Since 2013, Forward Momentum Chicago has been engaging local students in the art of dance by meeting them where they are—in their schools. The South Loop–based organization is led by founder and executive director Pierre Lockett, a professional dancer who performed with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Joffrey Ballet, where he also served […]
Tag: Vol. 52 No. 15
Issue of May 4, 2023
On the cover: “The Food & Drink Issue”
Mariko Kallister knows the way of Soba: Meet Chicago’s master of handmade Japanese buckwheat noodles.
Photograph by Jeff Marini.
Find a print copy of the Reader.
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Posted inArts & Culture
An artistic life
“I always said I was going to be an artist,” Kay Hofmann says. “It’s all I was interested in.” The 90-year-old artist has a startlingly clear statement of purpose: to make art, primarily hand-carved stone sculptures, no matter what. And she has done exactly that, creating countless works over her long and storied career, just […]
Posted inMusic
Rock ’n’ roll drag queen Christeene brings her gender terrorism to the Salt Shed
Christeene is like the bathroom-stall love child of Iggy Pop and Peaches. No, she’s like an orphan who emerged from a hidden cave unearthed at a Blacklips Bar stage show in 1992. Actually, she’s like a teen girl from the Stone Age who time traveled to 2023 to learn R&B. A rock ’n’ roll drag […]
Posted inMusic
Two guitar-oriented instrumental ensembles with their sights set on transcendence share a bill at the Hungry Brain
This spring, east-coast instrumental duo Elkhorn released On the Whole Universe in All Directions (Centripetal Force), and Chicago’s Elijah McLaughlin Ensemble released the equally game-changing III (Astral Spirits). Though their sounds are distinct, the two bands aim at a common goal of musical transcendence—which may help explain how they ended up on this bill together. […]
Posted inCity Life
Brick by brick
Will Quam found his love of bricks by accident. While working as an itinerant theater teacher in Chicago, he would travel around the city for work, and as he traveled, he started to notice Chicago’s bricks. “Before 2016 if you’d have asked me what a brick looks like, I would have said, ‘red,’ and I […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago indie-rock duo OK Cool pack big tunes into a short time on Fawn
In summer 2020, during one of my routine Bandcamp searches for new music tagged “Chicago,” I found OK Cool’s Anomia EP, and it convinced me of the local indie-rock duo’s potential. With that EP, guitarist-vocalist Bridget Stiebris and bassist Haley Blomquist proved that they know all the obscure flavors of indie and emo that precede […]
Posted inMusic
The HIRS Collective uses noise and grindcore to celebrate diversity and fight hate
The HIRS Collective is an amorphous grindcore punk group whose anonymous members first came together in Philadelphia in 2011 to uplift and defend people targeted by marginalization, oppression, and violence, including queer and gender-diverse people, BIPOC, and outsiders of all kinds. In the intervening years, the American right has escalated its campaign of bigotry and […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago hip-hop duo defprez reinforce each other in a powerful circuit on It’s Always a Time Like This
When I first listened to the new collaborative album from Chicago rappers Defcee and CRASHprez, It’s Always a Time Like This (Closed Sessions), I lost track of how many times I replayed a passage to catch an ingenious turn of phrase that’d I’d missed when it zoomed by the first time. In “Safer,” Defcee rounds […]