Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with artists about their project Untidy Objects, on view outdoors at adjacent to the Logan Center for the Arts. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability. Just south of Hyde Park’s Logan Center for the Arts, an acre of land hosts Untidy Objects, a dynamic multispecies […]
Tag: University of Chicago
Posted inOn Culture
The Chicago Project
What’s the Chicago connection to the events depicted in Christopher Nolan’s explosive, confusing, and acclaimed Oppenheimer film? Here’s what I learned from University of Chicago professor emeritus and astrophysicist Don Lamb. We spoke last week, before the film opened. J. Robert Oppenheimer led the World War II effort known as the Manhattan Project, but the […]
Posted inBook Review
Inside Ling Ma’s darkly funny fiction
I don’t usually get ensnared by a book. But Ling Ma’s short story collection, Bliss Montage, was different. I started reading it Thanksgiving morning and literally could not stop. There was something urgent in Ma’s writing, something that demanded full attention. It might be her distinctive voice—wry, witty, relatable. Or her sentences—carefully crafted, but not […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Purchasing power
Hadas Thier explains how the Chicago school of economics dominates the government’s response to inflation.
Posted inArts & Culture
What Paul Moses Taught
Mike Moses never knew his father, Paul Bell Moses. For the most part, he was afraid to ask about him. He knew about his father’s remarkable life in broad strokes. For example, he knew Moses—the first African American student admitted to Haverford College, a protege of the eminent art collector Albert Barnes, and later a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
For the first time in nearly 60 years, Instrument for La Monte Young sings again
David Skidmore couldn’t even begin to count the number of instruments he’s played. As a member of Grammy Award favorites Third Coast Percussion (most recently nominated for Perspectives, released earlier this year), Skidmore could plausibly play instruments from all six habitable continents for any given performance—plus the odd metal scrap, surgical tube, or squeaky toy. […]
Posted inAgenda
Readings from Remaking the Exceptional, Interrobang Theatre Project, and more
This summer, DePaul Art Museum hosted “Remaking the Exceptional,” a group exhibition curated by artist and activists Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsburg that explored the similarities between survivors of torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and survivors of police torture in Chicago. This evening, Ginsburg and fellow activists celebrate the release of Remaking the […]
Posted inAgenda
Winter clothing drive, Public Media Institute Halloween party, and more
Do you have spare coats, boots, gloves, hats, or socks? The Rogers Park People’s Survival Program, which is connected to the Chicago-wide collective For the People is leading a winter clothing drive, and searching for these priority items to be redistributed locally. They are also looking for underwear (never worn!), blankets, and basic hygiene products. […]
Posted inAgenda
Dreary North, Selena tribute, All That Light, Code of the Freaks, and Stew
If you’re looking for music that pulls no punches, head over to Subterranean (2011 W. North) this weekend for Dreary North Fest, three nights of extreme music running the gamut from difficult noise and grindcore to experimental hip-hop and “postapocalyptic metal” (as Reader senior writer Leor Galil describes the wonderfully named band Urine Hell in […]
Posted inMusic
Guitarist Eli Winter taps into Chicago’s musical resources
People pick their college for a lot of reasons beyond education. In Eli Winter’s case, one of the factors that persuaded him to choose the University of Chicago was the chance to engage with the city’s music scene. While growing up in Houston, Texas, the guitarist was particularly drawn to the way Chicago musicians from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Skateboarding as social practice
An average spectator might observe a skateboarder as nothing but a person on wheels; they see an athlete—or a delinquent, maybe—pushing and coasting and jumping (“How does the board stick to the bottom of their feet?”), there one minute and gone the next. But from the rider’s perspective, the world is transforming around them. Minute […]
Posted inFilm
The Janes is a call to action
“What we know for a fact is that making abortion illegal does not stop women from seeking abortions, it just keeps them from getting safe abortions.”
Posted inArts & Culture
Deeper research and a politics of care
In the summer of 2020, the people of Chicago rose up in support of Black life, with thousands taking part in dozens of actions across the city. That season of uprisings had curator and cultural producer Ciera Alyse McKissick thinking about Black people moving through space: about how Black migration and travel has been a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A shooting star of a talent, gone too soon
The 1960 oil painting Garden of Music—the magisterial centerpiece of a knockout survey of the art of Bob Thompson— shows Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and a half dozen other jazz luminaries coexisting in a pastoral landscape. Some figures are silhouettes, while others are rendered with distinct features. How the painter balanced so many disparate elements […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Politics of fear: Are youth really to blame for the carjacking spike?
Cops say masked teens with a thirst for violence and joyrides are terrorizing the city. An examination of arrests reveals a narrative built on shoddy data and anecdotal evidence.