The unauthorized exhibit, “The Art Of Banksy,” has a location: the Epiphany Center for the Arts in the West Loop, and a new opening date: August 7, reports Miriam Di Nunzio at the Sun-Times. The work is drawn from a range of eighty of Banksy’s prints, canvases, screenprints and sculptures in private collections. “All the pieces are from private collectors that Banksy sold to. Nothing has been taken from the street,” Corey Ross, president and CEO of Starvox Exhibits tells the paper of the show claimed to be worth $35 million. “They’ve been living in private homes or investors’ warehouses. So it’s a view behind the scenes of Banksy’s oeuvre. It’s an amazing opportunity to see this quantity of Banksy works. There’s no city in the world that has eighty pieces in one place. Our mission is to instill an artistic, cultural experience in all patrons who cross our threshold, with the hope that each will be inspired to realize their own epiphany. Viewing Banksy’s work with our unique and historical venue as the backdrop will undoubtedly accomplish just that.” Tickets are $30-$100 here.
Intersect Chicago 2021 Will Be In-Person November 4-7 At Navy Pier
Intersect Chicago, the art and design fair formerly known as SOFA (Sculpture Objects Functional Art), a partnership of brothers Tim and Dirk von Gal, will present “an exploration of materiality and meaning in design, objects, furniture, and art with a focus on local, regional, and global creation” at Navy Pier November 4-7. “Intersect Chicago’s November 2021 edition will feature a diverse roster of galleries and cultural partners with dedicated programming, curated focus sections and special events.” Details here.
DESIGN
Electric Scooters To Become Permanent In Chicago Landscape?
“Electric scooters in Chicago would shift from pilot to permanent — with ‘sidewalk detection’ technology to prevent them from endangering and inconveniencing pedestrians — under a two-year plan proposed by an influential alderman,” reports Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times. “Transportation Committee Chairman Howard Brookins (21st) introduced an ordinance that would pave the way for scooters to become a permanent part of Chicago’s transportation system. It would authorize the Chicago Department of Transportation to issue up to three licenses to scooter-sharing concessionaires, with each company free to deploy 2,500 ‘lock-to’ scooters per day, from 5am to midnight… Scooters must be ‘locked to’ a tree, pole or bike rack to prevent them from cluttering Chicago sidewalks.” Brookins would also permit “designated concessionaires to ‘apply for permits to display advertising signs or devices’ on their scooters. The advertising could be a potential source of revenue for the city.” NBC News looks at the boost in e-bike usage nationwide during the pandemic.
DINING & DRINKING
José Andrés Adds Speakeasy Basement Bar to Jaleo
Among the smorgasbord of eateries about to be unfurled by Chef José, tapas restaurant Jaleo in River North, set for a July opening, will feature a “bespoke cocktail experience” in a yet-to-be-named speakeasy-style basement bar, reports Eater Chicago. The location is kitty-corner from Rick Bayless’ complex of Frontera, Topolobampo and Xoco.
Funky Names And Few Failures: Talking Up Rich Melman
“The thing I may love most about Lettuce Entertain You is the amazing names it gave its restaurants in the early years, like The Great Gritzbe’s Flying Food Show or Lawrence of Oregano,” writes Anthony Todd for Chicago. “LEYE originated spots that are now standalone chains like Maggiano’s and Corner Bakery, opened the first tapas bar in Chicago (Café-Ba-Ba-Reeba), and helped launch the revitalization of River North back in the mid-80s. Everyone gushes about the success of LEYE (and rightly so) but every group has some restaurants that just don’t work. Melman couldn’t pinpoint LEYE’s shortest-lived restaurant concept, though he did give a nod to one of my favorites, Intro, which was set up as a sort of rotating think tank for up-and-coming chefs. The most obvious failure he can remember was the location of Café Ba-Ba-Reeba that he opened in Vegas in the early 2000s. ‘It just didn’t work,’ Melman remembers. ‘I think if we did it today, it might.'”
New Drinking Spots At Carbide & Carbon Building
Now open: Château Carbide is a “secret,” Cote d’Azur-inspired open-air rooftop twenty-four stories above Michigan Avenue. Named in tribute to the 1920s-era Carbide & Carbon Building that it tops, the al fresco terrace and interior lounge welcomes guests with house specialities: rosé, champagne magnums and hand-rolled sushi. On the ground floor of the hotel, behind heavy drapery, the secluded Bar Pendry fills another nook, a fireside retreat with “classic cocktails and chef-driven bar bites in an intimate setting.”
Soft-Open For Exchange
“A fairly massive project from DMKrestaurants opens (partially) this week,” reports Dish. “The Exchange is an ‘experiential wonderland’ (aka, a restaurant and entertainment venue) in the Loop, and the first portion of it, a small fifty-seat restaurant helmed by chef Brian Huston, opened Thursday. The experience will include custom-created nightly playlists that will also be available on social media.”
FILM & TELEVISION
Gary Culture and History Chronicled in “Looted”
Gary native and 2020 Morehouse graduate Chris Robinson returns home to debut “Looted,” a documentary about his hometown of Gary, Indiana, on Sunday, June 27 at 4pm at the ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen. “I love my city! It’s the place that raised me, and I felt compelled to do the research and tell this story,” says Robinson. A panel discussion will take place following the film. Tickets here; trailer here.
MEDIA
Tribune Watchdog Reporter Takes Buyout
Dan Hinkel, who wrote watchdog stories about law enforcement and government for the Tribune, takes the Alden Global Capital buyout: “Friday will be my last day at The Chicago Tribune. Thanks for reading and giving me a chance to write on behalf of the people of this city and state, point out injustice and take some joy from this work. I am fortunate. The best thing about my time at the Trib has been making friends I’ll keep for life and doing journalism with my heroes. I’d forget someone if I named everyone, but thanks for welcoming and teaching me, and for drinking coffee and beers with me. Let’s keep that last part up.” Hinkel’s 2010 collaboration on wrongful prosecutions in Lake County can be found here.
Tribune’s Amy Carr Takes Chicago Magazine Reins
Amy Carr is the new editor of Alden Global Capital’s city monthly, Robert Feder reports. “In a statement posted Wednesday, Carr said she applied for ‘but didn’t ultimately accept’ a buyout as planned. ‘I was preparing for a summer of finding my next chapter,’ she wrote. ‘Instead, my next chapter found me, and it’s an incredible one.'”
“Mainstream Media” Is Where The Hot Water Is
“A reliable way to stir up attention is to posit that ‘the mainstream media’ did or did not do something. Someone will invariably respond; everyone’s got an opinion on the subject. That was the draw, anyway, when, to drum up business, Nick Bacon, a video producer in Chicago, named his company, which provides technical support for events, Mainstream Media LLC,” reports Savannah Jacobson at Columbia Journalism Review. “He figured it would be good for search engine optimization. ‘We were just two guys working out of a back room in an apartment,’ Bacon said, ‘and we thought it was kind of funny to suggest that, like, this is where the mainstream media is.’ Bacon’s strategy paid off; during the primaries in 2016 and 2020, with Trump tearing into the mainstream media on the campaign trail, people called, emailed, and tweeted at the business every week. Last year, a pair from South Carolina phoned him repeatedly for an hour. ‘They legitimately thought I was the mainstream media Donald Trump was talking about,’ Bacon said. He tried to explain what his business actually was; after an extended back-and-forth, they asked him to convey their anti-media message—which Bacon described as ‘impotent rage’—to the rest of us.”
Memeing The Mayor
The Sun-Times’ Ashlee Rezin Garcia’s photos of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and 20th Ward Ald. Jeanette Taylor’s face-off are sweeping the internet, tweets Evan F. Moore, surfacing some memes. Original photos of the confrontation are here. Ald. Taylor demands an apology: “Who stands up to her? This is not the first time she did this to somebody. She does this all the time and people let her get away with it,” Taylor told the Sun-Times. “It’s a ‘no.’ How many times do you keep letting a bully bully you? Clearly, this is bullying.”
Insider Dispatches A “New Yorker” To Chicago; City Mouse Posting As Rube?
In the same school as “Why I’m Leaving New York Forever, Waah,” and “Why I Couldn’t Stay In Chicago, Boo” essays, Insider dispatches a writer to improvise photo captions to mostly stock photography in “I’m a New Yorker who visited the Midwest for the first time. Here are 15 things that surprised me.” Among the nougat: “When I walked through Chicago… there were some neighborhoods, especially downtown in the Loop, that seemed completely empty. Even some of the subway stations were deserted. It felt eerie and almost apocalyptic to be walking down city streets alone”; “During my two weeks in the Midwest, most people I spoke with talked about heading to a nearby cabin or going on hikes at parks”; “Strangers wanted to chat with me and learn a little bit about my life”; “Several times, I saw pedestrians wave at cars and thank them for letting them pass” and “Midwesterners… seem to use [‘Cheers’] as a replacement for ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you.'”
MUSIC
Tunney Says OK To Midweek Guns N’ Roses September Wrigley Outing
“The Cubs would get the go-ahead to hold a rare, midweek concert after Labor Day at Wrigley Field — Guns N’ Roses on Thursday, September 16 — under an ordinance proposed by the local alderman to help the team’s billionaire owners recoup some of their pandemic losses,” reports Fran Spielman. “At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, local Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) introduced an ordinance to waive that post-Labor Day ban and allow the Cubs to hold a 6pm concert on September 16 featuring Guns N’ Roses.”
For Chicago, It’s Goodbye, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road On Elton John Tour
Elton John will appear twice in Chicago during the “Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour,” his final world tour which runs into 2023. Tickets for the February 2022 United Center show range from $150-$3,000, with August 2022 Soldier Field ducats to be announced.
Bad Religion And Alkaline Trio Reschedule Co-Headline Tour
Tickets are on sale for Los Angeles punk band Bad Religion and Chicago “cult rock heroes” Alkaline Trio’s rescheduled North American co-headlining tour. “Bad Religion was one of my first loves,” says Alkaline Trio co-lead vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba. “I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Suffer. They are one of the very reasons I started playing punk rock music and continue to today. This tour is going to be epic on many levels. We’ve done Warped Tour and Festival shows many times over the years but this will be the first time it’s just us and I couldn’t be more thrilled!” The local show is November 13 at Radius Chicago. Tickets here.
STAGE
Lookingglass Returns
“In late July, [we’ll] gather at Lake Michigan to commemorate the start of the Chicago Race Riots with a simple ritual, Sunset 1919. Then in the fall we will release the first five short films of an epic exploration of our city from an artist’s point of view, ’50 Wards: A Civic Mosaic.’ In November, we’re returning to our theatre with the award-winning play all Chicagoans should see, ‘Her Honor Jane Byrne.’ In the spring we will unveil a brand-new raucous musical, ‘Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon,’ and finally, our joyful and awe-inspiring signature Lookingglass production, ‘Lookingglass Alice’ will make a return in Summer 2022. Along with planning our artistic endeavors, we’re engaged in the essential commitment of becoming an anti-racist organization and have developed the following Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines in hope that more of us – more of humanity – will be reflected with finer fidelity here at Lookingglass. This work is vital and will be ongoing as we work to have a wider variety of human experiences represented in our room, at our table, and on our stage.” More here.
City Lit Sets Season For January 2022
City Lit Theater has re-announced programming for its forty-first year of production, according to producer and artistic director Terry McCabe. After a pre-season run of “Thirteen Days,” which was cancelled during the pandemic, the 2021-22 subscription season will open with a world premiere adaptation, “The Virginian: A Horseman Of The Plains.” Owen Wister’s novel, which was adapted as a 1946 feature film and a TV series that aired from 1962-1971, has been adapted for the stage by Chicago playwrights L.C. Bernadine and Spencer Huffman. McCabe will direct. “A study of the meaning of honor in the Old West,” City Lit’s production will feature a diverse cast. “The value of any national myth lies in its availability to everyone,” McCabe says in a release. The show will also feature a small herd of puppet horses, three-quarters the size of real horses, created for the show by The Puppet Company. “The Virginian” will preview beginning January 7. Find more here.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Welcomes Four New Dancers
Alexandria Best, Michele Dooley, Michael Garcia and Simone Stevens join the Company. “Finding these new company members has been a long, exciting and rewarding process. We auditioned nearly 900 applicants via video and found four exceptional dancers who have tremendous skill and talent,” says artistic director Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell. “These dancers are excellent personality matches for the HSDC ensemble, while also possessing distinct star power as individuals. We are thrilled to have them on board for the 2021-2022 season.” Details here.
Charting The New Coordinates
Off-Loop Chicago theater company The New Colony is changing its name to The New Coordinates, a rebranding that is part of a larger restructuring process to work as an anti-racist organization. (Their efforts are listed through the anti-racism page of the company’s website here.) “Part of our work is to educate and examine ourselves, to be accountable to our history as a primarily white institution and improve the experience of collaboration with BIPOC artists,” co-artistic directors Fin Coe and Stephanie Shum say in a release. “To that end, one of the changes we’re making is the name of our company. It has been an increasingly awkward fit for some time now. It’s a little absurd to call for de-colonizing theater and its labor practices when it’s right there in our name, in our communications, an odd sticking point in all of our introductions. This simple update is just the most visible component of a fundamental shift in how we work,” they write. “The acts of creation, cultivation and curation are what inspire us, and what have allowed us to connect artists to audiences for over a decade. With thirty-two world premieres in our history, we continue our commitment to creating and uplifting new stories you won’t see anywhere else. Our mission is still the same; we still passionately do what we have always done, which is to tell new stories. But who we are, and how we execute the mission, can and will always continue to get better.”
ARTS & CULTURE
Wizard World Chicago Opens Ticket Sales For October 15-17
Twice-postponed, Wizard World Chicago is on: “Wizard Brands has opened up ticket sales for its largest and longest-running event, Wizard World Chicago, set for October 15-17, 2021 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. Tickets purchased for the originally scheduled event in 2020, also postponed from August 2021, will be honored. Details on celebrities, superstar creators, exhibitors, programming, entertainment, cosplay and other aspects of Wizard World Chicago 2021 will be announced as they become available. Prices begin at $40 for single-day Friday tickets. Celebrity VIP, photo-op and autograph tickets will be available once guests are confirmed for the event.” Tickets here.
