Flavorpill Chicago Events

Honest Abe of the West

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Oct 10 – Feb 15, 2010

Daily

@ The Newberry Library

The exhibition commemorates the 200th birthday of America’s sixteenth president. Lincoln-related artifacts from the Newberry’s collections will accompany the Library of Congress's traveling exhibition, With Malice Towards None, also on display at the Newberry beginning October 10.

Jersey Boys

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Sep 8 – Jan 10, 2010

Tuesdays–Sundays

@ Bank of America Theatre

The Chicago theater scene has been blessed of late with a raft of high-quality jukebox musicals: the Black Ensemble Theater showcased R&B crooners, the Drury Lane brought Buddy Holly back, and the Apollo's hit Million Dollar Quartet is headed to Broadway. But the road to Broadway runs both ways, as the midtown smash Jersey Boys continues to draw enthusiastic crowds here. The money fairly drips off the stage in this powerhouse account of the rise of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Younger showgoers might be surprised at the band's sheer number of familiar hits; their parents will just be singing along.

Fake

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Sep 10 – Nov 8

Tuesdays–Sundays

@ Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Steppenwolf Theatre Company kicks off its new season on the theme of belief with a world premiere written and directed by ensemble member Eric Simonson. Fake imagines a 1914 weekend at the English country estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His four houseguests all have some connection to the notorious "Piltdown Man," initially celebrated as the missing link between apes and men but later exposed as a fraud. The whodunit is merely a MacGuffin that drives the exploration of the play's true subject: the foundation-rattling bomb that the evolutionary revelation throws at faithful stakeholders in science, religion, and philosophy.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Sep 29 – Dec 6

Tuesdays–Sundays

@ Writers' Theatre

Tom Stoppard's inventive, razor-sharp absurdist play imagines Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as offstage existential anti-heroes with no understanding of what play they're in, and it's ultimately as profound a theater experience as it is a ludicrously funny one. The most a company can really hope for is to do justice to the writing; the production at Writers' Theater actually adds depth and insight. The set extends the play's metatheater by placing the audience in the stage wings in an off-kilter way. Acting is astute across the board, with a particularly remarkable performance by Sean Fortunato as a baffled, benign Rosencrantz and Allen Gilmore as the lead player in the dumbshow's acting troupe, elegantly manipulating the line between profundity and tongue-in-cheek parody.

James Castle: A Retrospective

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Oct 10 – Jan 3, 2010

Daily

@ The Art Institute of Chicago

Self-taught, working-outside-the-mainstream artists are an often-misunderstood phenomenon, if one considers the myriad terms that emphasize their otherness: "outsider," "visionary," "naïve," "folk," or, in Europe, "art brut." But one thing that self-taught artists are infrequently called is "the subject of a major museum retrospective." The work of James Castle, who was born deaf and worked in seclusion in rural Idaho, is an exhilarating justification of work made beyond the academy. The exhibition is comprised of more than 200 drawings, books, collages, and sculptural objects that explore the artist's pastoral landscape, many of which feature found objects and unique approaches to material like homemade ink made of soot and saliva.

Daria Martin: Minotaur

2009-11-08T06:00:00Z

Oct 3 – Feb 7, 2010

Daily

@ Museum of Contemporary Art

This show's titular maze-dwelling man-bull of Greek myth inspired Rodin in 1886, who inspired choreographer Anna Halprin for a duet filmed by Daria Martin (which, in turn, inspired a sassy review-as-poem by Claudia la Rocco this spring). This ten-minute movie, part of the 3M Project — "M" is for museum, and the three are the MCA, New York's New Museum and UCLA's Hammer — collapses all of its references into a lean parfait of art, observation, history, gender, and sex. It plays through February, before and after an anniversary reconstruction of Halprin's legendary Parades & Changes, visiting us in November.

Benito Juárez and the Making of Modern Mexico

2009-11-08T15:30:00Z

Oct 10 – Apr 12, 2010

Daily (9:30am–4:30pm)

@ Chicago History Museum

As America faced its darkest days during the Civil War, Mexico, too, waged war that led to the creation of its modern state. In conjunction with Abraham Lincoln Transformed, the Museum presents Benito Juárez and the Making of Modern Mexico. Both Lincoln and Juárez faced urgent situations that would forever shape the future of their countries. This show provides an introduction to Mexico’s most revered leader with many national treasures on display for the first time in Chicago.

Bertha Honoré Palmer

2009-11-08T15:30:00Z

May 23 – Jan 4, 2010

Daily (9:30am–4:30pm)

@ Chicago History Museum

Bertha Palmer reigned as the queen of Chicago society, but her influence was known around the world. She was a champion of her fledgling city and the epitome of a grande dame. On the anniversary of Palmer’s 160th birthday, the Museum presents a selection of her personal effects to honor one of the most significant figures in late 19th-century Chicago.

Abraham Lincoln Transformed

2009-11-08T15:30:00Z

Oct 10 – Apr 12, 2010

Daily (9:30am–4:30pm)

@ Chicago History Museum

He is often revered as the president who freed the slaves, but how did Abraham Lincoln arrive at his highly controversial decision, and what was the real impact? This exhibition examines the fundamental change in Lincoln’s views about slavery and the Union that changed America.

Chicago Model City

2009-11-08T15:30:00Z

Opens Thursday June 11 (5:30–7pm)

June 11 – Nov 20

Daily (9:30am–5pm)

@ Chicago Architecture Foundation

As the city celebrates the centennial of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago (if you don't think it's brilliant, try navigating a metropolis that's not laid out on a grid), the Chicago Architecture Foundation opens an exhibition highlighting the city's history, infrastructure, geography, and future. The show, designed to be a permanent fixture at CAF, is divided into five sections that explore Chicago as global, connected, green, beautiful, and new. Photographs, maps, videos, and a huge scale model of the Loop are all incorporated to help viewers grasp the intricacies of urban planning.

Robert Motherwell: An Attitude Toward Reality

2009-11-08T16:00:00Z

Sep 25 – Dec 6

Tuesdays (10am–5pm)

Wednesdays–Fridays (10am–8pm)

Saturdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)

@ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema

Robert Motherwell helped define 20th-century American art as a member of the New York School of painters (a group that also included Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko) and as an artist who created a vivid language of abstraction influenced by psychology, surrealism, and Asian aesthetics. This exhibition brings you up close to more than 40 Motherwell works, including monumental paintings and prints, collages, and drawings. It is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Jeremy Deller: It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq

2009-11-08T16:00:00Z

Oct 10 – Nov 15

Tuesdays (10am–8pm)

Wednesdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)

@ Museum of Contemporary Art

Artist Jeremy Deller orchestrates public events and collaborative undertakings that bring different social issues into relief. His Battle of Orgreave, for instance, was an epic re-enactment of a violent clash in 1984 between police and striking miners, with the melée's veterans participating. It Is What It Is takes a less spectacular approach, using conversation as a way to grapple with the situation in Iraq and our nation's perceptions of the war. The project began as an RV tour through 15 US cities, facilitating encounters between the public and two Deller collaborators with on-the-ground experience. The MCA's presentation centers around daily discussions with Iraq experts in an ad hoc community space — with the crumpled remains of a bombed-out car planted nearby to ground the proceedings.

Henry Moore: Elephant Skull

2009-11-08T16:00:00Z

Sep 22 – Dec 13

Tuesdays (10am–5pm)

Wednesdays–Fridays (10am–8pm)

Saturdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)

@ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema

In the late 1960s the British artist Henry Moore received an unusual gift—the skull of an African elephant. This exhibition highlights a series of etchings Moore created examining the object’s surfaces. Moore called the 28 prints “a mixture of observation and imagination” when he published them as an album in 1970. Today they are considered to be among the artist’s greatest graphic creations.

Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short scenario

2009-11-08T16:00:00Z

Oct 10 – Jan 10, 2010

Daily (10am–5pm)

@ MCA Chicago

Liam Gillick emerged in the early 1990s as part of a re-energized British art scene, producing a sophisticated body of work ranging from his signature "platform" sculptures — architectural structures made of aluminum and colored Plexiglas that facilitate or complicate social interaction — to wall paintings, text sculptures, and published texts that reflect on the increasing gap between utopian idealism and the actualities of the world.

His work joins that of generational peers such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno in defining what critic Nicholas Bourriaud described as "relational aesthetics," an approach that emphasizes the shifting social role and function of art at the turn of the millennium. Gillick's work has had a profound impact on a contemporary understanding of how art and architecture influence, and are themselves influenced by, interpersonal communication and interactions in the public sphere.

This exhibition is presented in association with the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Munich. It is the most significant and comprehensive exhibition of Gillick's work in an American museum to date, comprising a major site-specific installation in the gallery ceiling as well as a presentation of his design and published works, and a film documenting projects from the entirety of his career. The MCA is the only American venue for the exhibition.

The exhibition has a publication that reflects the unique nature of this survey of Gillick's work. This exhibition is curated by MCA Curator Dominic Molon.

Tony Kushner: 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize

2009-11-08T16:00:00Z

Sunday Nov 8 (10–11am)

@ Symphony Center

Already a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, three Obies, and countless other awards, Tony Kushner welcomes the fête train once again tonight, as he accepts the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize. If anyone deserves this much hardware, it’s Kushner: the playwright/screenwriter not only tackles some of the weightiest issues of the day with graceful, poetic realism, but he unapologetically (and commendably) shows no qualms about bringing his art to the masses -- most notably with the smash play/miniseries Angels in America. Proceeds from tonight’s special speaking event benefit the Chicago Tribune Holiday Campaign.