Fall Forward: A Guide to the New Season

Cover by Fletcher Martin

The Artists Take Over

With the fall art opening season pushing back closer to Expo Chicago, we decided this year to combine our Big Art Issue into our fall arts preview edition. But we wanted to keep that edition’s unique creative fire burning—remember last year’s takeover by Puppies Puppies?—and so decided to take the concept one step further. This year, the entire fall preview was created by artists selected by the editors in each discipline. And wow, what a range of work we’re excited to share with you!

Art
An anonymous “takeover” by an invited artist. See our Eye Exam column.

Comedy
He may be billed as “The World’s Greatest Mime” but the buffoon clown Honeybuns is never short for words. So we asked for his professional take on this fall’s comedy scene, making our own Zach Freeman his straight man.

Dance
Onye Ozuzu, who is now acting dean of Fine & Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago, is a dancer, choreographer, administrator, researcher and all-around deep thinker on the culture. For our dance preview, she draws upon her vast network of talented friends to create a broad and inclusive list of fall essentials.

Design
Fletcher Martin is founding principal and creative director of branding agency a5. In that role, he’s responsible for many of the graphic identities that surround us. Beyond his role as designer, he is also an illustrator. So for the design section, he took complete control and made his own page. We liked it so much that we commissioned him to make the cover, too.

Dining & Drinking
The first time Newcity dining & drinking editor David Hammond ever heard Iliana Regan speak, it was in a video shot by James Beard Award recipient Michael Gebert. Regan was talking about how it would be a dream come true for her to come upon a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in the middle of a wood. The impulse to give in to fantasy, to weave a web of make-believe over the dining experience, has characterized Regan’s work at Elizabeth (4835 North Western), her first restaurant. It’s fair to say that there is no other restaurant like Elizabeth in Chicago, though if one were to draw comparisons, it would be with Michelin three-star places like Alinea. Elizabeth is priced much more reasonably, but the same spirit of invention, creativity and kitchen artistry is apparent at both remarkable restaurants. We asked Regan to tell us a little about how her autumn menu reflects specific themes and how they all contribute to her artistic vision. Plus, here’s a few key fall events from David Hammond.

Film
We asked several of Chicago’s leading filmmakers to discuss the films and filmmakers they’re most excited about this fall. From the love of Agnès Varda by both Jennifer Reeder and Melika Bass to the homage to, yes, Robert Zemeckis by Stephen Cone, we’ve got some real cinematic range for you.

Lit
Christine Sneed is one of Chicago’s most acclaimed and prolific novelists. Her debut story collection, “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry” was published to considerable favor in 2010, and she followed with the novel “Little Known Facts” in 2013 and “Paris, He Said” came out this spring.

Music
Seth Boustead is a composer, arts manager and writer and concert producer whose over the past dozen years forged a highly personal musical identity through a prolific outpouring of works in every conceivable genre. His orchestra piece “This Point Forward” was a finalist for the American Prize in 2012. He also hosts the radio show “Relevant Tones” on WFMT, and seeks to revolutionize how and where classical music is performed and how it is perceived by the general public. He prepared his fall preview by composing a piece of music, “Step Into Fall,” which you can play yourself using the sheet music provided, or visit music.newcity.com to listen to an mp3 by the artist himself.

Theater & Opera
Honeybuns and Zach (see Comedy) had so much fun, they just kept going, tearing up the worlds of theater and opera with equal vigor.