04 The To-Do Free events at Comfort Station, Kan-Win day of action, and more
14 On the Cover | Mayors
Memories from the Washington adminstration
16 Joravsky Northwestern’s Streisand effect
Man’s Land at Steppenwolf, Rock of Ages at Mercury Theater Chicago, and more
CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN
MANAGING EDITOR SHEBA WHITE
PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON
SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD & DRINK TARYN ALLEN
MacKay & Ryley Walker, Voice of Baceprot, and Tropa Magica
06 People A profile of cartoonist and library clerk Alex Nall
FOOD & DRINK
17 Isaacs | On Culture The local connections to Oppenheimer
18 On Prisons Recent Supreme Court decisions make our Union less perfect.
20 Visual Art A DePaul Art Museum exhibition explores a 1980s pan-American artists’ solidarity movement.
22 Exhibitions of Note
26 Screenings The Gene Siskel Film Center will host Chicago’s first retrospective of filmmakers Camille Billops and James Hatch.
29 Movies of Note Barbie is a freewheeling kaleidoscope of saturated colors and snark; Oppenheimer sears its way into the viewer’s brain.
30 Galil | Roundup Nine great Chicago records to hear now
42 Early Warnings Newly announced and other concerts on the horizon
42 Gossip Wolf Two former Electric Eels help celebrate a new compilation, and local musicians soak up sounds at Pitchfork.
44 Savage Love Sex advice and more from Dan Savage
08 Sula | Restaurant Feature Maman Zari has the only fine-dining Persian tasting menu in the country.
10 Immigration The O-1B visa wasn’t built with the realities of artists in mind.
Recommended exhibitions at Povos, Sulk Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and more
24 Reid | Review The Wiz Walk shows us a way forward.
25 Plays of Note Beauty and the Beast at Chicago Shakespeare, No
34 Chicagoans of Note Lily Glick Finnegan, drummer and Option Series curator
36 City of Win Galaxy Francis leans into community to reinvent himself.
38 Shows and Records of Note Previews of concerts including the final Silver Room Block Party, Bill
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You can’t beat Chicago’s heat right now, but here’s some more hot stu for you to enjoy!
Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee) has two free events coming up that you’ll definitely want on your calendar. The first, on Sunday, July 30, is the Guild Complex’s Exhibit B: Social Justice Festival. Along with free food, good conversation, and a book drive, the festival promises a slate of literary-minded performers, including Reader feature writer Katie Prout. Sharing the bill are Atena O. Danner, Caroline M. Watson, Flor Flores, Rabha Ashry, Matt Harper, Mondeaux, Nick Rossi, Noa Micaela Fields, Tarnynon Onumonu, Tommy Carroll, and Chandler Browne. The Social Justice Festival runs from 11 AM-3 PM, and since it takes place on a weekend in the heart of Logan Square, you can all but guarantee stumbling into a fun neighboring pop-up activity afterward.
On Tuesday, August 1, Comfort Station also hosts a reading group that will discuss We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991. Sullivan was a trans activist who lived as an openly gay man during the 70s and 80s. He worked hard advocating for trans rights, documenting trans experiences, and providing resources for trans men and mascs, including founding the organization FTM International in 1986. Sullivan’s diaries provide both a rich theoretical and historic framework for parsing the relationship between gender and sexuality, and also a hell of a read. Don’t worry if you’re new to the text, though. While there’s a link to a free PDF available on Comfort Station’s Instagram, this event is less about comparing notes and more about building community through celebrating Sullivan’s legacy. The discussion kicks o at 7 PM. Emrys Brandt is the facilitator, and he welcomes questions about it (including accessibility!) at 8houseviz@gmail.com. comfortstationlogansquare.org
Gerber/Hart (6500 N. Clark, second floor) has Barbie fever. On August 5, the queer archive is hosting an opening for their Bar-
bie-inspired exhibit “A Dreamhouse of Our Own: An Examination of Dolls, Play, and Queer Identity.” The event kicks o at 5:30 PM with a cocktail mixer starting at 6 PM. (Non-alcoholic options will also be available!) At 6:30 PM, curator Olivia De Keyser and graphic designer Steven Russell will present on the show, and then Chicago’s favorite Barbie-inspired kink designer GNAT Glitter Kink will give an artist talk. Dress to impress because there will be a costume contest! The party continues at the Leather Archives & Museum (6418 N. Greenview) with a screening of Life-Size, the made-for-TV movie where Tyra Banks stars as a doll brought to life by Lindsay Lohan. Note that this event is strictly 18+. Tickets are $10 for the screening, $20 for the reception, or $25 for both. gerberhart.org
Also on Saturday, August 5, in Little Village, a pop-up shop called Chi-Town Dreamers is happening at 2620 S. Central Park. This is a great place to catch emerging talent in streetwear, including Southside Dreams , who’ve only been in the game about a year but make some of the hottest wearable odes to cholo culture and Latine Chicago. In addition to vendors of all varieties, there will also be entertainment such as poetry and hip-hop. It’s gonna be a bumping pop-up. Pull up from 6-11 PM! instagram.com/ southside__dreams
On Wednesday, August 9, Kan-Win will be participating in the 11th annual global day of action to demand justice for “comfort women” survivors. Kan-Win is a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating gender-based violence that centers on Asian Americans. During WWII, the Japanese military forced over 200,000 women and girls into sexual slavery in occupied territories such as Korea and Taiwan, and many feel that the Japanese government has never adequately acknowledged or apologized for this. Survivors and their descendents want justice. Starting at noon outside the Wrigley Building (400 N. Michigan), Kan-Win will have a Sonyeosang or Statue of Peace—a sitting statue of a girl whose details represent di erent facets of comfort women’s struggles—with
an empty chair beside it. People are invited to come sit, use the hashtag #comesitwithher, and take photos for social media. This is a symbolic act of witnessing as much as it is an attempt to spread awareness and increase pressure on the Japanese government so this injustice is not forgotten. kanwin.org
Later, at 8 PM on August 9, counselor and musician Jessica Risker will host a live taping of her podcast, Music Therapy, at Cafe Mustache (2313 N. Milwaukee). Risker and co-host
Leslie Tanner will be in conversation with musician Jawson Dell, Ohmme’s Macie Stewart, and Bric-a-Brac owners and Clickbait members Nick Mayor and Jen Lemasters. Stewart and Dell will also perform. To attend, there is a suggested donation of $10-$20. Must be 21 or older. cafemustache.com v
More event listings at chicagoreader.com
@JuggaloReporter
Take a Summer Road Trip
Free concerts in Bloomington, Indiana
August 24
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
w/Henhouse Prowlers
August 25 45 Drive
August 26
Pridefest 2023
August 27
Bloomington Symphony Orchestra
Great food and places to stay.
It’s affordable, not too far, relaxing, and fun.
Plan your music road trip at visitbloomington.com
Writers idealize themselves, spending hours at the computer, polishing their prose to make themselves sound better than they are. Cartoonists spend as much time, or more, to make themselves look, well, cartoonish. Lynda Barry erases her chin and hides her eyes behind opaque spectacles. Art Spiegelman turns himself into a neurotic mouse.
In his self-portrait at the back of his graphic
novel Lawns , Alex Nall makes himself look middle-aged and balding, with awkwardly large black glasses and a very R. Crumb look of resigned bemusement. In life, the Nall who sits behind the checkout desk at his day job at the Oak Park Public Library looks younger, fitter, more open, and (more or less) happy with the way things are going. His appearance is utterly unlike the beleaguered, hunched over, clown-nosed version of Nall who appears in
the pages of Teaching Comics, Volume One and its two sequels: Let Some Word That is Heard be Yours and Are Comic Books Real?.
So which is the real Alex Nall? Reading through Nall’s work—four graphic novels, Town and County (a semiannual 36-page comic book with three issues so far and more to come), and countless graphic short stories published elsewhere—it is hard to escape the feeling that the caricature is the real Nall, who
only emerges in his cartoons.
By his own admission, Nall has been living in the world of cartoons for a long time. “I knew I was going to be a cartoonist when I was six years old,” Nall confided.
Nall’s current project is an epic fictionalized re-creation of the world of his youth: the people and events that made up small-town life in Illinois in the late 90s and early 2000s. He started with Lawns, his 2018 graphic dramedy
about a town torn apart by a man who lets his dog do his business on other people’s lawns and the neighbors who demand the town’s ine ectual mayor do something about it. He has followed Lawns with numerous short pieces, some published in several issues of cartoonist Sean Knickerbocker’s anthology Rust Belt Review, others gathered in Nall’s own self-published Town and County
Nall said, “[My stories revolve] around a small rural town in Illinois, an unnamed, unincorporated township sometimes referred to as Township 828. There’s roughly 200 people that live in the township, and the goal of the series is to give every one of the people living there a story.”
On a wall near his desk, Nall has a map sketching out the topography of his fictional township and the towns around it: Clydesdale, Sandbag, and Maple. He said, “I’ve [also] got a Google Doc that has a brief synopsis of everyone’s story, but I haven’t completely worked it out yet. It’s a work in progress.
“The idea [for the series] was formulated over the years from reading books like Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. And the Palomar series by Gilbert Hernandez was also a big motivator,” Nall continued. “I love those kinds of world-building stories where you see characters weave in and out of each other’s lives and see how maybe one decision impacts somebody else.”
In his stories, Nall tells the tales of smalltown people for whom the thrill of living has gone. We meet Don, a retired widower, who spends his time writing short diary entries regretting his past and recounting his ongoing attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughters. There’s Sherman Snow, who has a decent job as the supervisor at the only grocery store for miles around, but still feels lost and unfulfilled. The characters Stanley and Luanne Pepper are a pair of empty nesters who used to be hot and heavy lovers but now barely interact. The problem: Stanley has been on a perpetual bender ever since the ball bearing plant he’d worked at since high school closed several years ago.
In one story Luanne hitchhikes to Bug’s Tavern in Clydesdale where she finds her husband drunk at the bar. Nall sums up their marriage in a line that could have been lifted from a country-western song: “He doesn’t ask her how she got here and she doesn’t ask why he doesn’t come home.
“Everyone says, ‘Oh, a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business.’ And I never felt that way. I always felt like everybody was
kind of a mystery.”
The people in Nall’s stories are not unlike the ones Nall got to know growing up in North Henderson, Illinois, a small village in Mercer County (with a reported population of 162 people in 2020), 14 miles from Galesburg. Nall’s roots in North Henderson run deep. His father worked for a local road construction company. His mom worked at the post o ce.
“There were no stores in the town; there was a post o ce, a grain bin, a park, two churches, and an abandoned baseball field.”
Are Nall’s stories based on real events?
“There’s a germ in there. But whenever I feel like I could mine something [I’ve observed],
exactly how it happened, I push away from that just because then it’s not fiction, then I’m writing somebody else’s story.”
Growing up, Nall had few options for entertainment. “We didn’t have a library, or a bookstore. I read newspaper comics. The Register-Mail in Galesburg had one page of comics: Peanuts , Garfield , Alley Oop , and Hi and Lois.” And then there were the cartoons on cable TV. “Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network. I was obsessed with Looney Tunes Rugrats Hey Arnold. Animation was sort of my bag for the first ten years of my life.”
In high school, Nall stumbled across the 2003 movie American Splendor about the
eccentric independent cartoonist, Harvey Pekar. For Christmas he got Pekar’s compendium of cartoons, also called American Splendor, and became obsessed. “I loved how every story was drawn by a di erent artist, and that this guy literally, almost, starts every story with “Hi, I’m Harvey. I work at the VA hospital.” It’s pretty amazing that this guy can essentially tell the same story over and over, just tell a story about going to get bread, and it can be fascinating.”
Pekar’s work inspired Nall to do his own autobiographical cartoons, recounting life in high school. Nall changes his voice, mocking the tone of his teenage self: “Here’s our man walking the halls of United High.”
Nall went to college in nearby Monmouth and moved to Chicago “four days after [he] graduated” in 2012. “I’d say within the fi rst two weeks, I had a little mini comic, like a stapled Xerox I put together, and went to Quimby’s, Chicago Comics, Graham Crackers, and I just started doing the consignment stu . Really, it’s the reason I came here. I was like, well, I know for a fact they have three stores I could put my comics in, and I could potentially make some money.”
As luck would have it, Nall happened across the fi rst annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) soon after he moved to Chicago. “I had no idea about [CAKE]. I just saw a poster for it. Laura Park did the artwork and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I could go here and pass out all of my stupid Xerox mini comics to people I had been reading in college.’ That’s where I met Ivan Brunetti, Je rey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Gabby Schulz, and Keiler Roberts. I remember it was Roberts’ first time tabling there. I have one of her mini comics where the cover is just a piece of construction paper. It felt like, ‘I can do this.’”
Eleven years later, Nall is deep into self publishing. He and his wife, graphic artist Hannah Larson, run their own publishing company, Hardscrabble Cafe.
“I think one of the joys of self publishing is the amount of control you have over the project. And there’s some stories in my head that I know are going to take up a big chunk of the issue, and then there’s other ones that are just going to be maybe a page or two. And I like the idea that I don’t have to limit myself to making a big book or have a place to publish these. They can all just kind of go under this one publication.”
@JackHelbig
Check out what a former flight attendant and an Italian chef have in mind for the future of this ancient cuisine.
By MIKE SULALast November, chef Matteo Lo Bianco took a crash course in Persian food.
Each day he’d show up at Farzad Shahsavarani’s house and begin cooking under the eye of his former boss, and his sister Farideh.
They made all the classics: the intensely herbaceous lamb and bean stew, ghormeh sabzi; the fruity egg-stu ed meatballs, kofte Tabrizi; the yogurt-enriched, legume and noodle soup, ash reshteh; the smoky eggplant-tomato dip, mirza ghasemi; and a lot more.
“They felt he had the flavors down immediately,” says Mariam Shahsavarani, Lo Bianco’s business partner and Farzad’s daughter. “But they felt he was truly there when he started making things his own. There was a moment when he was making ghormeh sabzi and sauteeing the herbs, and he commented about how he understood their importance. He made
mirza ghasemi for them for the first time and suggested they double smoke it, and then later developed the tahdig chips to go with it.”
Lo Bianco is a Milan-born chef and veteran of some half-dozen Italian restaurants around town (Coco Pazzo, Volare, Francesca’s, Rosebud). Shahsavarani is a former flight attendant who, by her own admission, doesn’t belong anywhere near a professional kitchen. But together they’ve opened Maman Zari, the first and only seasonal fine-dining, prix fixe Persian restaurant in the country.
They officially open on Thursday with an eight-course tasting menu of reimagined dishes—with wine pairings—on a stretch of Kedzie Avenue in Albany Park that’s also home to two of the city’s most established and beloved Persian restaurants.
But you won’t find anything like Lo Bianco’s compressed watermelon salad with bal-
samic pearls on the menu at Kabobi, nor his double-smoked mirza ghasemi, served with crunchy sa ron-tinted rice chips that mimic tahdig, the crispy bottom-of-the-pot layer of basmati rice that every Persian family fights over. Noon-O-Kabab’s menu sprawls, but you won’t find any deep cuts like Lo Bianco’s abdoogh khiar, a chilled yogurt soup with cucumber, walnuts, and raisins; or his mahi sefid, a sa ron-battered, gently pan-fried branzino filet, served with smoked dill-parsley-cilantro-flecked rice and sa ron beurre blanc.
Shahsavarani may not think much of her own kitchen skills, but she does have an extensive knowledge of Persian food, history, and language that she developed beginning at the age of four on her first visit to Iran to visit her grandparents during the Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations. She and her grandparents, who lived part of the time on a
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fruit orchard in the north of the country near the Caspian Sea, traded visits all through her childhood, teens, and early adulthood. In her 20s, she lived in Iran for nine months, studying Farsi and traveling all over the country.
“My family bonds over food,” she says. “You don’t have a gathering without oodles and oodles of food. Anytime someone stops by for ten minutes, it’s like, ‘Let’s cut up some fruit and have a cup of tea.’ My ca eine tolerance got really good when I lived there.”
In the summer, her grandparents escaped the Tehran heat and moved into the apartment above the Shahsavaranis’ Noble Square catering company. “I’d have lunch with them,” she says. “My grandfather and I would hop on the Grand bus and go to the Children’s Museum or Navy Pier or just wander around. There was usually candy involved for me. Then we’d come back and he and my grandmother would make us dinner.”
Shahsavarani first met Lo Bianco when she was a teenager and he took a job in the family business, which had transitioned into a privatelabel food manufacturer, that once filled the deli cases at Jewel. She knew him as a chef whose versatility extended far beyond highend Italian food.
Shahsavarani worked as a flight attendant for the travel perks, but mainly so she could get time off to visit her grandparents. After they passed away last year, she’d begun looking for something new. “I always wanted a casual cafe,” she says. “I like hospitality, which I guess a flight attendant is in line with.”
Her father suggested they join forces with Lo Bianco and open a dual Persian-Italian ghost kitchen, and the chef’s training began under the eye of her aunt Farideh, a skilled home cook and celebrated visual artist on an extended visit from Tehran.
“I fell in love with the food,” says Lo Bianco. “The family helped me a lot. Every day they teach me more and more. All the spices. How to use the sa ron. How to cook the eggplants.”
Lo Bianco became intimate with the importance of an abundance of fresh herbs—he uses nearly a dozen on the menu, including dill, parsley, cilantro, mint, tarragon, and fenugreek. Rice plays a critical role as well. It appears in four di erent dishes on the tasting menu—five if you count the rice noodles in the dessert sorbet.
773 -961-7866
mamanzari.com
As they were looking for spaces, they pivoted when they found and fell in love with the Kedzie Avenue spot, former home to Semiramis and Lebanon Bites. Suddenly a Persian ghost kitchen operating in the shadow of Noon-O-Kabab and Kabobi didn’t seem like such a great idea.
Plus they wanted to introduce guests to a broader sweep of Persian food and feature uncommon, seasonally appropriate dishes.
“We could’ve done a la carte,” says Shahsavarani. But you’re not necessarily going to get people to try new things. “With a tasting, you’re kind of forcing people to step outside of their comfort zone once they decide they’re going to eat here. We already had an array of recipes to choose from. We started narrowing them down, like, ‘Which of these is attractive?’ And which of these are not being done around here? Which of these flavors can Matteo take and do something fun with?’”
Austin, Texas, chef Amir Hajimaleki has hosted a few Persian tasting menu pop-ups in recent years, ahead of a planned brickand-mortar. In London, chef Yuma Hashemi recently remade his French dominant Drunken Butler into the multicourse modern Tehran_ Berlin, but as far as I can tell, that’s Maman Zari’s only competition in the prix fixe space.
I booked a ticket for one of Maman Zari’s soft opening seatings. That’s something I wouldn’t do if this were a critical restaurant review. And I want to leave out some of the surprises, but I can say it’s one of the most interesting, engaging, and least tedious multicourse meals I’ve eaten my way through.
It starts with a small, crispy, frittata-like potato-egg cake called kuku sibzamani, usually something one would eat in a sandwich, but here it’s plated with thin, pickled cucumber and a dollop of the northern Iranian herbal condiment known as dalar. The mirza ghase-
mi comes with a shared plate of mixed micro herbs, a delicate approximation of sabzi khordan, the mountain of fresh herbs that typically accompanies traditional Persian meals. A single lamb chop with a swipe of tomato sauce and a molded dome of sa ron rice is an easy, late-course reference to the meaty mountains of rice that fill the seats up the street.
Lo Bianco employs a few by-now-familiar modernist tricks to set some of these dishes apart. The watermelon on the salad course is vacuum compressed to give it the appearance of fresh, raw tuna. There’s a clear, jiggly, spherified blob of sweet lime juice that sits atop the rosewater rice noodle sorbet, faloodeh. The tahdig chips are simply made by pureeing saffron-stained basmati rice and spreading it to dehydrate and break into shatteringly snackable crisps.
Shahsavarani says that though Iran is hardly a dry country, it was still a challenge to develop wine pairings that weren’t entirely dependent on the whites that go better with the inherent sweetness and herbaceousness of Persian cuisine. Still, she found a few reds for the later courses, including a couple of Italian bottles, in honor of Lo Bianco. There’s also a small cocktail list with drinks named for Iranian cities, including the Gonabad Gin, a bewitching, golden-stirred mix of sa ron gin and poppy-infused amaro.
Relative to other upscale tasting menus around town, Maman Zari is a steal: $85 for eight courses, $45 for the wine pairing. It passes like a breeze too, in about two and a half hours under Farideh Shahsavarani’s abstract acrylic paintings, all of which makes me plenty interested in stepping outside my Persian food comfort zone for the future fall, winter, and spring menus.
@MikeSula
By HANNAH EDGAR
After Rui Sha graduated from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, she explored options to stay in the U.S. beyond the end of her student visa. An interdisciplinary artist, Sha felt the choice was more or less obvious: she would apply for the O-1B visa, the only visa o ered specifically to artists, musicians, and entertainers living in the United States.
But as Sha soon learned, a visa intended for artists doesn’t mean it was built with the realities of artists in mind. Legally, O-1B holders must derive their entire income from work related to their artistic practice. To state the obvious, making a living working in the arts full-time is impossible for many artists, especially those just starting their careers and without other means of financial support. Those who work outside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) restrictions risk losing their visa and getting deported.
Sha was one of the lucky ones: At the time she applied for the O-1B, she was in the run-
ning for a part-time job at the Evanston Art Center, where she still works. But she still freelances to make ends meet, and when her application stalled for half a year, Sha had to defer her work for the Evanston Art Center until USCIS finally granted her the visa. Between COVID-19-related travel interruptions and disruptions caused by her visa status, Sha was unable to return to China to be with her mother, who was dying of cancer.
Now, with less than a year until she must reapply for the O-1B, Sha again finds herself in limbo. She is distraught at the thought of returning to China. But the O-1B, meant to be a ticket to employment for artists in their respective fields, hasn’t opened the doors for her that she’d hoped it would. In fact, quite the opposite: Sha suspects that her visa status has scared o other potential employers who assume, wrongly, they’ll have to sponsor her visa, as employers do for an H-1B visa.
“I feel like my life has been paused by this visa,” Sha says.
Sha’s story is a familiar one for many immigrant artists in the U.S. Also called the “extraordinary ability visa,” O-1 visas—O-1A, for the sciences, education, business, or athletics, or O-1B, for the arts—allow individuals to stay in the U.S. for a maximum of three years, at which point they must reapply. But O visas are notorious for being both widely misunderstood and having a high standard of proof for qualification—standards which remain stringent no matter how many times one has successfully applied.
Many of the O-1B visa’s qualifications in particular can seem divorced from the day-to-day realities of artists in the U.S. USCIS requires proof that an artist has “received, or been nominated for, a significant national or inter-
national award.” (Examples of those awards, per USCIS: an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, or a Directors Guild Award.) If applicants can’t provide that, USCIS requires at least three forms of evidence pointing to other qualifications, such as proof of further employment, “national or international” recognition of their achievements, recommendation letters from experts in their field, and their ability to “command a high salary”—a rarity for anyone working in the arts.
The O-1B’s restrictions also make government bureaucrats judges of artistic quality. Before applying to the O-1B, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel, an actress who is both an ensemble member and artistic producer at Teatro Vista, applied for the EB-1 visa, or “Einstein visa,”
which gives successful applicants access to a green card. Her application was replete with career accolades, from her Non-Equity Je Award win (for the title role in Lela and Co., at Steep Theatre) to appearances on TV shows like Chicago Med, The Chi, and Empire. By the time she submitted her application, Gonzalez-Cadel’s file was “this thick,” says her husband, composer Tomás Gueglio, showing a two-inch space between his fingers.
But Gonzalez-Cadel says USCIS rejected her application, contending, in part, that the Je s weren’t a “nationally recognized” award, “like the Tonys.”
“I live in Chicago, and the Joseph Je erson Award is the nationally recognized award body of the Chicago theater scene. I cannot win a Tony because I do not live in New York,” Gonzalez-Cadel says. “Specificity like this is what the system lacks.”
After being rejected for the EB-1, Gonzalez-Cadel and Gueglio successfully acquired O-1 visas. Gonzalez-Cadel quickly learned that successful visa applications were ones which translated artistic achievements into qualitative data points for USCIS—metrics that missed the richness of her portfolio but would be “easy to understand for someone who is not part of the art world.”
“I’ve started being like, ‘This is the percentage of Latina Equity actors getting lead roles,’ so it’s easier for them to understand [my accomplishments] from a bureaucratic point of view. . . . Basically, how do you make artistic success a formula?” she says.
USCIS also recommends that applicants submit clips about their work published in “major” media or newspapers. Setting aside the fact that USCIS declines to define “major media,” press coverage is a dubious yardstick of quality when most publications have made significant cuts to their culture coverage in recent years. Lori Waxman, an art critic who frequently writes for the Chicago Tribune , attempts to address this shortfall with her public-service-meets-performance-art project 60 WRD/MIN , in which Waxman writes micro-reviews for artists on a first-come, firstserved basis. Most artists aren’t so lucky, and many bristle at the idea that their work needs press coverage to be legitimized in the eyes of USCIS.
“Sometimes you just feel like you’re doing [a project] for the media coverage. You’re not genuinely expressing yourself,” Sha says. Gonzalez-Cadel, too, finds it “emotionally taxing” to tie her self-worth as an artist to the O-1B’s metrics. Yet that’s what the visa forces
artists to do, again and again.
“For me, a successful day is if I write three pages of the script I’m working on,” Gonzalez-Cadel says. “That is not a successful day in USCIS’s book. Because there’s no output.”
On a sunny day in June, Jiaming You, a recent MFA graduate from SAIC, lets me into a nondescript gray building in the South Loop. They live and work here, leasing the space from a former professor. You sifts through their recent paintings—fleshy acrylics, many on synthetic, semitranslucent yupo paper—and tapes some to the wall for us to observe together.
Ambiguously gendered bodies dominate You’s artwork. So does the casual violence of spectator sports. In Mercy and Watcher (both 2022), the viewer is transported to the front row of a boxing match. A more recent work, Face-Off (2023), depicts two eerily faceless hockey players brawling atop agitated streaks of color.
“You watch these people fight, if you can afford the ticket. Money is the real winner,” You muses.
For the O-1B, too, “money is your passport,” says You. They’re currently in the process of applying for the O-1 for the first time, having remained in the U.S. through an Optional Practical Training (OPT) status tied to their F-1 student visa and, now, a B-2 visa. You thinks their prospects might be good for the O-1B: Recently, they’ve been able to live on their savings and lean into making art full-time. Their work has attracted a handsome amount of press attention, and they have two shows upcoming at W. Gallery, in September and October.
After graduating from SAIC, You spent a short stint working as an art handler to make ends meet, a taxing and male-dominated job that came with ups and downs. But for all its frustrations, the job was in their field and thus legally permissible under OPT, which operates under the same field-specific work guidelines as the O-1B. For most artists living here on a visa, that has to be good enough.
“I cannot just get a job at a co ee shop or bakery. That’s illegal for me,” says Chih-Jou Cheng, a movement artist and puppeteer.
This year, Cheng is hard at work on a largescale project on the immigrant experience with Dawn Theatre Project, which she recently cofounded; the company will host workshops exploring migration in English, Spanish, and Mandarin at UrbanTheater Company on August 19 and 26. Cheng also recently performed
in Teatro Vista’s The Dream King and works for a nonprofit arts and culture organization, on top of her teaching gigs. But any money Cheng saves over the next few years will likely get drained when she reapplies for the O-1B, in 2026. Between legal fees and USCIS processing fees—which are currently pending a nearly fourfold increase, from $460 to $1,655—O-1 applicants typically pay between $3,000 and $8,000 during the application process. When they reapply, they must pay that amount all over again.
“It’s a huge, huge stress, not knowing where you will be, if you can pay your rent, and relationship-wise, you feel put on edge . . . You have to do a lot of side gigs here and there. The outcome is burnout, all the time,” Cheng says.
Gonzalez-Cadel initially came to the U.S. from Argentina as a dependent on Gueglio’s student visa. When the couple moved to Chicago for Gueglio’s Ph.D. program, his university funding allowed Gonzalez-Cadel to qualify for a J-2 visa, a status which allowed her to find employment. For years, she worked as a beloved Zumba instructor at the University of Chicago while building her acting résumé. But when Gonzalez-Cadel and Gueglio had to switch to O-1Bs, the new visa stipulations meant that Gonzalez-Cadel had to walk away from a job she loved.
“I had to stop teaching Zumba, because teaching Zumba was not acting,” Gonzalez-Cadel says.
That same year, Gonzalez-Cadel tried to join the Actors’ Equity Association, the stage actors’ union which secures job protections for members and betters one’s chances of being considered for higher-earning Equity shows. But because of her visa status, Gonzalez-Cadel’s first attempt to join the union was denied.
“I found out Equity would only accept me while I was in contract, and then would force me to go into temporary withdrawal in between contracts. I wouldn’t be considered a full union member,” she says. “I was heartbroken. I couldn’t understand why, as an artist working under an artist visa in the United States, I wasn’t allowed to have the same worker protections as my peers.”
In response, Gonzalez-Cadel joined a campaign organized by other immigrant actors to advocate that Equity change its union bylaws to grant membership to actors with O-1 visas, which it finally did in 2021.
“I try to be a voice in every room that I’m in. I’m part of the local board of directors at
SAG-AFTRA, and I say, ‘Well, what about us? What about the folks that are here working?’” Gonzalez-Cadel says.
Between the visa’s work restrictions and steep legal and processing fees, the O-1B is biased towards independently wealthy artists, or artists who are high earners. That wasn’t the story for most of the artists interviewed for this feature, who emphasized again and again how lucky they were to land a job in their field, find a ordable legal counsel, or to have relatives who could front USCIS’s steep application fees.
“[The O-1B] is built for folks that have financial access. If you can’t bag groceries at Trader Joe’s to supplement your income, who will supplement your income?” Gonzalez-Cadel says.
As if seeking employment in the arts isn’t hard enough, some O-1B artists told the Reader they’d experienced discrimination on the basis of their visa status during job searches. Both Sha and Cheng have had employers abruptly stop corresponding with them well into a hiring process after learning they were in the U.S. on a visa. But an O-1B doesn’t operate like an H-1B visa, for which an employer typically assumes any application, processing, and legal fees incurred on behalf of a full-time employee. The O-1B makes no such demands of an employer. When it comes time for the visa holder to reapply for the O-1B, however, the applicant may circle back to the employer to request written evidence that they are, or were, employed by the organization—comparable to a standard background check.
“People tend not to be informed about the legalities of the visa, and I think folks would rather not go the extra mile to figure out what
the law actually says. You have to become your own advocate and say, ‘Here’s why it’s fine to hire me,’” Gonzalez-Cadel says.
But what is a boon to employers comes at a steep cost to artists. O-1B applicants enjoy more flexibility by being able to seek work from multiple employers, but unlike an H-1B visa, they must shoulder any application fees themselves. Moreover, some O-1B artists report requesting proof of employment from employers and never hearing back, the employer possibly mistaking their requests for one of fiscal sponsorship.
Unbeknownst to many employers, because USCIS gauges an applicant’s merit by their résumé, that written proof can make or break a visa application. Brazilian multimedia artist Carolina Pereira, whose show “Fuzzy Memories” recently closed at Povos Gallery in West Town, works in the unique overlap of tufted rug art and neon sculpture, the two combining in evocative, dreamy tableaus. Her O-1B status is tied not just to her exhibitions but to her day-to-day work as a graphic designer for the Chicago Sinfonietta, a job she believes single-handedly boosted her odds for approval.
Because of the rarity of O-1 visas, Pereira also had to walk her employer through the process.
“When you mention the O-1 visa, it’s very foreign to them. I’ve had to talk to [them] so they really understand that you don’t have to pay for the O-1. They might have to write a letter and sign some stu , but it’s not the same as the sponsorship,” Pereira says.
Applying for O-1B status as a multidisciplinary artist, as Pereira did, can present its own challenges. Cheng opted for a more expensive lawyer just so she could ensure that applying across her fields of expertise—dance, puppetry, and devised physical theater— wouldn’t hurt her application. After all, ev-
erything would be measured against USCIS’s capricious standards.
“It’s a little bit tricky to prove I’m ‘extraordinary’ in each genre,” Cheng says. “I needed [a lawyer] to guide me through how to prove that ‘multidisciplinary’ is its own area.”
The O-1B offers an unparalleled opportunity for immigrant artists living in the U.S. Likewise, the talent the O-1B attracts is nothing short of extraordinary—a community Gonzalez-Cadel hopes to celebrate in a forthcoming podcast series on the subject called Extraordinary Aliens. Absent another path to permanent residence, or citizenship, however, artists could ostensibly run on the O-1B’s expensive treadmill for the rest of their careers. Nor does the process promise any abatement from the threat of deportation. Some interviewees say they’re hesitant to make friends or pursue romantic relationships knowing their reapplication could be rejected, and for circumstances that would seem arbitrary under any other visa.
Sha, who must reapply for the O-1B next year, has no close family and few job prospects in Beijing, where she grew up. Her friends and partner are here, where she’s built a life she could have never dreamed of as a young person.
But, as Sha told the Reader , she may not have a choice. Some days—the bad ones— going back to China almost seems easier than the vortex the O-1B has trapped her in.
“It’s just emotionally exhausting. From the first day that I arrived here, my first concern was to solve the visa problem,” Sha says. “Every minute of my life, my priority isn’t school, or making money, or my career. It’s always the visa.” v
Muntu Dance Theatre is a Chicago-based West African dance company that’s beloved for its commitment to innovation, community, and culture. Their stage work centers the African and African American experience, but their message is universal.
“We believe that there is merit in all cultures and that we should strive to celebrate our similarities instead of focusing on our differences,” says artistic director Regina Perry-Carr. “We’re an African American organization, but we strive to celebrate humanity.”
Muntu evolved out of a drum and dance group called Unifying Humanity Through Cultural Creativity (UHCC), whose leaders were motivated by a desire to upli their identities and cultures as African Americans while honoring their connections to West African culture and arts. In 1974, the group officially changed its name to Muntu, a Bantu word that means “the essence of humanity.”
More than 50 years since its founding, it’s clear that Muntu has always been ahead of the curve. Perry-Carr says that under the leadership of president Joan Gray in the 1980s, the organization became the first West African dance company in the United States to pay its dancers salaries and benefits. Then in 1993, they launched the Arts for Community Empowerment (ACE) program to teach local children and teens from kindergarten through grade 12 about various aspects of the African diaspora through dance, art, and music. Through ACE, they set a bold example of how arts organizations could prioritize community engagement through youth education.
“When Muntu’s ACE program started, there really wasn’t any other system like that in the city,” Perry-Carr says. “Our founders were really forward-thinking people, and they knew innately that it was really about more than just performing. It was also about preserving [culture] through education.”
Perry-Carr herself is partially a product of Muntu Dance Theatre’s teachings. Her mother, Regina Taitts, was a dancer with the company in its early days, and the time Perry-Carr spent around the company in her childhood le a lasting impression. In 1994, Perry-Carr entered the company’s workshop training program, and by 1998, she had worked her way up the ranks to become a full-time teaching artist and dancer.
“Being able to see that kind of representation and see examples of professionalism, artistry, and people living their passion through dance [at Muntu] impacted me and developed my passion for the arts,” she says.
Perry-Carr le Muntu in 2003, but she returned in 2020 as the company’s fourth artistic director, working with executive director Sekou Conde, who also oversees the ACE program, which currently provides arts programming to six Chicago schools.
“I feel responsibility in that, a lot of times, we’re someone’s first introduction to understanding African culture,” she says.
Despite its long history and stature within the dance community, Muntu Dance Theatre has continuously battled negative public perceptions and stereotypes about West African dance, which is o en not taken as seriously as other dance forms, such as ballet. Perry-Carr says Muntu aims to shi that narrative.
“When we come to spaces, there’s o en still a lot of education that we have to do because of the many stereotypes that are placed on us,” she says. “West African dance in general historically has been looked at as uncivilized, and that goes way back to the transatlantic slave trade.”
In 2019, Muntu joined the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project (CBDLP). The goal of the project is to reduce inequities that Black-led dance companies have had to navigate for decades by providing a select cohort of organizations with funding, operational support, and performance opportunities.
Muntu’s participation in CBDLP has allowed Perry-Carr to find support and connect with leaders at other companies, who o en navigate similar obstacles.
“It’s been an awesome coming-together space,” Perry-Carr says. “The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project has helped bring people together more frequently where we may not have crossed paths as o en—so it’s created a space for us to build community and strength in numbers.”
In August, Muntu Dance Theatre will facilitate DanceAfrica Chicago, a three-day festival that brings together African and African American dancers and organizations from across the country for a weekend of dance, conversation, and community. Perry-Carr is optimistic that the festival will provide a much-needed space for participants to connect over their passion for the African diaspora and amplify the beauty of their art. In addition to the festival, Muntu Dance Theatre is developing a cultural exchange program with a dance company in Senegal, which will provide an opportunity for their dancers to hone their skills in West Africa.
With so many projects underway, it’s clear that Muntu Dance Theatre is on its way to becoming an artistic powerhouse on a truly global scale.
“We’re not only a voice for Muntu, but we’re a voice for all West African or African diaspora culture workers,” Perry-Carr says.
The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is a program of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Their current cohort of local dance companies includes Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center & Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, the Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Praize Productions Inc. For more about CBDLP, visit chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, and chicagoreader.com/special/ logan-center-for-the-arts-at-the-university-of-chicago.
Muntu Dance Theatre celebrates the African diaspora through dance, music, and folklorePhoto by Matt Karas
Robert Mier (1924-1995) was a professor of urban planning and public administration at University of Illinois Chicago and a leading expert on urban economic issues. Mier founded the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development in 1978. During Mayor Harold Washington’s first term, Mier became the City of Chicago’s director of economic development and created “Chicago Works Together,” a city plan for development that became a national model for other large cities.
In the winter of 1982 I was a junior at Gordon Tech High School (now known as DePaul College Prep). One of my best friends’ mothers was dating a guy named Big Tony.
Big Tony was the owner of two pizza restaurants and a gas station and also our neighborhood’s precinct captain. He was a large man who drove a Buick and carried a .25 ACP Beretta in a holster discretely concealed under his silk suits. Tony, despite his macho posturing, was rumored to be “too soft” to become an actual member of the mafia.
One morning he pulled over as my mom was walking down Bell Avenue. He rolled down his window and said to her, “We’re watching you Mrs. Mier.”
At the time, my father, Robert Mier, was helping coordinate Harold Washington’s first mayoral campaign. Most of Chicago’s white population, including the working-class Bavarians in North Center (my old neighbor-
hood), were hysterical over the possibility of having a Black mayor. My dad had warned me and my siblings that we were probably going to have rocks thrown through our windows.
After one of the most racist mayoral campaigns in Chicago history, which saw the best performance of a Republican (the previously unknown-to-many-voters Bernie Epton) in a Chicago election in over 100 years, Washington went on to win with only around 17 percent of the white vote.
Shortly after his historic victory, Washington asked my father to serve on his commission of economic development. Washington later moved him across the street into City Hall, where my father became the city’s director of development, a position that he held until he was fired on Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first day in o ce in 1989.
During his time at City Hall, my father would often talk to me about daily events at his job. He sometimes called me from his city-issued car, a 1982 Chevy Caprice Classic that had a phone in it (a sure sign that you had made the big time back in the early 80s).
After a while, the racist hysteria that swept over our neighborhood (“They’re going to replace the elevators in city hall with vines,” was a common refrain) gave way to begrudging respect for a mayor who prioritized neighborhood development over downtown development and manufacturing jobs over the service sector. I still remember my pride one evening when a neighborhood Teamsters Union truck driver told me what a good job his
local thought Washington was doing.
Chicago is now a very di erent city. The brick two-flats in my old neighborhood that used to have two or three families living in them have been gutted and converted to $2 million single-family mansions. The streets around Bell School that were once patrolled by the Simon City Royals are now patrolled by people pushing expensive baby carriages. Many working-class north siders have been pushed to the northwest side or out to the suburbs.
One thing today’s Chicago does have in common with the 80s is that a progressive is back in the mayor’s o ce. A lot of the major players in the Washington administration, including my father, who died of cancer in 1995, are long gone. I imagine that most people living in Chicago—especially those under 50—probably don’t even remember the Washington administration.
I fear that Washington’s reputation conversion from progressive changemaker into a harmless icon after his death by mass media companies like the Chicago Tribune and WGN (both fought him tooth and nail on many policies while he was alive) has left younger generations with little substantive knowledge of what he actually did. I decided to write this article to share a few things my father told me about the times back then, with hope that the information might be useful to the movement that propelled Brandon Johnson to the mayor’s office. You can find further information from my father’s writings (like his 1993 book Social Justice and Local Development Policy).
The Johnson administration should expect heightened scrutiny from the federal government. Nearly every new policy initiative implemented by the Washington administration was audited by the Feds. Granted, this happened during the Reagan years, but I can’t imagine the Biden administration will be any friendlier to a progressive democratic mayor, judging how the DNC has bent over backwards to prevent progressive mayors from getting elected (most recently in Bu alo). There are certainly those interested in working to turn the Johnson administration into such a disaster that no one elects a progressive in Chicago for another 40 years.
The Johnson administration should prepare to be attacked in the media for every attempt to provide affordable housing to the poor. During the Washington years, common attacks involved red-baiting (as happened to 46th Ward alderperson Helen Shiller), and constant accusations that the city was “putting development on hold” (one of the frequent proclamations of Machine alderperson Kathy Osterman).
T he new administration should prepare to be blackmailed into delivering on megacon struction projects. One of my father’s proudest achievements was helping block an edition of the World’s Fair from coming to Chicago. He was proud because mega-events like World Fairs, Olympics, and World Cups have
an uncanny habit of bankrupting local governments, causing forced evictions, and scarring cities with abandoned white elephants. Nevertheless, progressive mayoral administrations are susceptible to being blackmailed into delivering on large construction projects that do little to benefit their primary constituencies from the working and middle classes.
T his happened with the lights deal in Wrigley Field, which only took place after the Cubs threatened to leave the city. My dad, a lifelong baseball fanatic, was proud that they were able to lock in a deal that guaranteed the team the lowest number of night games in the MLB for 20 years. Mayor Washington’s promise to convert the area into public housing if the Cubs left town certainly gave the city more bargaining power.
T hey were less fortunate with Comiskey, as Governor Jim Thompson and Washington caved to Jerry Reinsdorf’s threat to move the White Sox to Florida and subsequently subsidized construction of an expensive new stadium for the White Sox, with an astronomical tab that taxpayers are still footing today. The logic behind caving into the demands back then, as I remember it, was that letting a team move out of town would be political suicide and would be used by an already hostile press to hammer home the message that well-meaning progressives don’t know how to run governments. This is an example of the type of threat to progressives that remains in Chicago and other big American cities to this day.
B enefits to corporations are not a one-way street. All over what is now called “the rust belt,” manufacturers that had received low-interest loans and huge tax breaks to open up shop in big cities in the 80s shut down operations and moved out, leaving millions of people unemployed. While most big-city mayors simply wrung their hands and repeated Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” quote, the Washington administration decided to hold corporations accountable.
Four years after the Hasbro-Bradley toy company received a subsidized $1 million loan from the City of Chicago to expand its Playskool factory (with a promise to generate 400 new jobs), the company changed its mind and announced a plant closure. The City of Chicago then sued the company for breach
of trust. During a time when the Reagan administration had no regulations for plant closures in place, Chicago was able to set a precedent. Although the lawsuit didn’t prevent the plant from closing, it managed to force Hasbro-Bradley to stay open for an extra year and pay for job placement services and emergency aid for their displaced workers.
I ndustrial jobs matter. In 1982, there were 277,000 manufacturing jobs in Chicago. Due to a variety of factors including robotics, that number has now diminished to around 63,000. These jobs are still important for Chicago, because they traditionally pay much higher wages than service-sector jobs. Manufacturing contributes around $53 billion per year to the local economy.
My father argued that despite the nationwide trend of manufacturing decline, Chicago still had a lot to o er to manufacturers who were thinking of relocating. Cheaper wages overseas, for example, could be o set by lower transportation costs, since Chicago was America’s rail, air, and trucking hub. Even if shutdowns were inevitable, the economic benefits would be substantial if this process of decline could be slowed down and workers were able to hold onto their high-paying factory jobs for a few more years before being forced into the normally lowerpay fi ng service sector.
T he 1983 Chicago Works Together development plan prioritized industrial jobs. One example of how the city’s department of economic development worked to help factories stay in operation was an order issued to allow a freight train to run through a new strip mall parking lot in the Clybourn corridor so that it could reach an 80-year-old candy factory that still existed in the neighborhood. Every day the train came through, cops would arrive with a tow truck and clear the tracks of any vehicle whose owner had ignored the signs warning them about it.
Popular participation is an important tool for deepening democracy. When the city announced construction of a new library in the loop, instead of awarding a no-bid contract to a politically connected construction company (as was the custom during the Daley Machine years), the Washington administration invited the public to vote on their favorite proposal.
Across the city, thousands of people went into their local libraries to vote on the five designs that fit the bidding requirements. This generated greater interest and a sense
of ownership over the project among Chicagoans. Washington died before the project was finished, but the Harold Washington Library (the largest single library building in the U.S. at the time of its completion in 1991) is now one of the city’s most beloved public institutions.
Communications is key. It’s extremely hard managing a city with the size and the problems of Chicago, and, as in the case of Washington’s election, expectations for Johnson among large swaths of the city must be unrealistically high. This may sound obvious, but it’s fundamental that the new administration work to clearly communicate what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it is trying to do, to avoid a backlash among its support base.
Faced with an information monopoly from a hostile press in the pre-Internet age, the Washington administration did a lot of this through neighborhood meetings. Communications technology has changed a lot since the early 80s but the goal of e ective communications with the base remains the same.
I moved out of Chicago and the U.S. in the 90s, and whenever I return to my hometown,
I wonder how different this city would be today if Washington hadn’t died of a heart attack shortly after consolidating his power over the City Council. What would the city be like today if, instead of artificially accelerating gentrification and strip mall construction through subsidies for big real estate mafi as, a government had stayed in place for decades that fought to limit displacement of its residents?
W hat would it be like today if there had been a 20-year period in which a government invested as equally in the neighborhoods as in the downtown business district? What if, instead of dishing out taxpayers’ money to cronies to turn city parks into tourist attractions for people from the suburbs and out-of-town visitors who do not contribute to the city tax base, that money had been used to improve the public schools and the city’s transportation system? We’ll never know, but here’s hoping the Johnson administration can pick up where the Washington administration left o . v
Point is, if anyone could convince NU boosters to kick in a little scratch for the new stadium/entertainment palace, it was the coach widely known as Fitz. You might say there was a lot of money riding on keeping him as coach. Now back to Hickey’s report.
It dropped on a Friday afternoon, which pretty much guaranteed it would not get much attention. NU didn’t even release the actual report—still hasn’t, as I write this. Nor apparently do they have to, as NU is a private institution not governed by public records law.
Instead, they released an “executive summary,” unsigned by any human. Not even NU president Michael Schill. So for all we know it was written by an AI robot, programmed to sound like a human (if humans sounded like corporate lawyers). Here’s how they broke it down . . .
Content note: This column contains mention of hazing and sexual assault.
Northwestern University (NU) may not win many, or any, football games this season. But, man, when it comes to cynical acts of duplicity and deceit, they may already be the champs.
Oh, where to start with the football hazing scandal that gets more scandalous by the day? How about with the as yet unidentified whistleblower?
Last November, after the Wildcats had completed an excruciatingly awful 1-11 season, the whistleblower contacted university officials with revelations about rampant hazing on the football team. In January, Northwestern hired Maggie Hickey, a well-connected corporate lawyer, to investigate.
“While we do not yet know whether the allegations are true, hazing is prohibited by University policy, and we take these claims seriously,” Northwestern said in a statement.
“The health, safety and well-being of our stu-
dents is the first priority.”
Got that, people? Nothing matters more than the “safety and well-being” of NU students! Keep that statement in mind as we fast forward several months . . .
On Friday, July 7, NU revealed the results of Hickey’s investigation. Well, sorta. But before we get to Hickey’s revelations, here’s a couple of other things to keep in mind . . .
The hazing allegations came just as Northwestern was proposing to build an $800 million new stadium—and concert venue—near the school’s Evanston campus.
A key person, if not the key person, in raising the money to build that stadium was coach Pat Fitzgerald, a beloved NU figure going back to his days as a linebacker on the 1996 Rose Bowl team.
Fitzgerald has many quirks that endear him to NU fans, such as ending interviews by saying “Go Cats!” As far as many NU boosters were concerned, the coaching job was his as long as he wanted, no matter how awful his teams played.
“Current and former players varied on their perspective of the conduct.”
Still . . .
“The investigation team determined that the complainant’s claims were largely supported by the evidence gathered during the investigation, including separate and consistent first-person accounts from current and former players.”
And yet . . .
“The investigation team did not discover sufficient evidence to believe that coaching sta knew about the ongoing hazing conduct.”
Nonetheless . . .
“The University took steps to eliminate hazing from the football program.”
To translate: something unspecified happened, though it’s open to interpretation as to how bad it was. But whatever happened, even if it wasn’t so bad, NU promises it won’t happen again. OK? Now get on with the rest of your lives cause there’s nothing more to see here.
The executive summary also announced Fitzgerald was being suspended without pay for the next two weeks, which happen to be the slowest weeks in college football, just before a new season begins. So it kind of amounts to an unpaid vacation.
After which Fitzgerald would return to coaching and, presumably, helping raise money for that new stadium. Except . . .
On Saturday, July 8, the Daily Northwestern ran a story based on interviews with a couple of players, including the whistleblower, that revealed the details the executive summary
neglected to mention. They “involved coerced sexual acts” such as forcing freshmen “to strip naked and perform various acts, including bear crawling and slingshotting themselves across the floor with exercise bands.” And a yearly tradition called “the carwash,” in which the article states “players would stand naked at the entrance to the showers and spin around, forcing those entering the showers to ‘basically (rub) up against a bare-naked man.’”
The article also mentions that the whistleblower alleged that he witnessed and was forced to participate in “a naked center-quarterback exchange, wherein a freshman quarterback was forced to take an under-center snap from a freshman center, while both players were naked.”
The article went viral. Suddenly people from coast to coast—even those who cared nothing about college football—were gobbling up the details of the scandal that Northwestern had clearly tried to bury with that vague “executive summary” dropped on a Friday afternoon.
Later Saturday night, President Schill announced he was considering a harsher punishment for Fitzgerald. On Monday, Schill fired him. Apparently having read the article in the Daily —and realizing the scandal was being covered by almost every major news outlet in the country—he concluded that what happened in the locker room was bad after all.
Call me jaded, but my guess is NU decided that hazing was bad for the “safety and well-being” of NU students after they realized it might be even worse for the well-being of a new stadium.
Now all hell is breaking loose with new revelations of hazing and lawsuits against the university by players. Fitzgerald has hired his own lawyer, Dan Webb. Who knows, maybe he’ll file a lawsuit. This story will be around for a long time.
It’s another example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomena named for Barbra Streisand, who didn’t want the public to see pictures of her Malibu mansion. Pretty much guaranteeing that everyone saw it.
In other words, the more you try to conceal something from the public, the more the public will want to see it. Especially if it involves the bad behavior of naked men in locker rooms. Go Cats! v @bennyjshow
By trying to bury the story about hazing on the football team, Northwestern guaranteed everyone would want to know about it.
BEN JORAVSKYA 2021 game between Northwestern and the University of Michigan Wolverines MAIZE & BLUE NATION/FLICKR, LICENSED UNDER CC BY 2.0
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published its first issue—six pages, mimeographed—in December 1945, four months after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Current Bulletin president Rachel Bronson says the goals cofounder Eugene Rabinowitch had for it still guide it: to inform the public, to provide a space for scientists to engage on policy, and “to manage the dangerous presence of Pandora’s box in modern science.”
building the pile in mid-November. “These neighborhood people played a vital role in assembling the pile,” Lamb said. “They did it in two weeks, working around the clock.”
On the morning of December 2, 1942, the experiment commenced. By afternoon—after an eleventh-hour, Fermi-ordered lunch break— they had reached a sustained nuclear reaction. They’d proven that a nuclear bomb was possible, and, importantly, that it wouldn’t require huge amounts of uranium.
“So, two things happened: right away they moved the pile out to site A at [suburban] Argonne Forest. That’s how Argonne, soon after that, became an o cial laboratory of the government and a pioneer in nuclear medicine.”
The other thing that happened was that Oppenheimer picked a remote mesa he knew from attending a New Mexico boys’ school as the site for the full-scale development of the bomb.
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 e ort known as the Manhattan Project, but the experiment showing it was possible to make and deliver an atomic bomb was conducted right here, under the west stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.
Scientists had already discovered that atomic nuclei, made up of neutrons and protons, release a tremendous amount of energy if they are broken apart. The open question was whether someone could create a hugely powerful bomb by setting up a sustained chain reaction—one in which neutrons from broken nuclei would continue to hit and split other nuclei in an expanding cascade.
“There was a lot of worry among physicists
that it could be done,” Lamb told me. “A famous German physicist was known to be interested, and the German army had control over two necessary resources: large amounts of graphite and, once they invaded Norway, heavy water.” Both of those are “moderators”—they slow down the blasting neutrons, which makes a sustained reaction more likely.
“This was extremely frightening,” Lamb said. Physicists in the U.S. sent a letter signed by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging the government to facilitate an experiment as soon as possible that would show whether such a bomb could be made or not. Roosevelt agreed.
“And,” Lamb said, “that brings us to the Chicago connection. A committee was set up to figure out how to proceed and where. The chair of that committee was Arthur Holly Compton, professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He more or less single-handedly decided the experiment should be done near Chicago.”
Enrico Fermi and others, who’d been
splitting atoms at Columbia University (ergo “Manhattan Project”), quickly moved to the University of Chicago, which had been converted to the war e ort.
Their plan was to build a pile of graphite, put uranium spheres inside, and see if they could get a sustained chain reaction going. Because it was considered somewhat risky, they were going to do it in a forested area southwest of Chicago; a contractor had been hired to assemble the pile there.
Then, Lamb said, “The contractor’s employees went on strike.
“There was such a sense of urgency, Fermi and the team decided to assemble the graphite blocks on campus, under Stagg Field. That space was available because in the 1930s, President Robert Maynard Hutchins had decided that large-scale football was not commensurate with the values and objectives of the university, and had ended it,” Lamb noted.
They recruited laborers from the south side, including high school students, and began
But by the time the bomb was nearing completion, it was the spring of 1945. Nazi Germany’s army was collapsing, and it was clear that Germany would be defeated soon. “There were discussions in Washington about using the bomb on Japan. The physicists were very uncomfortable with this, and many of them were adamantly opposed to it,” Lamb said. “A lot of work had continued in Chicago, and it was physicists here who first spoke out about their concerns.”
They wrote a report explaining their opposition; it’s called the Franck Report, but Eugene Rabinowitch, who would cofound the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote it, Lamb said. The report made three main points: how to make the bomb could not be kept secret— other countries would figure it out; once they did, there would be a horrific nuclear arms race; and the only way it could be slowed or stopped was by international treaties on nuclear weapons.
“Most strategic thinkers about nuclear weapons will say that 500 nuclear weapons used on Russia or, vice versa, on the U.S., would destroy the country,” said Lamb. “By the early 1980s, more than 60,000 nuclear weapons were available. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created here at the University of Chicago to take on the military complex and to try to stop a nuclear catastrophe from happening. That was 1945, and it’s still here, housed in the Harris School of Public Policy.”
Rabinowitch became the Bulletin’s longtime editor; its first board chair was J. Robert Oppenheimer. v
@DeannaIsaacs
By ANTHONY EHLERS
In the past year we have witnessed the Supreme Court change the very fabric of our country.
Last year, the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped women of their bodily autonomy. This year, we have seen the courts strip away affirmative action, allow businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, and deny millions of Americans (most of whom are Black and Brown people) relief from usurious student-loan debt.
This Court has abrogated its responsibility to the most vulnerable in our society. Instead, its right-wing majority chooses to protect white Republican evangelicals. The court is packed with members of the far-right movement who are using their position to push their political beliefs onto the American people.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2022 a full 61 percent of American adults polled were in favor of abortion being legal in all or most cases. Yet here we are, with abortion access curtailed in accordance with a minority opinion.
We are being held hostage by a Supreme Court that is out of touch. We are supposed to have what the Court calls “evolving standards of decency,” which means the Court should be attuned to the morals of the times. Yet, this Court seems to be regressing back to the
1950s, where women were kept in their place, Black people couldn’t eat at the same restaurants or attend the same schools as whites, and LGBTQ+ people were relegated to the shadows.
This is not the will of the American people.
The Supreme Court was so eager to make a ruling attacking LGBTQ+ people that it ignored over 150 years of tradition and precedent in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. They allowed the lawsuit to proceed without standing.
With the help of a conservative Christian law group, Lorie Smith challenged Colorado’s antidiscrimination laws, claiming they infringed on her right to refuse graphic-design services to gay and lesbian couples on religious grounds. Never mind that Smith hadn’t been impacted by the state’s antidiscrimination laws at all, since there was no actual website, no real customer, and no actual harm. In short, Smith had no dog in the fight. The Court went ahead anyway, asserting its power in an unprecedented manner.
Let’s call it what it really is: a victory for those who would discriminate against marginalized people. The First Amendment is being used as a shield for bigotry and as a weapon, a bludgeon to force small-minded religious views on others.
For many years, white racists in the south also used religion to justify bigotry. They
claimed segregation was ordained by the Bible, and the Bible called for separation of the races. My mother can remember a time when there were “Whites Only” signs posted in many public places in the south. We are not even a generation removed from such treatment of Black people in this country.
A rmative action was an attempt to level the playing field somewhat. Now, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court has overturned that precedent as well. All the while, justices tout equal protection under the law. It’s disingenuous and ignorant. Equal protection requires that we look at race.
How can it be that in this century, instead of coming to grips with the nation’s past, and working to build a better country, we are heading back toward Jim Crow? How is it a free speech right to discriminate? This court has shrunk back from its duty to protect people, and instead allows people to be treated as second-class citizens.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference to our “colorblind” Constitution in his concurring opinion in Students is ridiculous. How, precisely, is the constitution colorblind when it stated that Black people were only threefifths of a person? Justice Thomas’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
So-called colorblindness allows lawmakers and the courts to argue that the absence of racism in the law means Black people cannot claim racial harm. The politics of “colorblindness” is used to shroud not only racism, but poverty as well. This is what Justice Thomas is signaling: he is resurrecting the old code words and dog whistles of segregationists.
The fact is, the economic problems of Black America cannot be understood without taking account of racism. Black Americans have been and remain underemployed, unemployed, poorly housed, and poorly schooled because of racist policies. Decades of disinvestment and underresourcing have left African Americans surrounded by substandard housing, poor job options, and underfunded schools, not to mention the school-to-prison pipeline and terroristic policing. Only a massive financial investment can begin to repair this.
In a 1967 speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Now, in order to answer the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ . . . we must fi rst honestly recognize where we are now.”
Until those on the right, including those on the Supreme Court, stop trying to take
us back to the days before the civil rights movement, and we actually recognize that systemic and structural racism exists in this country, we will never be able to answer the question that Dr. King posed.
In his 1965 commencement address to Howard University, then-president Lyndon Johnson said, “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
President Johnson’s words are as true today as they were then. Clarence Thomas and the other far-right Justices would do well to revisit them. Johnson’s words acknowledge structural inequality and underscore the need for a rmative action.
President Johnson continued, “It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.” The Supreme Court is taking away that ability.
The Court has become politicized, with unelected o cials making themselves the arbiters of policy, acting as a super-legislature, and exercising more power than any elected o cial in government.
We are witnessing a larger pattern of removing rights from marginalized communities. Justice Thomas wants to revisit gay marriage; right-wing operatives are attacking LGBTQ+ rights in many states, and these cases are sure to go to the Supreme Court. There is a war being waged on how people live their own lives, and we see it in some of the broader issues like “Don’t Say Gay” bills, bans on books and drag performers, and attacks on trans people. This so-called war against wokeness (whatever that means) is really a cover to take away more rights from already marginalized people.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” starts the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. These recent SCOTUS decisions make our union less perfect. v
Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. Find out more about in carcerated journalists at the Prison Journalism Project (prisonjournalismproject.org).
@prisonjourn
If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.
The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP) and Lease for Ogden Commons, a mixed-income community is available for review. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has worked with its development partner to develop a Draft TSP and Lease for use at the private development known as Ogden Commons (previous site of the Lawndale Complex). The units within this development will be used as replacement public housing units for Lawndale Complex and the Lawndale Community area. If you listed Lawndale Complex/Lawndale Community area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you want to live or maintain a right to return to new CHA replacement housing per the Relocation Rights Contract (RRC), you can comment on the Draft TSP and Lease during the 30-day public comment period.
The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is releasing proposed updates to the FY2024 HCV Admin Plan & Public Housing ACOP for public comment.
The 30-day public comment period begins July 20 and ends August 21, 2023. While CHA encourages and welcomes all program participants, residents, and the community-at-large to review the proposed updates to the FY2024 HCV Admin Plan & Public Housing ACOP you are not required to view or attend the public comment hearings to submit comments. Your presence or absence at the hearing does not a ect your housing.
The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.
CHA will host two public comment hearings—one livestream and one in-person:
Due to COVID-19, CHA has suspended all in person public meetings and instead, CHA will livestream one public comment hearing. The date and time of the public comment livestream hearing is as follows:
• Livestream: Tue, July 25, 2023, at 11:00 am, www.thecha.org
• In-person: Mon, Aug 7, 2023, at 6:00 pm, FIC 4859 S Wabash
(Sign and Spanish interpreters will be present.)
Tue, April 20, 10:00am: https://youtu.be/QBGG47BHXMg
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A Summary and the full Proposed FY2024 HCV Admin Plan & Public Housing ACOP will be available on CHA’s website at www.thecha.org beginning July 20. You may also mail or fax comments for the Proposed FY2024 HCV Admin Plan & Public Housing ACOP. All comments must be postmarked and received by August 21, 2023.
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“Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities” at the DePaul Art Museum explores a forgotten nationwide solidarity movement. The future was on Lucy Lippard’s mind in 1982. That year, the art historian, critic, and organizer christened the opening of all-star art collective Group Material’s New York exhibition “¡LUCHAR! An Exhibition for the People of Central America” as “an art for the future . . . preparing a voice and an image for the dreams of the continent, a vision for the revolution for when it comes.” In another two years, with an eye toward that revolution, Lippard—along with a group of co-organizers, artists, and activists—would set in motion an ambitious, unprecedented project aimed squarely at Reagan-era violence and imperialism in Central America.
Known as “Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America,” or “Artists Call,” for short, the movement formed around an extraordinary mobilization of people, ideas, and resources that would bring 31 exhibitions, performances, readings, and screenings to 27 cities across the United States and Canada. From famous artists like Alfredo Jaar, Martha Rosler, and Nancy Spero, to local activists and grassroots organizations, Artists Call imagined a pan-American solidarity through the monumental e orts of thousands of participants reflecting on war, insurgency, and massacre in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
In the short term, Lippard’s dream of the future seemed to be on the horizon. In the long term? Almost 40 years after Artists Call, the project’s incomplete, uncatalogued archive lay untouched and ignored at the Museum of Modern Art’s archives in Queens, where it was unearthed by curator Erina Duganne in 2017. Significant artworks had been destroyed or lost. Information about participating artists was scant. A list of exhibition venues, events, and actions was nonexistent. “The art world forgets,” commented Lippard in early 2022, at
the first iteration of “Art for the Future” at the Tufts University Art Galleries.
Now on view at DPAM, “Art for the Future” resurrects Artists Call thanks to five years of archival work by Duganne and cocurator Abigail Satinsky. The exhibition, which includes archival material, replicas of lost work, stand-ins by participating artists, and contemporary commissions, probes a particular moment in which art was figured as a mode of political work, a form of information, imagination, and insurgence that should, and must, transform public conscience.
This orientation, which relied on a prophetic belief in razor-tipped awareness, agency, and action, infl amed in a post-Vietnam War era, locked in a vision of the present crackling with possibility. Some of the most striking archival material is graphic, appropriating the language of advertising and propaganda.
Alfredo Jaar’s We’re All Created Equal (1984), related to a now-lost work originally shown in an Artists Call exhibition, juxtaposes the phrase, “We’re all created equal. After that, baby, you’re on your own,” originally printed in a Fortune magazine ad espousing the American fantasy of capitalist individualism and progress against a black-and-white photograph of U.S.-backed Contra rebels trained to overthrow Nicaragua’s new Marxist Sandinista government. U.S. intervention, for Jaar, is a violence shared by the sink-or-swim spirit of American exceptionalism and an ironic counterpoint to the extractivism and exploitation propping up the country’s economic prosperity.
Other materials beg for action through the visual hallmarks of popular solidarity and war flyers. Carlos Cortéz’s ¡Fuera! No necesitamos mas tropas! (1984), one of two artworks sourced from Artists Call activities in Chicago by DPAM associate curator Ionit Behar, shows four woodcut faces creased in worry, hands outstretched to push back black gun barrels. Drawing on Cortéz’s print work for the Industrial Workers of the World, the poster ex-
changes Jaar’s wordplay for straightforward address. In photographs sourced from the archives of artist Mary Patton, Chicago artists—including Cortéz—block the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago with banners and posters including devilish icons of Reagan, authoritarian political advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the menacing French firing squad from Goya’s The Third of May 1808.
Looking back at these efforts, from a future very di erent from the one Artists Call envisioned, is to be haunted by failure. Conflict, war, violence, and political repression continues to reverberate in Central America, as do the discrimination and exploitation of Central American immigrants in the U.S. The more visionary work in “Art for the Future,” counterintuitively, rejects the future, standing instead as linear fact, insu cient to hold Central American aspiration and possibility. Sabra Moore’s Reconstruction Project (1984), a collaborative re-creation of a rare surviving Mayan codex, links the 16th-century destruction of Mayan culture with the killing of roughly 200,000 Guatemalans by U.S.-backed military regimes. “Victims of history,” writes educator and artist Josh Rios, “disrupt the fiction of progress as an upward bounding temporality where tomorrow will always be better than today.”
The curators of “Art for the Future” gesture toward the disruption of linear time in the organization of the exhibition as well, mixing archival materials with contemporary work, which also serves to correct another failure of Artists Call—the almost complete lack of work by artists from Central America, an oversight that Behar attributes to geographic and cultural barriers, as well as to the few and precarious venues for art in countries ravaged by violence. It is also the result of specific blindnesses and affordances of a group, including commercially successful
artists, wading into politics while balancing desires both radical and market-driven. In confronting this complex legacy, “Art for the Future” is less about promoting the archive of Artists Call than the productive confusion that surrounds the passing into history of any imperfect project whose aim remains incomplete, for which the future is no longer a horizon but an ethos.
In this way, Lippard’s assessment is truer than ever—the work continues to be for a future, just not the future we live in. If anything, today this future feels more remote, in a world where awareness and attention, once imagined as a sphere of political progress and action, is saturated and sold, diffused and stripped of its relationship to reality. Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 reads like a metaphor for this condition. The bare, eight-foot wooden cube, stamped with black text reading “ISOLATION BOX AS USED BY U.S. TROOPS AT POINT SALINES PRISON CAMP IN GRENADA,” is perforated above eye level with rectangular ventilation holes that reveal glimpses of an inky, black interior. The exterior delineates those known unknowns— the facts of interrogation, torture, abuse, intervention, extraction—that leave a trace to be followed, and a cause to be made visible.
The internal vacuum is stripped of sensibility, featureless and unintelligible—the achievement of power to erase the possibility of sight itself. Inside the box are the unknown unknowns, hundreds of thousands of lives erased from the face of the earth, the total obliteration of futures, the absence of sight, attention, history, or understanding. The feat of Artists Call and “Art for the Future” is in its various tracings of this boundary, all shadows of an empire whose dissolution remains the dream of the continent. v
“Art for the Future” probes a particular moment, in which art was a mode of political work.
my dead tells me that girl needs the earth so i make her a cup of black tea my dead tells me that girl’s going too far so i pack a flashlight i don’t think traveling in the dark is a bad thing but we don’t have the best memory we come from folks who go & forget how to return we come from folks who build wherever they land she has built a home in this dark is it bad for me to do anything other than bring her candles and tell her it is beautiful her living thinks it’s more than bad it is evil they think i am the dark a devil a murky path they call me the names they called my mother
By Venus Ayalaniand my dead are furious they call me the names they called my grandmother and my dead rise from the bottom of some ocean they call me the dead and just like that i am treading water struggling to catch my breath both here and drifting if i was the names they call me by i’d swallow them whole and disappear but no i am here hungry for a place to return to me & her do the searching together me & her split bread while we wait me & her buy tea lights for this home we make it as pretty as we can and maybe that is the bad thing we made the dark so beautiful she doesn’t want to leave
Venus Ayalani is an aquarius rising from 79th. The hood’s favorite griot. Tapping into some cellular memory; their poetry is a conjuring / is veneration / is time traveling / is to be left at the altar. Sometimes, Ayalani doesn’t write the poem at all. Sometimes they just sit in front of a journal with a pen in their hand, listening, as their folks tell the stories themselves.
This Poetry Corner is curated by Raych Jackson. Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and voice actor. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube and have been published by many— including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Shallow Ends, and Washington Square Review. She co-created and co-hosts Big Kid Show, a monthly variety show in Chicago. Raych’s debut collection EVEN THE SAINTS AUDITION (Button Poetry) won Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan in the Chicago Reader fall of 2019. RAYCH-JACKSON.COM
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Painter Hubert Neal Jr. comes home with “Thoughts and Prayers.”
Rarely is an exhibition title as apt as this one. In his first hometown solo show, up at Povos in West Town, Hubert Neal Jr. dissects a uniquely American social sedative: that preventable mass violence is both an anomaly and an acceptable price for freedom. Neal probes that foundational falsehood with his figurative paintings, rendered in vibrant acrylics. His style is as potently individual, and immediately recognizable, as Kara Walker or Keith Haring, with a political acuity in the spirit of both those artists.
A graduate of the Chicago Academy for the Arts, Neal is based in Los Angeles but turns an unsparing eye on violence all around the globe in “Thoughts and Prayers”: the war in Ukraine, Haitian immigrants terrorized at the U.S.-Mexico border, and police shootings of unarmed African American men. Neal’s police paintings depict officers in solid blue, not the skin tones of his other figures, and eerily grinning as they commit unspeakable acts of violence. Other paintings are more parenthetical but no less chilling. In Club Robb Elementary at the Uvalde Resort, Texas (2023), officers smilingly drink beer and play craps, a biting commentary on law enforcement’s more than hour-long delay in stopping a gunman’s rampage at Robb Elementary School last year. The work’s dissonance between breezy repose and horrific carnage is as stark as pleading for reform and, instead, getting thoughts and prayers. —HANNAH
EDGAR “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” Through 7/30: Sat-Sun noon-6 PM, weekdays by appointment, Povos,1541 W. Chicago, povoschicago.com
In Elnaz Javani’s textiles, identity is constantly being reworked.
Experiencing Elnaz Javani’s solo show, “Dwelling Places,” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid is like plunging into a sea of turquoise and dusty pink; swimming through convoluted seagrass, shadows of the past, and specters of near-forgotten selves; and, in the end, emerging to the surface of the water, a bit disoriented, but resolved.
Hanging textile-based works barely dri from the wall, with the exception of a small one docked quietly on a pedestal—products of complex and elaborate processes involving various methods of dyeing, printing, sewing, and embroidery. These works unite and accentuate one thing: process is the metaphor. One of the most remarkable moments is located in Coming Undone and Midnight Sun, where swatches appliquéd to the backing fabric are the outcome of repeated sublimation printing. Swirling marble patterns resemble the reflection of a burnt sunset on a wrinkled lake, a sublime sum of fractured lives that are sometimes at odds with each other.
Dyeing, done by submerging the textile with opaque liquid to alter its color but not its texture, is not unlike the body’s instinct to adapt while preserving what’s innate. Techniques of layering and self-referencing, spotted frequently in Javani’s new works, corroborate this metaphor. In Piscina, a small humanoid figure with three arms, located in the upper right quadrant of the
composition, carries traces of multiple revisions: a handpaint dye that gives them a dark, forest-green silhouette; a white partial outline resulting from bleach; and, if you look closely, a thinly machine-sewn thread of yet another shade of sea-foam green that completes the rest of the contour. Similarly, in Conquered, a human figure is embroidered on top of a dye of similar shape, the latter of which is most visible by its aberration beyond the contour of the figure firmly demarcated by the embroidery. Each addition (or in the case of bleaching, subtraction of the color) contributes to or tweaks the overall outlook of the figure. Identity is constantly being worked and reworked, always a little awkward here, a bit ill-fitted there, but ultimately—and quite naturally—becoming a unique assemblage, beautiful in its own right. —NICKY
NI “DWELLING PLACES” Through 8/5: Sat noon-4 PM and by appointment, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 2233 S. Throop, #419, tigerstrikesasteroid.com
Leasho Johnson unravels vast territories of identity.
Before even entering the gallery, “Somewhere between the eyes and the heart” pulls you in. Leasho Johnson’s densely textured paintings vary in scale. The dark color palette and shiny pitch-black silhouettes are interrupted by bright splashes of color: vivid pink, yellow, blue, and tangerine. The Jamaican-born, Chicago-based artist’s subjects are abstract enough for their facial features to be indistinct, but figurative enough to feel their piercing eyes look into your soul. The tension goes both ways.
Johnson’s work—spanning formats and media from painting and collage to sculpture and murals—is a deep dive into the culture and experiences that have shaped him. Growing up Black, queer, and male in a small Jamaican town, the artist was heavily informed by early childhood memories, his country’s postcolonial condition, and dancehall street culture that encompasses music, fashion, drugs, guns, art, community, technology, and more. The artist describes it as “vibrant, dynamic, and o entimes controversial.” The energy of Black queer love is palpable throughout the show. So is the exploration of the vast territories of identity.
His approach to color and figuration in painting: charcoal—layers and layers of it. Color emerges from the blackness of his canvas in the form of watercolors,
COURTESY ELNAZ JAVANIrience that is “THE RIDE” because Fingerhut’s work is singular. Coded over a period of two years, the executable poem combines multisensory physical elements with Fingerhut’s so ware to form an installation that challenges and expands, with generosity and humor, what it means to be a reader, an observer, a person.
Do I slam into hyperbole with my fawning over “THE RIDE”?
Probably.
Does such sentiment negate the possibility that it is all true?
Not in the slightest.
Did “THE RIDE” move me, surprise me, shake me, serenade me, confound me, change me?
Yes. Yes to it all. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE “HALCYON.EXE: THE RIDE” Through 8/10: Thu and Sun 4-6 PM, or by appointment, Sulk Chicago, 525 S. Dearborn #209, sulkchicago.com
acrylic, and DIY natural dyes. Between figurative and abstract forms, Johnson’s exhibition becomes intensely personal; fluid and open to interpretation, it grants the viewer the freedom to explore different paths, consider possibilities, and unconditionally connect with the work in their own terms.
“Somewhere between the eyes and the heart” serves both as a reminder of how far we have come and how much further we can go. At the intersections of Blackness, queerness, and the self, Johnson breaks down the barriers between high and low. Fusing pop culture and fine art literally and metaphorically, he first becomes vulnerable, then consumed, and eventually liberated. Same goes for the viewer. —VASIA RIGOU
“SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE EYES AND HEART”
Through 8/12: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, westernexhibitions.com
Mark Fingerhut’s so ware poem challenges what it means to be an observer.
On a page in Donald Barthelme’s 1974 book Guilty Pleasures, there is a collage of a collision between two ships. Under the graphite lines of their hulls, the words “not our fault!” ring like a bell. In artist Mark Fingerhut’s so ware poem “HALCYON.EXE: THE RIDE,” currently up at Sulk Chicago, two cargo freighters, with a matterof-fact exuberance, have the following exchange:
HEY!
HELLO?
CAN YOU HEAR ME?
LOUD AND CLEAR
IT’S BEEN SO LONG
Fingerhut’s work has been compared to David Foster Wallace’s infinitely fragile, connected worlds and James Joyce’s playful verbal recursions and forms maddeningly aware of their own pre-inscribed bounds.
I pose Barthelme—the 20th-century writer of short stories filled with linguistic games, psyches, and narratives formed through and by fragmentation—as a third example, as his work comes close to capturing the funny, devastating, and moving currents of life, all undulating within Fingerhut’s motherboard.
However, this proximity fails to capture the expe-
“Drink from the river” shows that the personal and the universal are not so far apart.
Exploring intimacy, memory, and human connection through personal experience, Brenda Draney employs a less-is-more approach to painting. Here, absence and presence don’t seem to matter. Born in Sawridge First Nation, by the town of Slave Lake in Alberta, Canada, the Edmonton-based artist uses thick brushstrokes to depict aspects of contemporary Indigenous life. “Drink from the river,” on view at the Arts Club of Chicago, serves as a lens to nostalgia.
Utilizing white space as a conversation starter between her and the viewer, Draney intentionally leaves her work open to interpretation. Still lifes, figures, and mundane objects become more than vivid canvases featuring vignettes of everyday life—the carefully constructed compositions are set around a focal point that challenges the eye and the mind with things apparent and, importantly, with things le unsaid.
Between the tangible and the intangible, Draney’s work transports the viewer into a very personal place: the artist’s own childhood memories, histories, experiences, relationships, and cultural influences. Domestic moments—an unmade bed, a living room featuring nothing other than a floral upholstered couch and a chair, a naked woman getting ready in the bathroom, a joyous couple having a beer—invite an almost voyeuristic approach. Allowing one into the intimate corners of another person’s life (in this case, the artist’s), “Drink from the river” shows that the personal and the universal are not so far apart—that strength and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin.
Perfectly-imperfectly positioned onto sparsely painted canvases, Draney’s subject matter has a fuzzy, dreamlike element to it—as if she only vaguely remembers details. Memory can be tricky and elusive like that. But the artist’s work does not aim to lead the viewers along a predetermined path. Instead, it is meant to let them roam, reimagine, and ultimately reconstruct what they think they’re looking at—and that might even be looking back at oneself. —VASIA RIGOU “DRINK FROM THE RIVER” Through 8/15: Tue-Fri 11 AM-6 PM, Sat 11 AM-3 PM, Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario, artsclubchicago.org v
There are days I don’t think I can handle one more essay on the precarious state of the American theater. It’s not that I’m in denial about the existential threats facing so many institutions large and small. I just feel rather helpless to change what’s going on. And let’s be honest—even a wistful desire to return to the pre-COVID-19 days requires a lot of denial about the preexisting systemic inequities in the regional theater system, and the precariousness of the nonprofit arts model overall. The foundations were wobbly for many theaters before the virus took a wrecking ball to the structure.
So believe me when I say that Theatre Y’s The Wiz Walk was just what I needed to recharge my psychic batteries. Created by the company’s youth ensemble as a mash-up/ remix of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Wiz (the 1974 rock and R&B musical that was turned into a film in 1978), it’s a love letter to family, friendship, and faith in yourself.
This is the fourth installment of Theatre Y’s annual ambulatory, or “camino,” shows that first began in 2019 on the 606 with The Camino Project, and returned after the shutdown with YOU ARE HERE (exploring the “emerald necklace” boulevards of the city). Last year, the company, which just opened its new permanent home in North Lawndale, celebrated the neighborhood’s history and that of George W. Johnson, America’s first Black recording artist, with Laughing Song: A Walking Dream, created with and starring Chicago legend (and North Lawndale native) Marvin Tate.
This year’s show doesn’t take us as far afield in North Lawndale (there’s probably less than half a mile of ground covered), but if there’s
one constant enduring lesson in Baum’s beloved tale, it’s that everything you need to imagine a better world is right in your own backyard. If you don’t know your own power, you can’t empower others.
The premise here is that sisters Doro (Braniah Townsel) and Thea (Emily Bynum), having lost their parents in a house fire, now live with their grandfather, Pa Gene (Tate), Aunt Em (Emjaiye Royale), Uncle Henry (Richard Bonds), and cousin Mickey (Christopher Bonds), who all pitch in to run the family restaurant, Ozzie’s. (If only they could find the original recipe for Grandma’s famous mac and cheese, maybe business would be even better!)
But Aunt Eve (Nadia Pillay), who’s the chief investor in Ozzie’s, is ready to shut it down and sell out to buyers interested in gentrifying the neighborhood, maybe for “a Sweetgreens, or a farm-to-table deli.” When Thea runs out with Tutti (Eric K. Roberts), the family dog, to visit her parents’ graves, Doro follows her, and the two end up following the yellow brick road (marked out with gold paint on the sidewalks and vacant lots) through you-know-where.
As they collect the famous trio of Scarecrow (Roesha Townsel), Tin Man (Jada Dunkertell-Thetenman), and the Lion (Catrina Evans), the sisters also catch glimpses of the Wizard (Tate), as he rides through the streets
delivering empty bromides via bullhorn through the sunroof of a car. (“The answer to the riddle is to ask more questions.”) In conjunction with scenes set around the former Paderewski Elementary School (shuttered ten years ago by Rahm Emanuel, along with 49 other public schools), it sets up the framework for one of the political messages in the piece: you can’t depend on the folks on high to fix what they deliberately broke.
Through 8/ 12 : Sat-Sun 2 PM; performances begin and end at Theatre Y, 3611 W. Cermak, theatre-y.com, free admission (dinner included), but reservations requested.
But the show, codirected by Kaleb Jackson, Melissa Lorraine, and Pillay and featuring original music by Sharon Udoh, is far less interested in dissecting the root causes of disinvestment in North Lawndale than it is in celebrating the greatest assets of the area: its people. The combination of adult and youth actors creates a multigenerational real-time portrait of what working together for a common goal from the grassroots looks like.
Don’t get it twisted: there is a lot of humor and heart in this piece, which consistently elaborates upon the original story in simple
but e ective ways. The Tin Man shares some DNA with the protagonists of the Toy Story universe, in that he was abandoned by a kid who outgrew him. Puns and wordplay abound in the script, and small touches add delightful texture. Roberts’s Tutti is a splendid tour guide, but he’s also gonna stop and check his messages, if you will, at the local fire hydrant. During the showdown with Pillay’s Evilene, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Lion is distracted, as any cat might be, by a laser toy.
By the time we’re on the rooftop of Theatre Y’s new home, with the skyline of Baum’s original “Emerald City” spread out before us, the sisters realize that they (and their traveling companions) always had what they needed to get home: each other. “You’re the homiest home I know,” Doro tells Thea, and it’s an achingly beautiful moment.
And then it’s back downstairs to Ozzie’s for a free meal of chicken wings, collard greens— and, of course, mac and cheese. Theatre Y’s The Wiz Walk invites us to consider why stories endure, what it means to create and sustain a community, and how we find our way back after loss. If that’s not the best reason for theater to exist in the first place, I don’t know what is. v
Chicago Shakespeare’s Beauty and the Beast beguiles.
The stages at Chicago Shakespeare Theater are accustomed to classic tales of daring sword fights, magic spells, and a prince in disguise—just the kinds of stories that Belle loves to read. Although Navy Pier is far from Belle’s French provincial town, CST’s production of the Disney favorite Beauty and the Beast roars to life nonetheless. Directed and choreographed by Amber Mak, this enchanting family musical (score by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, and book by Linda Woolverton) brings this familiar story to life to the delight of young and old(er) audiences alike. A er all, one can never be too old for fairy tales.
As the story goes, Belle (Audrey Hare) offers herself up in exchange for her father, Maurice (Michael Kingston), to be freed from the dungeon of the Beast (Jason Michael Evans). However, Gaston (David Sajewich) has something to say about it, as he attempts to woo the town outsider who would rather read than be bothered by him. As our heroine, Hare gives Belle the lo y voice with which we are familiar but also allows her to be silly and fun simultaneously. Sajewich too brings an air of humanity to Gaston that he so o en lacks as a onedimensional villain. But good luck taking your eyes off Sam Linda as Le Fou when he takes the stage. Who knew the sidekick could demand the spotlight so profoundly?
The ensemble transitions like mad between scenes and personas, and the design elements are also divine. Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s book-flanked set is gorgeous, lending itself perfectly to Mike Tutaj’s novel projections, which transport us through the story page by page. However, most beguiling are the dazzling costume designs by
Theresa Ham. This show is truly a feast for the senses, from glowing wolf eyes to cancan napkin dresses. (Be aware that some noises and effects may be frightening for younger children, however.) Bon appétit! —AMANDA FINN BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Through 8/20: Wed 11 AM, Thu-Sat 11 AM and 2 PM, Sun 2 PM; audio description with optional touch tour Sat 8/5 11 AM, ASL interpretation Sat 8/12 11 AM; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $42 adults, $26 children 12 and under
Meant to Be at the Magic Lounge is a sly mind-blower.
The description for Henok Negash’s Meant to Be at the Chicago Magic Lounge makes it sound a little like a navel-gazing self-actualization exercise. Negash, we’re told, “specializes in offering a personalized mystery; meaning that he is not looking for perfection but rather connection.”
Rest assured that what you’re in for at the show is a sly and funny performance that, over the course of 75 minutes, sets us up for a mind-blowing finale. Negash is both self-deprecating and sardonic; during one trick, as he picks participants from the audience, he reminds each of them in turn that he chose them because “you’re so unique!”
Early in the show, he asks us to guess his ethnic makeup. (Spoiler alert: he’s of Ethiopian and Irish descent.) Though he doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how his parents met, the bit sets up more than Negash’s punch line about the folly of challenging him to a combination long-distance running and drinking competition. It plants the seeds for realizing that connections between people, particularly people in love, pop up in perhaps unexpected ways.
There isn’t a lot of flash to the show. Like most
Chicago Magic Lounge performances, this one is about the—yes—connection to the audience and the art of close-up magic. At the performance I saw, a couple that first met at Illinois State University in the 70s and reconnected decades later found themselves center stage. Details of their relationship popped up in sealed props in ways seemingly impossible to explain (well, unless you’ve gone to Magic College, I guess). It’s a compelling and endearing slice of sleight-of-hand. —KERRY REID
MEANT TO BE Through 9/27: Wed 7 PM, Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark, 312-366-4500, chicagomagiclounge.com, $40-$45
No Man’s Land hits differently postBrexit.
Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land occupies the territory between his earlier “comedies of menace,” such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, and the more overtly political work he’d create in the 1980s (Mountain Language, One for the Road). But it’s primarily a comedy of language, at least in Steppenwolf’s current intriguing staging under the direction of Les Waters, starring ensemble member Jeff Perry and Mark Ulrich (a late—and remarkably good!—replacement for Austin Pendleton, who le the show right before previews for personal reasons).
The roots in the earlier works are pretty apparent. You don’t have to look hard to find parallels to Davies, the dri er who moves in with two brothers in The Caretaker in Ulrich’s Spooner, who’s come back to the well-appointed, but rather sepulchral, drawing room of Perry’s Hirst, a successful “man of letters.” (Kudos to set designer Andrew Boyce for creating that tomblike effect.) It’s not taking on human rights atrocities as those 80s pieces did. But I couldn’t help but feel that Pinter’s portrait of two aging men now serves in a roundabout way as a portrait of a country that’s been having its own
identity crisis since the Brexit vote.
In the first act, the two codgers grow sloppy on drink and nostalgia. “What happened to our cottages? What happened to our lawns?” laments Spooner, sounding perilously close to those “we used to be a country, a proper country” memes on social media. With the arrival of the younger generation, embodied in loutish Foster (Samuel Roukin) and silkily sinister Briggs (Jon Hudson Odom), the stakes are raised. In the second act, the older men share memories of what might be their past history together at Oxford and a erward, much of which involves sexual one-upmanship, while the younger men seem to tighten their control.
The sense of menace here isn’t so much from outside forces as it is the vagaries of the older men’s own minds, implied by the title. Perry’s Hirst tells Spooner that he’s in “the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run.” As usual with Pinter, we’re asked to fill in the gaps in their histories and decide for ourselves where the narrative truth may lie. But Waters’s production and the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-them ensemble fill each pause and seeming non sequitur with a blend of pathos, humor, and clear-eyed understanding that the bravado of old men (and old nations) o en hides aching voids. —KERRY REID NO MAN’S LAND Through 8/20: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Wed 8/9 2:30 PM only; open captions Thu 8/3 and Sat 8/12 3 PM, ASL interpretation Fri 8/11, audio description and touch tour Sun 8/13 (touch tour 1:30 PM), mask-required performance Wed 7/27 and Wed 8/9 2:30 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-355-1650, steppenwolf.org, $15-$98
Mercury’s Rock of Ages is a raucous 80s jukebox celebration.
The Mercury Theater production of this five-time Tony-nominated musical re-creates the 80s with such abandon that the audience’s fervor was palpable (and loud) on the night I attended. Tommy Novak’s staging creates a fun environment where musical theater mainstays intermingle with fresh standouts on the local scene. Reminiscent of the Emcee in Cabaret, rock club employee Lonny narrates this freight train ride of jukebox nostalgia (written by Chris D’Arienzo), and Michael Metcalf exudes charmingly sleazy charisma in the role. With lots of winks and breaking the fourth wall, he facilitates audience buy-in into a world that veers from depraved to cartoonishly sweet and back again.
The central romance we’re rooting for features Drew (David Moreland, a er recent notable runs in Rent and Cruel Intentions), a wannabe rock star, and Sherrie (Kayla Marie Shipman in her Chicago debut), an aspiring actress. Both have taken detours to work in said rock club, the Bourbon Room, where their will-they-won’tthey love is scored by hits from Poison, Twisted Sister, Whitesnake, Journey, and more. When the whole Sunset Strip is threatened by German real estate developers, the cast bands together with “power to the proletariat” energy to save the rock ’n’ roll haven. You’ll find layers and layers of 80s nods here that resonate no matter your connection to the decade, and Laura Savage’s choreography is spot-on. Shout-out to Donovan Hoffer as rock star Stacee Jaxx, undulating with hilariously overblown sex appeal until his last moments on the run.
—MARISSA OBERLANDER ROCK OF AGES Through 9/10: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Mercury Theater Chicago, 3745 N. Southport, 773-360-7365, mercurytheaterchicago. com, $35-$80 v
The Gene Siskel Film Center will host Chicago’s firstever complete retrospective of filmmakers Camille Billops and James Hatch.
By KAT SACHS“The films of Camille Billops may not be a good place to look for answers,” writes Monique Guillory in her essay “The Functional Family of Camille Billops,” published in editor Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Women Film and Video Artists compendium. “Nor should one expect to have any one ideology or school of thought confirmed there.”
Indeed, if you’re influenced by traditional narrative structures that demand punishment, guilt, and/or redemption for any morally incogitable action, you may read the synopsis of a Camille Billops film and be tempted to assume it follows such a pattern, that a salve will be o ered for any such burn, in which case you might be confused, even (depending on your own virtuous predispositions) disappointed.
Billops subverts expectations here, too, using that very disappointment to salt the wounds of impropriety. As Guillory asserts, “The confrontational brashness of Billops’s work precisely yields the dynamics of interrogation and discourse that may lead us to a path of productive valuation.” If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Billops’s work suggests the road to salvation (be it personal, artistic, or societal) is paved with, if not exactly bad intentions, then at least some tricky animus. Thus, her films interrogate uncomfortable aspects of familial and societal
structures that might be otherwise ignored or diluted by polite civil discourse.
“A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch” (the latter her longtime partner and eventual husband, with whom she collaborated on all her films) is a complete retrospective of their film work, the first-ever in Chicago. I refer to Billops primarily because Hatch often took a supporting role to Billops’s lead, especially when the films were directly about Billops or her immediate family. In addition to making films, Billops (who died in 2019) worked in such media as sculpture and printmaking; Hatch, who was white—the dynamics of their interracial relationship, which at the time was still taboo, are sometimes explored in their work—was a professor and a historian of Black theater. Their SoHo loft in New York City was a storied meeting place among their contemporaries, and together, they amassed an extensive archive of Black art ephemera, now called “The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives” and housed largely at Emory University.
The couple met in 1959 and married in 1987. To hear one of Billops’s relatives tell it, Hatch was the reason Billops gave up her daughter for adoption when she was four years old. These circumstances account for the basis of Finding Christa , a film that’s radical in both form and content. Simultaneously a documentary (though that term feels insufficient for
the kind of colloquy Billops and Hatch work in), a memory play, and an averment of will and independence, the film is a decidedly unapologetic examination of Billops’s decision. It screens Saturday, July 29, at 3 PM and will be followed by a discussion with Natalie Bullock Brown, a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, documentary filmmaker, and founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group.
Billops’s films are often informally divided into sections; one needn’t reach too far to bridge a connection between that structural motif and the act of compartmentalization in her real life. What may be a coping mechanism in reality becomes a device in art, allowing for Billops to more objectively interrogate her subjective experiences. Christa, on the other hand, Billops’s daughter who appears about midway through the film, is more emotionally vulnerable than her mother; it was Christa (herself an artist, having split the di erence between her birth and adoptive mothers’ influences by specifically being a musician like the latter) who sought out Billops, while it’s Billops who stages reenactments of pivotal moments in their reunion. The film was made over the course of several years, so it was subsequently at a chronological remove, as well as an emotional remove, from the initial experience; di erences between the two women are palpable yet intriguing.
A STRING OF PEARLS: THE FILMS OF CAMILLE BILLOPS & JAMES HATCH
Fri 7/28 6 PM, Sat 7/29 3 PM and 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State $13 general admission, $ 8 students and youth, $ 6 Film Center members, $ 5 SAIC students and faculty, and staff of the Art Institute siskelfilmcenter.org/billopshatch
The reason Billops provides for having given up Christa is she simply didn’t want to be a mother. (As she told bell hooks in an interview for hooks’s Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies, “I didn’t admire motherhood.”) “It is clear that in her films, Billops does not view herself as an exemplar of feminism nor does she endorse her own life as a universal model for all to follow,” Guillory writes. “But ultimately, Billops is unequivocally a feminist and her life tacitly embodies those social factors and forces that encroach upon the life and freedom of all women.” To that end, Billops represents a particularly audacious version of feminism that defies even radical forms of convention (motherly love, for example, remains a constant expectation across political ideologies) as much as it does labels; by using her circumstances as the source material, going so far as to reenact key moments with no apparent feelings of shame or regret, Billops uses cinema not just to document but to illuminate in such a way that may seem almost gratuitous.
It’s di cult to talk about Billops’s films, this one in particular, without dancing around language that could be interpreted as judgmental or even contemptuous, regardless of the critic’s (an all-too appropriate word here) intentions. Billops may keep an emotional distance from her subject matter, but in confronting viewers with the nuances of her story, she and Hatch ask us to evaluate the distance at which we keep ourselves from what many would deem the “unthinkable,” a space often infused with deep-rooted prejudice and unreasonable scrutiny. As Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in an essay for e-flux journal, “the art of confrontation is an anticolonial intervention precisely because it turns the space between the performer and the audience into the trenches,” where the war of perception is fought.
Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance in 1992, making Billops the first Black woman (although cocredited with Hatch) to win the award.
Screening with the film is Billops’s and Hatch’s 1982 documentary short Suzanne, Suzanne, called as such after Billops’s niece. Suzanne, Suzanne is also Ingmar Bergman-esque, not just in its aesthetic—austere black-and-white cinematography, sometimes hazy, sometimes stark—but also in its considerations of love and violence. Suzanne’s father physically abused her and her mother, and in the film they recount their complex emotions toward him. Her mother, Camille’s sister, Billie, expresses guilt over being glad her husband is dead, while Suzanne, whose once-dire drug addiction is hinted at as being the result of this trauma, expresses that singular kind of admiration, frustration, and desperate yearning for a ection that a child might feel toward an abusive parent.
Suzanne, Suzanne and Finding Christa comprise the first two parts of a three-film Family Trilogy (not unlike Bergman’s famed trilogy); Billops’s and Hatch’s 2002 film A String of Pearls , which screens Saturday, July 29 at 6 PM, is the third part. Instead of focusing on the female members of her family as she had done previously, Billops here turns her camera toward the men, exploring questions of fatherhood and the issues they face being Black men in America. You’ll recognize familiar faces and names from the other films; some have merely gotten older, while some have grown up altogether, new fathers to young children.
This is perhaps the most traditional of the documentaries, as interviews with various doctors exposit the violence facing Black people in the U.S., especially Black men and
specifically in Los Angeles, where Billops grew up. Somehow this film is still gentler than the previous two, with a good amount of levity from its subjects. There’s a certain “boys will be boys” quality to much of the banter, though ironically, it’s Billops who interjects with admonitions toward the younger male members of her family, imploring them to be more responsible. Society often goes too easy on men, but here, she’s harsh toward them; on the other hand, society is often too harsh toward women, so with regard to her own decisions, it would appear she’s gone “easy” on herself, another provocative contradiction that underscores the undeniable radicality of her thinking.
Screening with A String of Pearls is the 1987 short documentary Older Women and Love , inspired by a love affair between Billops’s octogenarian aunt and a younger man. It was Billops’s and Hatch’s second film after Suzanne, Suzanne ; its tone is genial, even celebratory, as documentary and narrative are blended to provide a simultaneously informative and entertaining probe of a thenvery-taboo subject (which it still is now, even, just to a lesser degree). Seemingly among the more lighthearted of the program’s six films, it’s nevertheless underscored by Billops’s proclivity for bringing into public consciousness that which is often left behind closed doors, unspoken about, and perhaps even reviled by
so-called polite society. The screening of these two films will be followed by a discussion with Naeema Torres, the interim executive director of Mezcla Media Collective.
The 1998 short Take Your Bags , commissioned in part by the National Black Arts Festival, is a high-concept, semiparablistic essay on slavery and the legacy of cultural theft that emerged as a result. Billops, talking to a little boy, recounts an almost childlike tale of how the slaves’ bags were stolen on the slave ships, from which their heritages were then taken out and appropriated. Billops and the boy face generally toward the camera but with their gazes somewhat askew, as if looking at something to the side. Billops references whatever might be there (perhaps that which is shown to viewers as still images separate from the scenes with Billops and the boy) as if what she’s looking at is some kind of dry-erase board on which anything might come into view. Which through art, Billops seems to be implying, it can.
Several years prior, Billops and Hatch explored another high-concept idea, this one less child friendly. The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks: A Docu/Fantasy About Everybody’s Racism (1994) evokes a John Waters-esque tactility in how it realizes an understanding of racism vis-à-vis Dante’s Divine Comedy . It’s an ambitious and expansive descent into this hyperparticular version of the underworld, where hatred comes in all shapes and sizes, much of it frolicking about unchecked as a less common or lesser known type of prejudice. At various intervals, Billops and Hatch appear in a field of sunflowers, doing one another’s hair. These sequences, revealing more of the intimacy between the two filmmakers than we’ve seen prior, along with the conventional interview segments, differ starkly from the tour through hell (with activities and displays such as “May I Touch Her There?” and “The Room of Racial Slurs”), which is all color paper-mache and o ensive ephemera.
In their idiosyncratic body of film work— here presented in all newly digitized 2K with a special 4K restoration of Suzanne, Suzanne Billops and Hatch explore the tempestuous complexities of life, family, and society at large, asking all the questions and providing none of the answers. Here, one starts on the road to “heaven” by going through hell (in the case of the The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks, literally); salvation will always be hard-won.
Greta Gerwig serves up a frothy confection of fashion and fun coupled with searing social critique of the iconic doll in the movie Barbie. A freewheeling kaleidoscope of saturated colors and snark, this film is a bonkers romp through Barbieland, the real world, and back again. The improbably stacked cast includes Helen Mirren as the narrator, Issa Rae as President Barbie, Will Ferrell as a villainous Mattel exec, and John Cena as Mermaid Ken.
Margot Robbie is fantastic in plastic, perkily skipping down a path of self-discovery as Stereotypical Barbie, trailed by lovesick puppy Beach Ken, a pitch-perfect casting of Ryan Gosling. Hardcore Barbie fans will squee underneath the cubic ton of nostalgic Barbie fashion and accessories, and haters will cackle at the nonstop irreverent jokes. An underwritten subplot about a mother and daughter reclaiming their inner child (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt, respectively) gives the film heart.
The plot flies completely off the rails in the second
half, not unlike a group of children playing make-believe. But the movie transcends all missteps through the strength of its vision. Anyone expecting a harsh critique of capitalism or apolitical mindless fun will be sorely disappointed. Some of the funniest sequences in the film send up the patriarchy through mocking the himbo Kens, including the now iconic power ballad “I’m Just Ken.”
With Barbie, Gerwig proves once and for all that thinking pink pays at the box office.
—SHERI FLANDERS PG-13, 114 min. Wide release in theaters
Oppenheimer the latest from Christopher Nolan, is a searing portrait of a man plagued by visions of a world that can’t be seen, a theoretical world composed of the literal particles of his ideas. Driven by an unyielding need to bring his visions to light, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) struggles with the notion of bringing theory into practice, reminiscent of the very process of filmmaking. It’s a film about the creation of something not before seen and the consequences this entails.
It’s set against the backdrop of Oppenheimer’s
hearing to renew his security clearance and maintain his vocal political influence on the United States’s atomic policy, a semblance of control over the further development of the weapon he helped unleash. Oppenheimer maintains several states at once, shi ing backward to Oppenheimer’s early education and to his involvement in the Manhattan Project and forward to the contentious Cabinet hearing of former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and friend-turned-antagonist Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.).
Visually, it’s clear to see Nolan’s love of the physicality of film, of the process of transferring concepts to a physical medium, and using the physical medium to present those ideas to the world; Nolan uses the development of the Manhattan Project to symbolize his own efforts. We’re witness to jarring visions of the physical processes Oppenheimer sees in his head, images of chaotic motion of particles, unharnessed energy with the potential to create new worlds and destroy our
current one.
For a film framed around political proceedings, there’s very little interest in political analysis here. Communism is used as a backdrop, but ideology isn’t the focus, and Nolan spends little time delving into the brunt of the political conditions his characters advocate for. Narratively, it’s one of Nolan’s more straightforward efforts in recent years, which despite its linear shi s maintains a clear through line and focus. The ensemble cast puts in stunning performances led by Murphy and Downey, and Emily Blunt is compelling as the equally troubled Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer.
From the onset, Oppenheimer, in all its jarring imagery and sound, sears its way into the viewer’s brain. It’s an effectively devastating portrayal of the formulation of events that unleashed unprecedented destruction onto the world, the results of which we’re still caught in the looming shadow of today. —ADAM
MULLINS-KHATIBR, 180 min. Wide release in theaters v
If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.
The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is releasing the Proposed FY2024 MTW Annual Plan for public comment.
The 30-day public comment period begins July 24 and ends August 23, 2023. While CHA encourages and welcomes all program participants, residents, and the community-at-large to review the proposed updates to the FY2024 MTW Annual Plan you are not required to attend or view the livestream public comment hearings to submit comments. Your presence or absence does not a ect your housing.
The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP) and Lease for Ogden Commons, a mixed-income community is available for review. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has worked with its development partner to develop a Draft TSP and Lease for use at the private development known as Ogden Commons (previous site of the Lawndale Complex). The units within this development will be used as replacement public housing units for Lawndale Complex and the Lawndale Community area. If you listed Lawndale Complex/Lawndale Community area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you want to live or maintain a right to return to new CHA replacement housing per the Relocation Rights Contract (RRC), you can comment on the Draft TSP and Lease during the 30-day public comment period.
The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.
CHA will host three public comment hearings—two livestreams and one in-person:
• Livestream: Tue, July 25, 2023, at 2:00 pm
• Livestream: Mon, Aug. 14, 2023, at 11:00 am Go to www.thecha.org Live Comment Hearing (Sign interpreter will be present.)
Due to COVID-19, CHA has suspended all in person public meetings and instead, CHA will livestream one public comment hearing. The date and time of the public comment livestream hearing is as follows:
Tue, April 20, 10:00am: https://youtu.be/QBGG47BHXMg
• In-person: Tue, Aug. 8, 2023, at 6:00 pm, FIC 4859 S Wabash (Sign and Spanish interpreters will be present.)
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Most music outlets have already published their listicles spotlighting the best albums of the first half of the year. As usual, I’m not even thinking about picking my favorites from among every album released anywhere—I’m overwhelmed just by the volume of quality Chicago music that I haven’t gotten to write about yet. This felt like a good time to catch up, partly because big music festivals take up so much oxygen in the summer—if you’re not looking for coverage of smaller local artists, you could easily get the impression that the only musicians doing anything worth paying attention to are traveling under the banners of mega-promoters Live Nation and AEG. (In case you haven’t heard, AEG is attached to the Congress Theater renovation, which received $27 million in TIF funding last week.)
I review recent albums by nine local artists below, and none of those artists has been booked for any of the marquee local festivals. Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano has attracted the most media attention, though I’m sure Valee’s collaboration with Harry Fraud will make a big splash—I wrote this before it dropped on July 21. The Reader has already mentioned two of these albums in passing (Particle of Organs in a recent Chicagoans of Note, Lamb Leaves Pasture in Gossip Wolf), but I felt they both deserved more love. In no way do I imagine I can be definitive or exhaustive, even about just the previous three months of Chicago releases, but I hope to give you a more nourishing sense of the scope and variety of the music we can call ours.
BUGGIN
CoNcReTe CoWbOyS
By LEOR GALIL
Flatspot. Flatspot has been kicking around for a couple decades and amassed considerable influence: in 2012, for example, it issued the first in its Extermination series of compilations, which featured an early recording from present-day hardcore heartthrobs Turnstile. The fourth Extermination, which dropped in January, includes the Buggin track “Attitude,” which runs through three distinct moods and speeds in its 51 seconds. In June, Flatspot issued the band’s debut full-length, Concrete Cowboys, and it demonstrates perfectly what’s drawing so many kids to a new generation of hardcore: in the right hands, this shit is fun. Buggin play mostly at blink-and-you’ll-missit speeds (the album’s longest track lasts two minutes and 17 seconds), but spend enough time with Concrete Cowboys and you can start to feel the rhythm section shift a song’s center of gravity with a palpable swing. Front person Bryanna Bennett sings in a stinging bark or a hoarse holler, but it’s worth making the e ort to marinate in their lyrics. They praise the joys of junk food (“Snack Run”) and rail against the marginalization of women and nonbinary musicians in hardcore (“Not Yours”), bringing the same controlled, focused force to every subject. Strong words are the language of hardcore, so I’ll say this plainly: Buggin kick ass.
all-ages show, Hallogallo Fest 2.5, on June 1 at Color Club. This small but mighty scene now includes enough bands to warrant two days of celebration, and the Color Club concert doubled as an uno cial record release for Lamb Leaves Pasture, the debut album from Deerest Friends, one of the newer Hallogallo-a liated projects. This five-piece includes Will Hu man of folky lo-fi group Post O ce Winter as well as Francis Brazas and Desi Kaercher from gloriously shambolic indie-rock outfit Dwaal Troupe, and Deerest Friends’ rough-hewn sound incorporates the styles of those groups. Quasi-symphonic touches (strings, xylophone, accordion, horns, piano) bring a shaggy sort of sophistication that complements the music’s charmingly unraveled edges. Most of the players in Deerest Friends also sing, usually in plaintive half-whispers (I’d be shocked if they’re not all Phil Elverum fans), and when they join together in harmony, it can evoke the collective catharsis of punk-rock gang vocals. Lamb Leaves Pasture has a lot in common with the Hallogallo scene as a whole: young people banding together have made something big and ambitious that’s still comfortable enough with its own imperfections to feel welcoming to everyone.
Wright, better known as G Herbo). Within a few years, he helped break Chicago nationally, in no small part because he produced most of Do or Die’s 1996 debut album, Picture This. All of this is to say that Traxster is a big deal—when he set out to find rappers to be part of his sprawling new double album, Chicago, he didn’t need to dig deep in his Rolodex. A great array of rappers show up—including Lupe Fiasco, Twista, King Louie, Rhymefest, Belo Zero of Do or Die, and L.E.P. Bogus Boys veteran G Count—but what gives the album its power is Traxster’s ability to mold his svelte productions to so many clashing personalities. I particularly like the switcheroo he pulls on “Just Dance”—the instrumental stops and changes to a brandnew arrangement partway through the song, and both halves fit the shrapnel-scu ed voice and mischievous personality of Vic Spencer. If I had to pick a favorite track, though, it’d the 33-second trunk-thumping funk of “So Cold,” with its swaggering performance from Crucial Conflict’s Coldhard. If you need a quick lesson on the breadth and shape of Chicago’s hip-hop history, this is a great place to start.
Piano, which foregrounds her love of ambient music: she spends much of the album allowing little details to collect until they sparkle like a garden full of morning dewdrops. The light electronic percussion that pulses through “La Langue d’Lamitié” provides a boost of energy and a sturdy backbone, working like a hip-hop breakbeat without distracting too much from the lush composition or disrupting its calm, soothing mood. Margaret’s voice first peeks in halfway through the album, and her tender performance on “City Song” feels like the arrival of the long-lost friend whom Romantic Piano has been preparing you to welcome.
FlOwErS ReCoMpOsInG
The collective of teen indie-rock groups that make up Chicago’s Hallogallo scene has expanded significantly over the past year, no doubt in part because two of those groups, Horsegirl and Lifeguard, have signed to Matador. On May 25, the second annual Hallogallo Fest took over Lincoln Hall (a capacity upgrade from Beat Kitchen last year), and immediately afterward the crew announced another
DJ Kool Herc threw the very first hip-hop party in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, just a few weeks after Chicago producer and rapper the Legendary Traxster was born. As hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer, it’s impossible to discuss Chicago’s contributions to its global culture without mentioning Traxster. He emerged in the early 90s as a member of the Ill State Assassins collective and half of cultishly beloved duo D 2 tha S (whose other half, Kay-Tone, is the late uncle of Herbert
Romantic Piano , the modest and largely instrumental third album from Chicago singer-songwriter Gia Margaret, grew from a recording where cicadas paint in the space between slow, sleepy tumbles of piano notes. “Cicadas” was the first track she made for the album, and its quietly reflective playfulness makes it a great addition to the tiny canon of recent recordings by local artists that prominently feature the buzzing bugs—it also includes “Now (Forever Momentary Space)”
by Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble and Fuubutsushi’s “Cicada Season.” Margaret’s “Cicadas” made a great seed for Romantic
No Lonesome bandleader Jeb Backe makes songs whose leisurely, swaggering saunter lends itself equally well to country, folk, and indie rock—and all those genres mingle on the group’s new album, Flowers Recomposing. Backe infuses the record with homemade charm and a spirit of informality, as if No Lonesome were performing an impromptu set around a campfire on a cool summer evening. Backe accomplishes this with seasoned sophistication, so that you know the looseness is an aesthetic choice. They get a little help from a couple contributors too, including drumming on one track by Austin Koenigstein of throwback psych-pop project Smushie (whose June album, Doofus Casanova, should win over fans of Unknown Mortal Orchestra). On “To Begin,” No Lonesome assemble exquisite instrumentation—a couple of picked acoustic guitars, soft handclaps, drums, a shaker, flamboyant horns—into a layer cake that towers higher and higher as the song progresses. Backe uses a restrained touch even while making ostentatious turns, which gives Flowers Recomposing an extra dose of o anded charm.
continued from p. 31
NICO SEGAL TeLl ThE GhOsT WeLcOmE HoMe
Improviser, composer, and educator Emily Rach Beisel is entrenched in Chicago’s experimental-music community. In fall 2021, they launched the monthly Pleiades Series at Elastic Arts, which “features womxn and nonbinary musicians and improvisors.” Because of Rach Beisel’s experience in this scene, I was prepared to be challenged by their recent solo album, May’s Particle of Organs—but not prepared enough! It’s a showcase for voice and bass clarinet, modified with analog e ects and amplification, and from its first note it doesn’t exactly meet you halfway: opening track “The Indark Answers With Wind” begins with a low, guttural groan that could be a marble spiraling down a thick plastic tube, an abstract sound that warps further as the song progresses until their voice sounds like it’s being yanked into the cosmos by an alien tractor beam. Rach Beisel’s vocals make plain the artist’s love of extreme metal, and they strike me as especially violent and abrasive when set against the stretches of Particle of Organs where the background is spartan if not silent. Their bass clarinet usually sticks closer to the instrument’s familiar vocabulary, and in contrast to their vocal performances, it can provide levity or even relief—their melodic playing in the serene “Warm Upon Your Skin” feels like the sun breaking through turbulent clouds. At the beginning of the song, somber clarinet notes rise out of a low drone like steam o a hot bath, and when I first heard them, a wave of calmness washed over me—a sensation as intense as any of the anxiety and dread that Particle of Organs also provoked.
Trumpeter and producer Nico Segal dropped his debut solo album, this spring’s Tell the Ghost Welcome Home, long after establishing himself as a veteran in Chicago music. He cofounded breakout teen fusion group Kids These Days in 2009, and since then he’s become indispensable to several projects. He’s been an integral part of Chance the Rapper’s backing band, the Social Experiment, and led it on its lone studio album, 2015’s Surf (as “Donnie Trumpet,” his pre-TFG stage name). For the past several years, he’s focused his energy on a jazz group called the JuJu Exchange. With all this experience, Segal has polished his skills to a high gloss, and he can round o the brassiest trumpet solo with controlled smoothness. He sounds nonchalant and easygoing throughout Tell the Ghost Welcome Home , even when delivering performances that you know have him sweating. This is much to the album’s benefit: the childlike goofiness of “Runway [Ticket]” might chafe more if Segal didn’t keep the song at a carefully controlled simmer. This is largely an album of laid-back pop and soul, with Segal’s hushed vocals encouraging relaxed reflection. He recruited a handful of collaborators who could get on his level, including Nnamdï on “Naturally Somehow” and Shawnee Dez on “Scary Spooky” (full disclosure: Shawnee Dez is a Reader employee). Jamila Woods and Aja Monet have their own big albums this year, and I hope their fans seek out their collaboration here—they both appear on the gentle neosoul number “Can’t Look Away,” and it’s a high-water mark for everyone involved.
Few hip-hop artists have made as deep an impression on me over the past decade or so as rapper-producer Tremaine “Tree” Johnson. On the 2012 mixtape Sunday School, he delivers bubbly but thoughtful verses in a crisp, weathered voice over clattering trap beats and giddy looped soul samples, and it’s all seared into my memory. By the end of the decade, the torrent of music he issued through much of the 2010s had petered out, and ever since then I’ve felt like I’ve been missing something. In an April 2022 interview with YouTube-based hip-hop podcast The Super Facts Network , Johnson said he’d stopped making music upon realizing he needed more money for his family—and in an attempt to earn it, he chose a path that landed him in jail. Last year he was sentenced to a three-year bid for marijuana trafficking. According to clips from a forthcoming documentary called Free Tree, when the judge sentenced him in March 2022, he also gave Johnson a 39-day stay. In that brief reprieve before he had to report to prison, Johnson recorded a rash of music. Earlier this summer, he dropped a heart-wrenching album that’s also called Free Tree. I also love his new collaboration with Vic Spencer, Something Is Not, which came out in early July as a follow-up to the pair’s 2019 release, Nothing Is Something . Accompanied by gritty, blissfully washed-out soul samples, the MCs coax tenderness out of each other even while they rap about injustices that’ll make you want to put your fist through a wall. Occasionally a lyric or phrase lands awkwardly, but I still get a lot of joy out of hearing Johnson cook up a meaty number like “Every Day” with a friend like Spencer.
Chicago rapper Valee performs like he’s tuned into a frequency the rest of us can barely perceive, which electrifies his collaborations even when he’s taking the mike on a trash fire of a Kanye album. On Virtuoso, his brand-new fulllength with New York producer Harry Fraud, Valee’s ever-shifting verses function like wild illustrations in a coloring book, and Fraud fills them in with flamboyant, sometimes psychedelic productions that make them leap o the page. On “WTF,” Fraud’s throwback sci-fi synths and spelunking electronic drums twist around Valee’s flip-flopping flow, which flits from laid-back to tightly coiled and back—and then Twista zooms into the picture with one of his hyperfast verses. Chicago shows up strong on Virtuoso, with rising king Saba sashaying onto the summery “Watermelon Automobile” and west-side wonder ZMoney dropping in on the swanky “Uppity” to recapture the magic he and Valee first summoned in 2017 on “Two 16’s.” Valee has made a career out of keeping listeners on their toes, so much so that you can expect curveballs from him—but on Virtuoso he’s found a way to surprise even the people who know he’s going to surprise them. v
Option Series is a showcase of improvising, avant-garde jazz musicians from across the world, but we mainly have funds for American musicians. And giving them a space to either do a solo work—in the past there have been larger groups, but this summer we’re limiting it to a trio, and most sets have been just solos or duos. So it’s giving them a showcase for a nice, fair-paid show, which never happens. It’s well-funded enough that I feel like people make more of what they deserve.
It’s honestly better than any gig I’ve ever played. For a local’s fee, if it’s solo, they make $500. And if it’s a group, they make $1,000 total. So a duo or trio will make $1,000. If it’s a traveling group, we cover everything—flights, where they stay, everything. And then if it’s a solo show, it’s $800, and a group traveling fee is $1,200.
Another big part about [Option] is that we have the interview, the conversation. And that’s in a way just as important, because there’s not many shows where you get to actually hear the artist talk. I like when you have to talk about something—it kind of solidifies it and makes it more real.
“Power should be more equally distributed—it should be a wide variety of people. It shouldn’t just be one person deciding this is what jazz is and this is what improvised music is.”
As told to PHILIP MONTORO
Lily Glick Finnegan, 25, is a drummer, composer, improviser, and curator. A Chicago native, she returned to the city in 2022 after completing a master’s degree in music at Berklee. She manages the online record store for nonprofit artists’ collective Catalytic Sound, a job she took at the invitation of local reedist Ken Vandermark, who cofounded the collective in 2011.
Finnegan plays in Vandermark’s quartet Edition Redux, which has an album due this
fall; the lineup also includes keyboardist Erez Dessel and tuba player Beth McDonald. She drums for saxophonist Sarah Clausen in her trio with bassist Katie Ernst, as well as in Thwartet with Clausen, Dessel, and bassist Tyler Wagner. She’s part of Christof Kurzmann & El Infierno Musical alongside Vandermark, saxophonist Dave Rempis, and cellists Lia Kohl and Katinka Kleijn, and that group has plans to record soon as well.
Perhaps most significant, Finnegan’s trio
with Clausen and bassist Jakob Heinemann has an album coming in the fall that consists entirely of her own compositions—her first release as a bandleader.
This spring, Experimental Sound Studio invited Finnegan to come aboard as one of three curators for its Option Series, whose salon-style programming focuses on contemporary improvisation and composition. This year’s series runs every Sunday through September 3.
The artist’s conversation and everything is archived. The performances are video recorded and audio recorded; everything will be put on YouTube. Experimental Sound Studio has an insane archive already—like, the biggest Sun Ra collection and stuff. Getting to put people who are currently making music in that same archive is really important. In ten, twenty, thirty years or whatever, whose stories get told? It’s not going to be everyone’s, but if you can have a better archival system and documentation of what’s going on, then these people won’t be forgotten.
That kind of segues into what I think should be transformed about [Option]. The curators are me, Ken Vandermark, and Andrew Clinkman. For a few years it was Tomeka Reid instead of me, and then before Tomeka, it was Tim Daisy. They’re clearly trying to make it more representative, at least genderwise. It’s not really representative at all racewise at the moment. What I’m trying to make, for me to change it, is promoting women and nonbinary people and queer folks and people of color. And people who haven’t really had the recognition they deserve.
I think Ken said to me that we want to get younger people in the series. I have di erent connections to younger people than he does, or even Andrew. For example, my friend Devon Gates is going to be coming in August, and she’s younger than me. She’s, like, 21, probably, and she’s an amazing bass player and vocalist. They would have never known about her if I didn’t connect them, because it’s just di erent scenes and ages.
But then I also feel like on the older side, people can get forgotten as well. Obviously Ken and Andrew are conscious of that too. Another person I’m really excited is gonna play is Shanta Nurullah. She’s a sitar player and a storyteller. She’s completely overlooked by a lot of people in the music community, and she’s a Chicago person. She was in the AACM [the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians]. She’s a legend and somehow just gets kind of forgotten. And I don’t really know why. I mean, I do know why—it’s because she’s a Black woman, and that’s not the narrative that gets the attention.
I’ve listened to some of the talks that Ken has done, and they’re great—I don’t think he’s shy at all talking about more political things. But I want to get into that with the interviews, especially because the people I’ve been wanting to come are very into that as well. We can depoliticize art and music, and this kind of music, which is supposed to be cutting-edge, experimental, avant-garde, et cetera. But then we can’t really talk about how our gender or race and queerness all flows together with it.
When these spaces become run by white men, you’re not gonna want to even bring up those aspects. Power should be more equally distributed—it should be a wide variety of people. It shouldn’t just be one person deciding this is what jazz is and this is what improvised music is.
A lot of it has to do with how are the resources being distributed. This is such a small thing that I’m doing, honestly. But for example, Francisco Mela, he was my teacher at Berklee and the most amazing guy, and he really makes me feel lucky to be able to call him a friend and a mentor. [Booking him for Option] is just one small thing I could do for him. When I was in Boston, I was like, “Yeah, I’ll bring you out to Chicago.” I kept saying
that to him. And I actually got to do it, which feels really good.
With Shanta as well—she asked me to play in her group this winter. There aren’t many Black women in this series, especially queer Black women. Of course she should be in it.
I don’t want to get credit for it either. People are doing the work. And I’m just trying to showcase a different landscape and give the resources to the people that should have it.
ESS has a wide audience. They’re a respected institution. If I was just putting it on myself, not nearly as many people would know. I also think the audience could be di erent and more expansive, and I’m sure it’s something that they’re thinking about as well. You’re getting these people’s stories, their music, shown to people in the present and online and then in the archives. And to have a system like that in place, it takes a long time and a lot of work and people. So the fact that it exists, and then we get to put whoever we want in the archive and in the space, is special. Because that’s how it’s gonna change, is having di erent people in it.
Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood
Events are free and all-ages and begin each Sunday at 3 PM. A conversation with the artist follows each performance.
July 30: Jaribu Shahid
August 6: Shanta Nurullah
August 13: Francisco Mela
August 20: Devon Gates and Fay Victor
August 27: Will Greene
September 3: Erez Dessel
And it’s not just for history’s sake—it’s about the present. Who are we talking about? Who are we giving opportunities? It’s not like I’m just going up to someone, like, “Oh, can I record this, and I’ll put it in this archive? But you’re not gonna get paid.” There’s also a financial aspect to this.
There’s not many places that are doing both aspects—representing and giving the resourc-
es that are due. So the fact that ESS has both is really cool. Because that never happens, where you can get paid well to do whatever you want to do, that also reaches new people, that becomes a part of the history and a part of the current narrative.
The DIY stu is what I came up doing and what I feel has influenced all my ideals. Being in high school and playing a lot of punk DIY stuff in Chicago, that world was so great, because it was like, yeah, we all believe in a similar thing—a lot of anarchists, people who don’t fuck with the police. Queer people, it’s so open and out there. And then we can get that—not out of the way, but we can embrace it, and then make the music we want. Which is super rare.
That to me is what music is about, in a way—in that community, putting to practice what you believe. Music is transformative in the moment and in the future. And making those spaces in the present of what you want to see the world to be, it’s super key. The thing is, a lot of them don’t have any funding.
Devon Gates, like I was saying, is a friend of mine from Berklee—she’s probably the coolest person I know, the smartest person. So immediately I was like, Devon should come [to Option]. And then I was like, well, it’d be cool to have her with someone else, representing di erent generations. You wouldn’t be here without them. And older generations can also learn from the newer generations, like a cycle that keeps flowing.
Fay Victor is a vocalist from New York. Devon had worked with her in this program called Mutual Mentorship for Musicians—Fay was one of the mentors. Devon and I were talking about this idea, that it’d be cool if she did a duo with someone from a di erent space and background. I don’t know if they’ve ever done a duo before.
So Option is a cool space for new projects to happen. Also, I’m not gonna lie—I don’t know if this is selfish of me, but I’ve brought people, especially from out of town, who I want to make music with. [Violinist and vocalist] Gabby Fluke-Mogul came, and we’ve known each other but never played. I was like, “Come to Option, and then maybe the day after we could do a recording session.” And we ended
up recording a whole duo album!
With Devon and Fay, we’re gonna all play a show the night before at the Hungry Brain on August 19. It’s a larger band, and I think Shanta is going to be playing in it too. I was like, “Yeah, you guys are coming to Chicago—if you want to stay a few more days and work on some other projects or meet musicians here . . . ”
I’ve learned from Ken. He brought Kaleigh Wilder and Ben Hall, who I both love. They’re from Detroit, and Kayleigh is only a few years older than me. We were talking a lot about the Chicago-Detroit connection. And Jaribu Shahid, who’s coming [July 30], he’s the most amazing bass player. Underrated as well, from Detroit. He’s also been playing with Ben and Kayleigh—so it’s three di erent generations of them playing together in Detroit. And it’s just cool to bring that here to Chicago. And then hopefully we can come back to Detroit—a big thing about this is the connections in the community.
Improvised music is so many things. “Experimental” is anything that’s not the norm. It’s a vast category.
Sometimes, the idea we have of improvised music, especially today, it’s like the John Zorn type of vibe of just craziness or larger ensembles. It usually looks a certain way, and a lot of times it’s men in those groups. It has a certain sound, and it can be awesome, but that’s just one way of doing it. There’s so many other ways.
You want to react against it. A lot of the improvised music I connect to, there is a humorous aspect to it. Because at the end of the day, it’s kind of crazy that we’re just here improvising, and it’s awesome, and it’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of funny. You don’t want to take it overly seriously. Be grateful and humble about what you’re doing. It’s not necessarily better than other things. You have to take yourself and your art seriously, but you can react with humor.
I do feel like you can sense it with some improvisers. It’s not just joy—it’s a lot of emotion—but there is a joy to it. I’m thinking of, like, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It’s this palpable sense of, “This is something new. This is how we want our world to be.” v
City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Alejandro Hernandez that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.
Our current understanding of how galaxies form is that they’re shaped by the clumping together of dark matter, which makes up the invisible scaffolding of the universe. Clouds of gas and dust gather along this sca olding, slowly collapsing into stars that evolve and then die in supernova explosions. These explosions create clouds of gas that form new stars and the planetary systems around them. This cycle of death and rebirth has continued for billions of years, and galaxies have continued to develop during all that time—as they accrete mass or merge with other galaxies, they slowly grow larger and more organized in their structure.
Lamont Anderson knows a thing or two about evolution. The Chicago-based artist formerly known as L.A. VanGogh has spent more than a year rebranding himself creatively as Galaxy Francis. Under his previous name, he’d built a solid reputation thanks to a diverse skill set: rapping, singing, producing, and engineering. But he felt he’d outgrown that persona, and the name “L.A. VanGogh” was creating logistical problems.
“Search-wise, it’s a fucking mess,” he says. “I’m competing with Vincent van Gogh, La Oreja de Van Gogh, the Van Gogh exhibit—so much has to populate before you might see me.” He thought carefully about what he wanted his new identity to be.
“You break down [‘Galaxy Francis’], ‘galaxy’ by definition is a collection of gas and stars and dust that comprise worlds, and I feel like that myself, making space for all that I am as a singer, rapper, and even a producer,” he ex-
plains. “‘Francis’ translates to ‘free man.’ So allowing all those worlds inside of me to be free.”
This May, Galaxy reintroduced himself to audiences with the first project under his new name. Throughout the 13-minute EP iNNERGALACTiC: SiDE A , he takes listeners on a rocket ride around his musical universe, switching flows across a range of multidimensional beats and bouncing between spitting clever bars and harmonizing choruses. By including standout features from the likes of Icy LS, Jay Wood, and Manasseh, Galaxy stays true to his name—he’s creating space for other stars to shine.
Galaxy hasn’t always had access to a team of collaborators, though. When he was first introduced to music making, he had to learn to do everything himself—vocals, production, engineering—simply because he had no other choice.
“The first rap song I ever remember hearing was ‘Gin & Juice’ by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, and if you know Dr. Dre, you know he produces and engineers his own stuff,” he recalls. “So I think that idea of being self-sufficient was like subconsciously pumped into me. And just coming from where I come from, resources didn’t always allow me to hire all of these team members.”
Galaxy’s list of music influences—Motown, west-coast hip-hop, modern EDM—spans decades and genre lines, and he credits battle rap for helping sharpen his writing.
“Again, a lot of worlds that make up that galaxy. You got R&B, you got alternative. I really recently got into electronic music. Just those types of production elements make a lot of things really fun.”
In April 2022, Galaxy was still working at a T-Mobile store and transitioning between personas. He took a trip to Los Angeles with friends whose connections there included
“When I realized that I could create with other people,” says the rapper formerly known as L.A. VanGogh, “I realized how much of a gi I had . . . that I owed to the people around me.”
“I reached a point where it wasn’t about ‘What do I get by putting this music out?’” says Galaxy Francis. “It’s ‘What am I giving?’” THOUGHTPOET
movie composer Hans Zimmer, and it refreshed his creativity and his sense of who he is. In a lucky omen that didn’t seem lucky at first, he suffered an ankle injury on the trip that led him to take leave from work—and that time o allowed him to think about his future.
“I think I was relying or maybe just had this fear that I can only create in my bubble,” Galaxy reflects. “When I realized that I could create with other people, around other people, I realized how much of a gift I had that I owed to myself and that I owed to the people around me. And just selling phones and phone plans felt like such a disservice to that. I really felt like I was in the wrong place.”
Energized by a new sense of self, Galaxy has leaned into his community to revamp his creative process. He’s now a staff engineer at Studio Shapes in Albany Park, alongside Renzell.Wav, and they’re helping orchestrate the current wave of talent in Chicago. He’s also allowing the community to have a hand in his artistic direction: for the past year, he’s been letting his fans choose which single he releases next by conducting an occasional “choose your fighter” video-game-style poll via Instagram.
On August 2, Galaxy will release iNNERGALACTiC: SiDE B, with production by Ethan Deetz and a feature by singer-songwriter Ranika. The week before—on Wednesday, July 26—he’s throwing a free listening party at Midlane Esports (2471 N. Milwaukee) that will include video-game tournaments, a DJ set by Chan000, and a ra e for three hours of time at Studio Shapes.
“I reached a point where it wasn’t about ‘What do I get by putting this music out?’ It’s ‘What am I giving?’” Galaxy says. “This whole iNNERGALACTiC EP rollout is literally the pre-rollout for an album I want to put out in 2024. So understanding that, I gotta create a narrative as an artist—I gotta give people some substance to want to hear an album.”
@DroInTheWind_
Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 8PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 27 8PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 28 8PM
In Maurer Hall
X Rescheduled date In Maurer Hall
Monday, August 28 just added!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 8PM
Allstars In Maurer Hall
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 8PM
Clem Snide In Szold Hall
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 8PM
Tom Paxton
& The Don Juans In Maurer Hall
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 8PM
(of Dirty Projectors) In Maurer Hall
Group classes are forming now for a new session –beginning the week of Aug. 28!
I UNDERSTAND WHY people are sad that this year’s Silver Room Sound System Block Party will be the last. When Silver Room owner Eric Williams started the block party in 2002, he did so in part to address the fact that neighborhood street festivals routinely overlooked the Black musicians and artists in his community—if no one else would showcase these talented Chicagoans, he’d do it himself. He grew the festival from an informal party in a Wicker Park alley into a Hyde Park blowout on 53rd Street with several stages and a draw of 40,000 people. For years the Silver Room Block Party was a single-day street fest, and admission was free or by suggested donation. Last year, though, after a couple years o due to the pandemic, Williams and the organizers in his orbit decided to make a change, hoping to help manage the crowd and cover some of the event’s costs: the 2022 Silver Room Block Party was a ticketed two-day event on Oakwood Beach with a gated perimeter. Tickets cost $30 for one day, $50 for both, and according to the TRiiBE, about 15,000
people attended. Given how costly and challenging the party has been for Williams—he spends the entire year planning it—I wasn’t surprised that he’d decided to end it.
I can’t say I’m happy about that choice, but I remain in awe of what Williams has accomplished on his own terms. This summer Live Nation and NASCAR have monopolized Grant Park for high-priced ticketed events, and the street race forced the postponement of Taste of Chicago, one of the city’s biggest traditional summertime celebrations (which is, I must point out, free to attend). Corporate interests increasingly treat us as grapes to be squeezed in an ever-tightening vise, but Williams has pulled o his event 17 times with nothing on his side but the strength of the community he’s built. The 18th Silver Room Block Party is something to celebrate.
The great lineup that Williams and company have assembled should make it easy to get in the spirit one last time. Throughout the weekend, its three stages feature 50 sets by musicians, the-
ater performers, dancers, and poets. True to the fest’s origins, Chicagoans are heavily represented, and the bookings weave together di erent generations and scenes. DJ Ca$h Era has recently become a first-call artist when street fests want a hip-hop set, but I can’t think of another event that would follow her with Gene Hunt, a house veteran who got his start in the early 1980s (they perform back-to-back sets on the Block Stage on Sunday afternoon). North Carolina hip-hop producer 9th Wonder and New York garage pioneer Tony Humphries are among the big draws from out of town, and other notable Chicagoans include rapper Mick Jenkins and longtime house-music figures Boo Williams and DJ Lady D. And of course it wouldn’t be a Silver Room Block Party without deep-house artist Ron Trent, who headlines the Sound System Stage on Saturday. He and Williams are close friends, and he’s performed at the block party every time—considering that long history, Trent’s set ought to be one of the summer’s most important local
Frsh Waters Shawnee Dez and Senite open. 7 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20, $15 in advance. b
Pivot Gang will go down as one of the most important and prolific artist collectives in Chicago hiphop history, even though most casual fans haven’t caught on to their music yet. These seasoned westside rappers come together to create a distinctly soulful sound, and the tapestries of drill-inspired flash and winsome alt-rap on individual members’ solo efforts prove that they’re just as powerful on their own.
Pivot cofounder Frsh Waters has been gliding over tracks for the better part of a decade, even lending his government name to the group’s debut mixtape, 2013’s Jimmy. He’s the brother of late crew member Squeak, killed in 2021, and that connection is always present in Frsh’s music. His lyrics express earnest concern for the well-being of his loved ones: on recent single “Light Work” he raps, “Lord willin’ / My boy makin’ a killin’ / He just had another baby / His girl ’bout to be three / Told him same sun shinin’ in him, shinin’ in me / Ain’t no envy in the circle.”
Frsh is road tested and fan approved. Throughout his career he’s displayed consistent artistic growth, resulting in a small yet mighty solo discography filled with thoughtful beats, ambitious lyrics, and choice collaborations. His recent single “Velour Sweatsuit,” produced by the eccentric Joseph Chilliams (also a Pivot cofounder), sounds exactly like you’d expect from that title—it’s a breezy, pianolaced scorcher with an impressive guest verse by Brooklyn MC Radamiz.
Over the past few years, Frsh has been teasing a new project on his Instagram, and earlier this month he announced the July 25 release of The Aqua Lounge, a double single consisting of “Grace Look Good” (featuring Ohana Bam and Benjamin Earl Turner) and “Not Knowing.” Making the news even
sweeter, he offered local fans a chance to stream the new material early by sending him a message with proof of ticket purchase to this release show at Schubas. I haven’t heard either song yet, but if Frsh’s latest tracks are any indication of what he has in store on The Aqua Lounge, we’ll get eclectic grooves, smart collaborations, and that signature Pivot Gang thump we’ve all come to know and love.
—CRISTALLE BOWENBill Mackay & Ryley Walker See also Fri 7/28. Azita opens. 8 PM, Judson & Moore Distillery, 3057 N. Rockwell, building #5, $25, $20 in advance. 21+
When Bill MacKay told me it’d been five years since he played with Ryley Walker—something they used to do all the time—it reminded me once again how badly the pandemic era has shaken our collective grip on time. Getting back to real life, relationships, and projects has been slow going, and on top of that everyone has seemingly been working to establish new routines and playing mad catch-up with one another. But at long last these two journeyman guitarists will meet again.
Anyone with good taste in local guitar heroes is familiar with Walker, the Rockford boy turned globe-wandering bard and progster. The same is true of MacKay, a man of one million sublime sixstring projects—last month his supergroup with bassist Douglas McCombs and drummer Charles Rumback, a trio called Black Duck, released their debut album. Both guitarists are perpetual multitaskers, and Walker also runs the ambitious Husky Pants label (which recently released a collaboration with sadly defunct Japanese psych band Kikagaku Moyo).
MacKay says he and Walker will perform songs from the duo’s two LPs together, 2015’s Land of Plenty and 2017’s SpiderBeetleBee , plus a few brand-spanking-new compositions. He says he’s “looking forward to expanding on our repertoire improvisation-wise, and with new arrangements for
various songs.” I’m especially excited to hear him mention improvisation—MacKay and Walker’s exalted guitar interaction lends itself divinely to spacey exploration. Both of their duo albums dig into the past and complicated present of roots music, and their endearing tunefulness and sparkling beauty recall other famous pairings—British folkies John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, for instance, or American stoner heroes Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.
“Come watch me get smoked by Bill,” Walker says, in a classic bit of midwestern self-deprecation. “I’ll do my best to keep up!” MacKay and Walker may be humble about it, but as far as I’m concerned they’re two of the most talented musicians not just in the heartland but in the whole freakin’ world. Watching them spar once again should be a gas of epic proportions. Opening night one is abstract pop singer and pianist Azita Youseffi; opening night two is multi-instrumentalist Jake Acosta, who released an album of kosmische guitar-and-synth explorations, Rehearsal Park , on Husky Pants last fall.
—STEVE KRAKOWBill Mackay & Ryley Walker See Thu 7/27. Jake Acosta opens. 8 PM, Judson & Moore Distillery, 3057 N. Rockwell, building #5, $25, $20 in advance. 21+
SATURDAY29
The Silver Room Sound System Block Party See Pick of the Week at le and also Sun 7/30. The first day of the final installment of this beloved festival includes performances across three stages by Ron Trent, Party Noire, Angel Meléndez & the 911 Mambo Orchestra, Kami, Meagan McNeal, Oveous, and many more. Noon-10 PM, Oakwood Beach, 39th Street (aka
Pershing/Oakwood) and Lake Michigan, $60 per day, $95 two-day pass, free for children 13 and under. b
SUNDAY30
CUsp OK Cool headline; the Dreaded Laramie, Cusp, and Hard Femme open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $13. 17+
So far this summer, few new indie-rock songs have affected me as much as “You Can’t Do It All,” the not-quite-title track from Cusp’s self-released debut album, You Can Do It All. Jen Bender’s sweet, straightforward vocals snuggle up against a fogbank of guitar fuzz, a quietly humming bass line, a waltz-time beat, and an almost birdlike keyboard loop. She offers reassurance with two simple repeated lines: “You can do anything you want / But you can’t do it all.” I often have to remind myself of that, especially in the summer, when my calendar always seems so packed with weddings, hangouts, film screenings, and outdoor concerts that once I’ve factored in work there’s barely time for sleep. Cusp started out in Rochester, New York, and last year moved to Chicago, putting together a new lineup here. They’ve done more to remind me of my limits and my place in the world than I can usually do myself, and I’ve revisited You Can Do It All over and over since Cusp released it in May. The album is so engrossing that it challenges my perception of time—how does such a relaxed-sounding band make 33 minutes fly by as quickly as a three-minute single? I can get wrapped up in the details of a single song for days or even weeks, and I cherish that experience all the more now that the dominance of streaming and playlist-based listening has eroded the lifespan of new releases—an album that might’ve held the public’s attention for months disappears like a raindrop falling into Lake Michigan. I’m happy to accept that I can’t do everything I want this summer, but it’s a top priority to see Cusp play songs
continued from p. 39
from one of my favorite Chicago albums of the year.
—LEOR GALILThe Silver Room Sound System Block Party See Pick of the Week, page 38, and also Sat 7/29. The second day of the final installment of this beloved festival includes performances across three stages by Rich Medina, EvietheCool, Adam x Avehre, Boo Williams, Tony Humphries, Mick Jenkins, Freddie Old Soul, Lady D, and many more. Noon-10 PM, Oakwood Beach, 39th Street (aka Pershing/Oakwood) and Lake Michigan, $60 per day, $95 two-day pass, free for children 13 and under. b
Telekinetic Yeti, Stinking Lizaveta
Rifflord and Shrineburner open. 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20. 17+
Telekinetic Yeti ’s 2017 debut album, Abominable , hit like a fat slab of bloody blubber dropped hard enough on a snow-covered mountainside to cause an avalanche. The Iowa duo’s music stood out for its superheavy stoner-doom riffs as well as for the whimsy and tongue-in-cheek humor in its lyrics (on tracks such as “Stoned and Feathered” and “Electronaut”). The rapport between vocalistguitarist Alex Baumann and drummer Anthony Dreyer could make it sound like the band was twice its size, but in 2019 they had a falling-out and split up. For a while two separate acts were operating as Telekinetic Yeti, but these days Dreyer’s group calls itself Twin Wizard while Baumann soldiers on under the original name with new drummer Rockwel Heim. Telekinetic Yeti’s delightful 2022 full-length, Primordial (Tee Pee), is as light-footed as Abominable in its heaviness—the band negotiates sludgy, spacey stomps and pulpy themes with palpable glee. Philadelphia band Stinking Lizaveta, named a er a pitiful but powerful character in Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov , have carved out such a distinct sound that their instrumental music—informed by punk, jazz, metal, progressive rock, space rock, and whatever else happens to pop into their minds— feels like a genre unto itself. The trio formed in the mid-1990s with drummer Cheshire Augusta and two brothers, guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos and upright electric bassist Alexi Papadopoulos, and their lineup has remained intact ever since. Though their sound has evolved, the interplay among the instruments creates the sense that the music is primarily in dialogue with itself—even as it invites you to follow its sonic dialectic across multiple lines of argument and several planes of existence. Earlier this year, Stinking Lizaveta released their ninth album, Anthems and Phantoms (SRA). Crisp, crunchy, and playful, it shimmers with the joy of a cicada climbing out of its last nymphal skin with a fully developed set of wings and a repertoire of prismatic bug song that doesn’t need words to make itself understood. As Yanni recently told the blog Queen City Sounds and Art, “ Anthems feels like an emergence from the dark, a movement into light from uncertainty. There are more major chords.”
—MONICA KENDRICKXylouris White See also Wed 8/2. Helen Money opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $18, $30 two-night pass. 21+
Xylouris White’s fi h and latest LP, April’s The Forest in Me (Drag City), stands apart from everything else in the duo’s discography. Cretan folk musician George Xylouris—who contributes laouto (lute), lyra (upright fiddle), and vocals—and Australian MVP (most valuable percussionist) Jim White have typically recorded music that feels a lot like their live performances. Their concerts are usually exhilarating whirlwinds of ardent singing, mad strumming, and busy drumming that encompasses the
hurtling momentum of a waterfall and the counterflow of the eddies at its foot. But when COVID shut things down, the two musicians and their producer, Guy Picciotto, found themselves separated by thousands of miles. Recording remotely, they developed a dozen brief, introspective instrumentals that eschew folkloric sources and song forms in order to evoke the stillness and distance of that moment in time. The insistent beats and keening bowed melody of “Night Club” reverberate as if across an unbridgeable distance, and the rustling brushwork and unhurried string harmonics of “Witnessed by Angels” sounds like music quietly willing itself into existence. When I saw Xylouris White this spring at the prestigious Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, the new material had a paradoxically galvanizing effect: its subdued tempo and volume made the rave-ups feel like even more of a release.
—BILL MEYER
Xylouris White See Tue 8/1. Matchess opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $18, $30 for two-night pass. 21+
Uniflora Fruitleather and Plant Matter open. 7:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $13. b
Until this summer, I’d have struggled to think of a trio of rising high school sophomores who’d landed a slot at West Fest just a few months after forming their band—but then Chicago postpunks Uniflora went ahead and did it. Drummer Ruby O’Brien and bassist Theo Williams have been friends since kindergarten, and guitarist-vocalist Quinn Dugan attends Whitney Young with Wil-
liams. They launched Uniflora in March, a er they all played together in two groups with larger lineups and shorter life spans—beginning in fall 2022, they’d been part of Cinnamon Sticks, a “surf-rock Christmas band” that played a single show in a guitar shop, and an outfit called Final Say that lasted just two weeks. By early 2023, only the three members of Uniflora remained interested in pursuing music together. In May, they self-released Francium, a scruff y, energetic EP whose austere rhythms and brittle guitars blur together minimal postpunk and trippy psychedelic rock. Quinn’s father, veteran Chicago drummer John Dugan (best known from recently reunited mod-punk trio Chisel), recorded the three songs on Francium, and Ruby’s father, Johnny O’Brien, is a musician too—he played bass in Slings & Arrows. But as important as parental support has been to Uniflora, their biggest allies in the scene have been kids their own age, including the bands Neptune’s Core and Lifeguard. Kai Slater (of Lifeguard and Sharp Pins) has been particularly helpful ever since he booked Uniflora for the all-ages Hallogallo Fest 2.5 at Color Club in June. “We played Color Club, and we got to meet a lot of people there and make new connections,” Ruby says. The bustling teen scene surrounding the Hallogallo collective is growing fast enough that Uniflora could book two groups of scenemates with vegetation-related names (Fruitleather and Plant Matter) to open their first headlining date at Schubas. —LEOR GALIL
Voice of Baceprot Above Snakes open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $25. 17+
A few years back, an emerging metal trio named Voice of Baceprot became an Internet sensation with videos of themselves covering the likes of Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine. They went viral less for their choice of tunes and more for
FRI
special guest Oso Oso
who and where they were—vocalist and guitarist Firda Marsya Kurnia, bassist Widi Rahmawati, and drummer Euis Siti Aisyah were teenage girls from a conservative Muslim village in rural Indonesia, and they played in hijab. The bandmates (now in their early 20s) discovered metal in 2014 through middle school counselor Ahba Erza. Encouraged by their interest, Erza taught the girls the basics of their instruments on school equipment, and as they developed their chops as musicians and songwriters, he became their mentor and (for a time) their manager.
According to outdated stereotypes about who metal musicians are “supposed to be,” VoB are just a novelty, but the band’s musical prowess and politically charged lyrics (which mix English and their native Sundanese) loudly assert their bona fides. (“Baceprot” is a Sundanese word for “noisy.”)
Their first original single, 2018’s “School Revolution,” weighs freedom and individualism against dogmatic teachings. And “[Not] Public Property,” the first track they wrote without Erza’s assistance, champions bodily autonomy and denounces violence against women.
VoB’s growing fan base includes heavyweights such as Tom Morello and Slash, and they’ve landed slots at major festivals, including Wacken Open Air in 2022. But every success has been hard-won. Though metal is relatively mainstream in Indonesia—in 2014 the country elected the world’s first self-proclaimed metalhead president, Joko Widodo—VoB have faced sexism in their scene, and the very existence of the band is considered radical by some conservative Muslims. In a 2022 profile on Red Bull’s the Red Bulletin, the members joked that they had “no friends” and spoke of villagers back home literally turning their backs on them. They also say they’ve received death threats. When they’ve traveled abroad, their experiences have been peppered with prejudice and Islamophobia: the Red Bulletin article also detailed a conversation with a French woman journalist who fixated on their hijabs and asked if they were oppressed.
In response, VoB have grown bolder. Their new debut full-length, Retas , which compiles early material with previously unreleased tracks, kicks off with “What’s the Holy (Nobel) Today?,” a ferocious anti-war banger in the spirit of RATM. The record also features their most cutting song to date, “The Enemy of Earth Is You,” where they take direct aim at the bullshit of political leaders, war profiteers, wealthy ecotourists, and others who are worsening the climate crisis (Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, and other impacts of climate change). VoB are already
opening minds and changing lives, one metalhead at a time, and this is only their first U.S. tour—next time around, I doubt they’ll play anywhere quite as intimate as Beat Kitchen. —JAMIE
LUDWIG
WEDNESDAY9Tropa Magica’s psychedelic cumbia contains some of the happiest, most upbeat grooves I’ve heard in years. The four-piece emerged from East Los Angeles’s magical musical cauldron in 2017, evolving out of a band called Thee Commons, who combined cumbia with elements of metal and surf rock. The brothers behind Tropa Magica, guitarist and vocalist David Pacheco and drummer Rene Pacheco, were motivated to launch the new group by their shared desire to deepen their exploration of their Mexican heritage through a fresh combination of nostalgic and modern influences. The self-described “chunsters” riff on northern Mexico’s chúntaro music—an urban style that combines cumbia and norteño with Colombia’s accordion-based vallenato—and add rock, punk, and west-coast psychedelic and tropical touches.
The Pacheco brothers’ affection for all things chúntaro comes through loud and clear on “Chunti Party,” which came out last year on Tropa Magica’s third album, III. As they explained in a 2019 interview with self-described “live music and culture label” Do It Ourselves, the term “chunti” (a variation of “chúntaro”) can be either endearing or insulting, as it stereotypically refers to “someone who is chicano or Mexican that drives around a pick-up truck, blasting corrido music.” David went on to note that “chunti” is uncool, and that’s exactly why the band is drawn to it. “We love that word because we are like that. We see bands like Chicano Batman and they wear tuxedos on stage. They’re not trying to be cool,” he said. “That’s just their style and that’s our style, not trying too hard.”
At a chunti party, according to the song, everyone dances: “todos bailan.” So come to this show ready for a supreme disco-delic dance party reminiscent of the kind of 80s southern California barrio weekend when the sounds of Kumbia Kings, Selena, and tropical accordion star Rigo Tovar filled the air. The band’s warm, luminous music is perfect for carefree nights. “El mundo se acaba, pero la cumbia no,” they sing on “Cohen’s Cumbia”—the world is ending, but not the cumbia.
—CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON v
Music by: Zolita / BOOTS! (DJ SET)
Hole Kardashian (Putivuelta Bogotá) & More
SAT JUL
with DJs Suzanne Shelton / Jeff Moyer Rob Kokot / Glenn Russell & More
A METRO 40 TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
MICHAEL SHANNON & JASON NARDUCY AND FRIENDS PLAY MURMUR
FRI AUG 11 / 11:30PM / 21+
JOE FIORE PRESENTS
TUE 10/3
Boyscott, Nova One 8 PM, Schubas, 18+
Frankie & the Witch Fingers, Wine Lips 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
WED 10/4
W.H. Lung 9 PM, Empty Bottle
SAT 10/7
Eladio Carrión 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+
THU 10/12
Nocap 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b
FRI 10/13
Junior H 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b
Superheaven 8 PM, Bottom Lounge b
SAT 10/14
Dale Watson 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
THU 8/10
Sarah Borges, Angela Perley 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Monsterwatch, Spoon Benders 9 PM, Empty Bottle
SUN 8/13
Girls Rock! Chicago End-ofCamp Extravaganza noon, Thalia Hall b
FRI 8/18
Adventure Club, Koven, Muerte 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
Bleeding Through, Dead to Fall, Too Pure to Die 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
SAT 8/19
Adventure Club, Stoned Level, GorillaT 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
Agua, DJ Iggy, DJ Chava, Mo Mami, J Santos 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Silver Cup, Hembree 8 PM, Schubas, 18+
THU 8/24
Jonatha Brooke 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
FRI 8/25
Be Our Guest: The Disney DJ Night 9:30 PM, Park West
SAT 8/26
Liv.e 8 PM, Subterranean b
SUN 8/27
Danna Paola 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, Rosemont b
X 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
MON 8/28
X 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Avatar, New Years Day 5 PM, Hard Rock Live Northern Indiana, Gary, IN
SUN 11/5
Beach Bums 7:30 PM, Schubas b
Girl God 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+
TUE 11/7
Meltt 9:30 PM, Hideout
TUE 11/14
Skinny Puppy, Lead Into Gold
8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
WED 11/15
FRI 9/1
Boris Brejcha, Moritz Hofbauer, Ann Clue, Deniz Bul 10 PM, Cermak Hall at Radius Chicago, 18+
Kettama, Mall Grab, Shaun J. Wright 10 PM, Metro Eric Prydz, Adam Beyer, Cristoph, Hummingbird 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+
Scorched Tundra XIII night one featuring Cloakroom, Osi & the Jupiter, Luggage 10 PM, Empty Bottle
VTSS b2b Boys Noize, Hiroko Yamamura, Brenda 10 PM, Smart Bar
SAT 9/2
John Summit, Nic Fanciulli, Chase West, Rika B 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+
Scorched Tundra XIII night two featuring Portrayal of Guilt, Firebreather, GAG, Ak’chamel 9 PM, Empty Bottle
SUN 9/3
A Night of Classic Soul with the Heavy Sounds featuring Renaldo Domino, Gina Bloom, and Michael Avery 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
WED 9/6
Claud, Boyish 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Paris Texas 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b
FRI 9/8
Poppy, Pom Pom Squad 8 PM, the Vic, 18+
SAT 9/9
Habstrakt, Blossom, Chyl 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
THU 9/14
Chris Smither, Paul Cebar 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn
SUN 9/17
Rhiannon Giddens, Charly Lowry 7 PM, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture b
WED 9/20
Diogo Nogueira 8 PM, Park West, 18+
THU 9/21
Clem Snide 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Steve Mason 9 PM, Empty Bottle
Veronica Swi 8 PM, City Winery b
FRI 9/22
Alien Nosejob, Ace of Spit, Clickbait 10 PM, Empty Bottle
Califone 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn
THU 9/28
David Longstreth, Sen Morimoto 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Marcus Rezak’s Shred Is Dead
8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
SUN 10/1
Madalitso Band, Luciano
Antonio’s Funk no Samba
8 PM, Hideout
Son Rompe Pera 8 PM, Park West, 18+
MON 10/2
Chai, Font 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
Jodee Lewis & Jonas Friddle
8 PM, City Winery b
SUN 10/15
Nation of Language, Miss Grit
7:30 PM, Metro b
Slauson Malone 1 9 PM, Co-Prosperity, 18+
TUE 10/17
Kiss the Tiger, Old Joy, Burning Lights 8:30 PM, Hideout
WED 10/18
Bag Raiders 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+
TUE 10/24
Rawayana 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
THU 10/26
Alanna Royale 8 PM, Golden Dagger
Nai Palm 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+
FRI 10/27
A. Savage 9 PM, Empty Bottle
SAT 10/28
Darlingside 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
SUN 10/29
Chrisette Michele 8 PM, City Winery b
MON 10/30
Chrisette Michele 8 PM, City Winery b
TUE 10/31
Chrisette Michele 8 PM, City Winery b
WED 11/1
Barns Courtney 7:30 PM, Metro b
Shane Smith & the Saints 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
FRI 11/3
In This Moment, Ice Nine Kills,
Skinny Puppy, Lead Into Gold
8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
SAT 11/18
Le Youth, Ocula 9 PM, Park West, 18+
FRI 11/24
Slander, Jason Ross, Wavedash, Riot, Redline 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+
SAT 11/25
Slander, Jason Ross, Wavedash, Synymata, Redline 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+
THU 11/30
Pierce the Veil, L.S. Dunes, Dayseeker, Destroy Boys 5:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+
FRI 12/1
Riot Ten, Effin, Skellytn 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
SAT 12/2
Lil Tjay 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b
SUN 12/3
Straight No Chaser 3 PM, Chicago Theatre b
SAT 1/13/2024
G Jones, Mala, Sayer 9 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+
FRI 1/26/2024
Couch, Alisa Amador 8 PM, Park West, 18+
SUN 2/18/2024
Squid 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
FRI 8/9/2024
Metallica, Pantera, Mammoth WVH 6 PM, Soldier Field b
SUN 8/11/2024
Metallica, Five Finger Death
Punch, Ice Nine Kills 6 PM, Soldier Field b v
CLEVELANDPROTOPUNK band the Electric Eels existed for just three years in the early 70s, playing all of five gigs, and didn’t release a record till long a er they’d broken up. But the legend of this notoriously self-destructive band keeps growing—maybe because founding guitarist Brian McMahon published a masterfully cantankerous memoir, Jaguar Ride , via HoZac Books in 2017. The Electric Eels’ recordings—mostly four-track rehearsal tapes—have been compiled in many combinations over the decades, but last week Ohio label Scat Records released a double LP compilation, Spin Age Blasters , that it calls the “most definitive collection ever assembled,” packed with the best versions of 27 scabby, blistering tracks. McMahon has lived in Chicago since 1988, and on Sunday, July 30, he and fellow Eels veteran Paul Marotta (also of the Styrenes) will sign records and sit for a Q&A during a free release party at Gman Tavern that runs from 8 PM till midnight. McMahon will also spin records, as will HoZac cofounder Todd Novak , Gentleman John Battles, Mark Henning, and Henry Polk
The Pitchfork Music Festival seemed to bring together every scene in the city. At Sen Morimoto’s set on Friday, Gossip Wolf spotted pop auteurs Nnamdï , Kara Jackson, and Justice Hill, while footwork pioneer RP Boo rolled up to Jlin’s latea ernoon performance. On Saturday, this wolf bumped into John Dugan (of recently reunited 90s mod-punk trio Chisel) and his son Quinn (who fronts postpunk band Uniflora) a er King Krule and chatted with Pinksqueeze bassist Anna White and OK Cool guitarist-vocalist Bridget Stiebris during Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul’s set on the Blue Stage. On Sunday, Gossip Wolf spotted recent transplant Karl Kuehn (aka indie-pop artist Gay Meat, who dropped “Lychee Ice” on Tuesday) watching Illuminati Hotties and Daniel Villarreal taking in Mdou Moctar. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL
Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
needs, assuming he’s still capable of being sexual; in fact, the thought of being sexual with your husband— who’s on his way out—is so unappealing that you don’t even want to risk broaching the subject of sex, MOM, for fear he might get ideas about being sexual with you. But you can somehow risk monitoring the porn your husband consumes, MOM, porn he tries to hide from you (however unsuccessfully), porn you could help him hide from you (by turning a blind fucking eye), and porn you should be grateful he has access to (porn gets you off the hook).
Take care
Q : I have a partner of several decades who needs me, as I am his primary caregiver and he’s been going through a prolonged health crisis. But we have been sexless for two decades. There are multiple reasons for that, on both sides, some of which include the fact that I’m just not that physically attracted to him anymore even if I once was, even if I love him, even if I still feel sexual desire (just not in his direction). I have no interest in renewing our sexual relationship, especially not now, given the condition he’s in. I don’t even know if he’s capable anymore. But I don’t want to give up being a sexual being. I also don’t think he would be open to opening the relationship and allowing me to get my needs
met elsewhere. He’s very traditional in that sense, and I’m scared to ask. I think it would break his heart.
Yet, at the same time, he’s kind of getting his needs met via porn, which he hides and he’s very reluctant to talk about, although I understand. Not because I watch or enjoy porn, but because I understand he has needs, and I am not fulfilling them. I guess in his mind it’s different because he’s not engaging in a relationship with someone else, so it’s not cheating. Although I could argue that the amount of hours he spends watching porn and the extreme types he views certainly feel like something close to cheating to me. Not quite sure what I’d call it. I kind of mind when it’s bordering on jailbait and/ or violent situations—I do find those subjects more
problematic—but I’m trying really hard not to judge, even when it’s more disturbing to me, because I don’t want to add to his shame. These are just fantasies, and he wouldn’t act on them. He can’t act on them. So, I am trying not to mind, and consider myself grateful that he is getting his needs met somehow, and I’m off the hook.
My question, I guess, is how do I broach the topic that I have needs, too? And maybe get permission to get them met elsewhere without hurting him? I’m not going to leave him. I can’t. That would be cruel. But I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives (and his might not be that much longer) living like a nun. —MARRIED OR MARTYR
a: So you don’t wanna meet your husband’s sexual
pointless conversation that would only highlight what never worked about your marriage at the end of his life—will bring you some small measure of happiness, I think you should go ahead and get sex elsewhere. It’s entirely possible your husband is no more interested in having sex with you than you are with him—it’s possible he prefers porn at this stage of his life—but regardless, MOM, your husband didn’t ask for your permission before he figured out a way to take care of his own needs. He did what he needed to do. You should do the same.
humor and without stigma.
“You can only lead the horse to water, right? It’s a tricky move that depression pulls where the disorder sort of builds a protective shield around itself where the person is so devoid of hope and self-regard that they don’t think help is either possible or deserved, when in fact it’s both.”
While you were never that sexually attracted to your husband, MOM, at some point you made the difficult transition from sexual and romantic partner—or presumed/default sexual and romantic partner—to caretaker. Even people who enjoy strong sexual connections with their long-term partners sometimes have to make that awful transition, and the sex dwindles away. But sex was never an important part of your marriage and you stuck around anyway, and now you’ve taken on profound obligations and responsibilities that transcend sex; you’re not there to get him off, you’re there to see him out. That’s a loving thing to do—or it’s a thing that can be done lovingly (some people are monstrous to their dying partners)—and the less resentful you are about the pressures and deprivations that come with being a caretaker, the more loving a caretaker you’ll be.
So, there’s your rationalization, MOM. If discreetly getting sex elsewhere without seeking your husband’s permission—thereby sparing your husband a painful and
PS: But for the love of Christ, MOM, stop looking at his browser history or dusting his DVD collection or whatever it is you’re doing that forces you to think about the porn your husband is watching. If his porn preferences bother you, there’s an easy for fix for that: respect his privacy
PPS: I honestly can’t understand why people whose marriages have been sexless for years or decades but who choose to stay together don’t release their spouses from monogamous sexual commitments.
Q: Here’s the situation: I’m involved with someone who is depressed, and I don’t know how to help him. His depression has caused him to lose the ability to experience pleasure, for the most part. He’s on antidepressants, but not the kind that impact your libido. How do I li his spirits and get him to enjoy sex again?
—BLUES CLUES
a: “It can be very difficult when someone you love needs help but won’t get it,” said John Moe, host of Depresh Mode, a podcast that tackles depression with
So, while your partner is already on antidepressants and therefore has sought some sort of treatment, if he’s still struggling with depression—and having no libido can be a sign that someone is struggling—he may not be on the right antidepressants, and/or antidepressants aren’t the only treatment he needs.
“When I was at my low point, before diagnosis and before treatment, I didn’t think I was worth getting better,” said Moe. “Finally, my wife said, ‘If you don’t love yourself enough to go see someone, do you love me and the kids?’ I said sure, of course. ‘Then do it for us,’ she said. And I did. The other line I know sometimes works when people don’t want to get help is to just ask how the status quo is working out for them. Like what exactly is so great about the current situation that you want to hold on to? Not so much about sex, really, but getting help can get you to a better mental state where sex becomes more feasible.” v
Follow John Moe on Twitter @JohnMoe and the DepreshMode podcast on Instagram @depreshpod.
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Market Research Analyst REMESAS DE RIA ENVIA, INCORPORATED seeks a Market Research Analyst. Mail resume to 21 N GENESEE ST. WAUKEGAN, IL 00 5.
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INVITATION TO BID INVITATION TO BID NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN by the Board of Trustees of the Barbara W. Smith Family Life Center, located in South Holland, Cook County, Illinois, that the sealed bids will be received for the following improvement(s): Roofing; Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning; Electrical (wall and floor outlets); Plumbing; Carpentry (ceiling tiles, flooring, interior doors). Said bids will be received up to the hour of 2 p.m. Central Standard Time, on Friday, the 4th day of August 2023, at the Barbara W. Smith Family Life Center Gym, located at 1130 East 154th Street, South Holland, Illinois and will be publicly opened and read at that time. The
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