Special Events
Conference Excursions
Thursday
Newberry Library Archival Objects Presentation (for Graduate Students): November 7, 3:00-4:00 p.m. Registration information: capped at 25. The Newberry Library is a private research library just a few blocks from the Drake Hotel. Founded in 1887, its Modern Manuscripts collection includes manuscripts and papers from modernist figures in literature, journalism and the performing arts, including Sherwood Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, Ruth Page, Eunice Tietjens, and Ida B. Wells. Melissa Bradshaw will curate an exhibit of objects based on registrants’ collective research interests, and introduce them to research and fellowship opportunities at the library. We will meet in the lobby of the Drake at 2:40 to walk over to the Newberry (60 W. Walton St.).
Bronzeville Tour: November 7, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Registration information: capped at 20-25. This is a private motorcoach tour of Bronzeville (Chicago’s South Side) with special emphasis on the Great Migration, which, between the years of 1910 and 1970, brought 6-7 million African-Americans (of whom approximately 500,000 settled in Chicago) from the rural South to the urban north in search of a better future. Pickup and dropoff will be at the Drake Hotel, location TBD. The tour is led by Bronzeville native Shermann ‘Dilla’ Thomas, who was recently interviewed on NPR/WBEZ. Here is an excerpt from the tour website:
Chicago historian Dilla, as he is affectionately called, is a fascinating blend of modern historian, cultural worker, and public employee. Dilla has become a Chicago social media sensation by going viral on Tiktok. His 60 second history videos on everything Chicago have been viewed over 20 million times, and he has amassed a following of 210K followers across all social media platforms. Dilla has been featured on all manner of Chicago media and has also appeared nationally on both “The Today Show” and “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” Dilla is a proud lifelong resident of Chicago's South Side. He lives by the saying that everything dope about America comes from Chicago.
Friday
The Arts Club of Chicago: November 8, 10:00-11:00 a.m. Private tour of the The Arts Club of Chicago, an exhibition and meeting space established in 1916, after the angry reception to the 1913 Armory Show made clear that the city needed a venue to exhibit and foster conversation around challenging art, music, and ideas. Executive Director and Chief Curator Dr. Janine Mileaf will introduce us to the permanent collection and discuss the Arts Club’s colorful history–including hosting Gertrude Stein during her 1934 tour of the United States. We will meet at the Arts Club, 201 E. Ontario St. (fifteen minute walk from the Drake).
TOUR OF Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935 with Hull-House Director Liesl Olson:
November 8, 2:00-3:00 p.m. Radical Craft explores the history and legacy of arts education at the country’s most influential social settlement. Through exemplary paintings, textiles, metalwork, pottery, and books—largely from Hull-House’s own collection—the exhibition shows how the arts at Hull-House provided immigrant neighbors with opportunities to experience the “restorative power in the exercise of a genuine craft,” in the words of Hull-House co-founder Jane Addams (1860-1935). Radical Craft gives attention to Hull-House’s lesser-known co-founder, Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), who was committed to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and believed that art should be accessible to everyone. The exhibition also pays homage to the significance of unnamed artisans by displaying unattributed work alongside the settlement’s more well-known figures.
Location: Hull-House Museum, 800 S. Halsted Street, Chicago.
25 people. 45 minute tour followed by Q/A
Transportation: link to directions and accessibilityAbout the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Saturday
Walking Tour: The Pyschogeography of Streeterville: A Ramble:
November 9, 2:00 p.m. The Drake Hotel sits at the edge of Streeterville, a site of coastal landscape reclamation with a convulsive history as a vice district, a zone of property and sovereignty disputes, of institutional investments, and of modernist architectural experiments that shaped the phenomenology of city life and the dynamics of racial perception. On this guided walk across Streeterville’s layered psychogeography, we will be accompanied by in situ flash talks about notable aspects of the built environment and those who have made or responded to it, from Nella Larsen to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and from Simon Pokagon to Bertrand Goldberg. Guides include Toby Altman, Adrienne Brown, and Harris Feinsod.
We expect to walk approximately two miles, rain or shine. Meet in the lobby at the Drake at 2 p.m. on Saturday, November 9. 20 people.
Plenary Sessions
Friday
Chicago Encounters:
November 8, 5:00 p.m., following the Hull-House tour. Inspired by the re-issue of Rachel's Cohen's book, A Chance Meeting, this conversation will explore moments of meeting, brief or sustained, which have palpably shaped the nature of artistic expression in Chicago and beyond.
Adrienne Brown, Director, Arts & Public Life, University of Chicago; Associate Professor, Department of English, and Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, University of Chicago.
Rachel Cohen, Professor of Practice in the Arts, University of Chicago.
Jacqueline Goldsby, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of African American Studies & English, Yale University
Liesl Olson, Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; Professor, College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, University of Illinois Chicago.
Saturday
Screening of the film Passing: November 9, 4:00 p.m., in the Grand Ballroom. Seating for up to 350.
Chaz Ebert –Chicago luminary, CEO of rogerebert.com, and Executive Producer of Passing – will introduce the film. A roundtable discussion with Rafael Walker, Pardis Dabashi, and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier will follow the screening.