts at 4 PM at 5932 S. Cottage Grove (just east of the Fountain of Time sculpture near Midway Plaisance); a $15 donation will be requested and organizers suggest you bring lawn chairs. You can find more information at the Chicago Black Artist Union’s Facebook page. (SCJ)
Tonight is a chance to eat traditional Indian comfort food at Monday Night Foodball as offered by chef Jasmine Sheth, of the “always fascinating” Tasting India meal delivery pop-up. Reader senior writer Mike Sula writes more here about Sheth’s food and journey to the Jean Banchet Awards. Tasting India’s special menu for tonight includes goda masala chicken puffs and jackfruit chai bonato bars, and the Kedzie Inn’s owner Jon Pokorny will be offering a special cocktail to complement the dishes. You can pre-order here; limited walk-in ordering will be available starting at 5 PM at 4100 N. Kedzie.
The curators of the exhibition “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo,” which recently closed at DePaul Art Museum, used tea as a symbol to inform their work. Sharing tea and sitting together can be a simple way to make space for tough or intimate conversations, but tea can also be construed as a metaphor for imperialism, especially when one looks at the colonialism of the international tea trade. Tonight’s event at PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood) offers tea and a listening session, hosted by “Remaking the Exceptional” cocurator Aaron Hughes. Visitors will listen together to an episode of the Remaking the Exceptional podcast, which will be followed by an open discussion facilitated by Hughes about the connections between policing and incarceration in Chicago and the human rights violations committed during the Global War on Terror. This free event begins at 7 PM.