Tours & Exhibits
Game Changer Chicago: Card, Board, and Computer Games for Change
Demo Hours: 12:30 p.m to 4:30 p.m.
Stuart Hall, Room 102
Stuart Hall, Room 102
The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab is an initiative in which youth collaborate with faculty and university students to create digital stories and games in order to explore various health-related issues. The GCC Design Lab workshops help youth gain skills in media literacy, critical inquiry, storytelling techniques, and game design. The Lab was started by Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda at the University of Chicago. Jagoda and Gilliam, alongside Lab game designers, will offer hands-on demos of a few of the games created through the project.
Wings, Speed, and Cosmic Dominion at the Smart Museum of Art
Exhibition Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Guided tours at 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Wings are prevalent in a wide range of Renaissance representations, from figures (angels, winged cherubs, and mythological gods) to animals (eagles, griffins, and winged horses). The multiple iconographies of wings during this period drew on allegorical, cosmological, and religious symbols inherited from both Christian and ancient Near Eastern mythologies. Drawing on the Smart Museum’s permanent collection, with selected loans from the University of Chicago’s Library and the Oriental Institute, this intimate exhibition examines the Renaissance fascination with wings as symbols of speed and power through the influential histories of flight derived from the bird cult of Horus in ancient Egypt to the circulation of winged creatures in prints by Albrecht Dürer and others.
Suicide Narcissus at the Renaissance Society
Exhibition Hours: 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Guided tours at 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Featuring eight artists, Suicide Narcissus is a group exhibition meant to serve as a contemporary vanitas. Maybe the Mayans weren't referring to an event but a mindset. Although the world did not end in 2012, climate change has forced us to think about our fate as a species, to confront the thought of our extinction wondering if we are an exception. Clearly, the grand evolutionary scheme of things tells us no. Human history relative to natural history amounts to a mere speck in time. The earth was here long before us, and it will be here long after us. Over the 3.5 billion years of life on earth, countless species have come and gone. While this is a humbling thought, as the planet's dominant species, we are less defined by our humility and more by our chauvinism. The will to survive has become the right to survive, a right whose abuse has made startlingly clear the fragile parameters governing terrestrial life. Our ecological crisis taints all facets of our relationship to nature such that culture and our quest for knowledge can only be juxtaposed against reflections on folly, catastrophe and death.
Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism, and Archiving—A Never the Same Exhibition at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
Exhibition Hours: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The exhibition presents new work by five individual artists or groups of artists working in local, socially engaged, art research and practice. The selected artists (Dan S. Wang, Liliana Angulo, Jayne Hileman, Faheem Majeed, Extinct Entities) approach Chicago as a site of engagement from a variety of perspectives: as life-long Chicago dwellers, former residents, or newer and temporary residents. Taking inspiration from the Never The Same archive, they extend their investigations using forms such as mapping, archiving, performing, curating, braiding, typesetting, and imagining.
Diasporal Rhythms: A 10-Year Love Affair with Collecting Art of the African Diaspora at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Exhibition Hours: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Logan Center Exhibitions is partnering with Diasporal Rhythms to present an exhibition that marks the 10th anniversary of this distinct art collectors’ collective. Founded in 2003, Diasporal Rhythms seeks to build a passionate group of collectors engaged in actively acquiring visual art created by contemporary artists of the African diaspora and to expand the appreciation of these artists’ work. The bi-annual Collectors’ Invitational marks the culmination of the group’s efforts to recognize the artists they have encountered. Every other year, the membership gathers to vote “out of their collections”: Each member can cast a ballot for an artist whose works they have acquired, and the top five artists are then honored by exhibitions and other events for two years. The nineteen artists featured in this exhibition, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of Diasporal Rhythms, are all such honored artists. Visit the Diasporal Rhythms exhibit online for more information.
Echoes of the Middle Ages: Schola Antiqua of Chicago in an Open Music Rehearsal at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Open Rehearsal: 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801
Experience rediscovered sounds from centuries ago. Schola Antiqua of Chicago, the city’s premier professional vocal ensemble specializing in music before the year 1600, will present a rehearsal open to the public, as they prepare to make a recording of eleventh-century music in the weeks ahead. The music, which has not been brought to modern audiences until now, belongs to a peculiar genre of the Christian liturgy called the sequence, a genre that all but vanished by the end of the sixteenth century. The medieval sequences to be heard in this rehearsal are of a special subgenre featuring singing without text. This kind of rapturous outpouring of uninhibited sound was thought to be an appropriate vehicle for expressing inexpressible joy during the ritual of the Mass. Schola Antiqua’s recording project is supported in part by the Noah Greenberg Award given by the American Musicological Society.
Tour of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Building hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Guided tours at 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Students and staff will lead guided tours of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, offering the opportunity to experience firsthand the groundbreaking work of architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Building highlights include the 474-seat Performance Hall, DelGiorno Deck and Mezzanine, Terrace Seminar Room, Gidwitz Lobby, a gallery space, fourteen arts classrooms, a film screening room, and over 90 individual arts studios, rehearsal rooms, and digital media labs. Visit the Logan Center online for more information about the many events and resources that the facility offers.
The following events are not a part of Humanities Day, but will be taking place on or near campus and may be of interest to those in attendance.
Yoshio Hayakawa with Masahide Sakuma: Live in Concert—October 18, 2013
The University of Chicago will host the first-ever appearance outside of Japan by Yoshio Hayakawa (b. 1947), a legendary figure in the history of Japanese popular music. Hayakawa first emerged into the public’s eye in the 1960s as leader of the seminal underground folk-rock band The Jacks. Critical darlings but commercial failures, The Jacks released two classic albums of original songs that probed the existential angst of Japanese youth in the 1960s. In his Chicago performance, Hayakawa will be joined by Masahide Sakuma (b. 1952), another key figure in Japanese popular music history. After debuting in the folk group Yonin Bayashi, Sakuma later achieved widespread fame in the New Wave band The Plastics. In recent decades Sakuma has been one of the most in-demand producers in Japan, working with many of the most popular Japanese rock bands while continuing his own activities as a performer and songwriter. Free and open to the public. Visit our event website for more details and to hear music samples, read lyrics and watch videos. (International House, 1414 E. 59th St., 7:30 p.m.)
Chicago Humanities Festival Hyde Park Day—October 20, 2013
The Chicago Humanities Festival comes to the University of Chicago campus for the Seventh Annual Hyde Park Day. Events under the 2013 theme of Animal: What Makes Us Human, include: an illustrated discussion on dinosaurs with world-renowned paleontologist Paul Sereno, a reading with poet Brenda Shaughnessy, a conversation on the ethics of documentary filmmaking with Kartemquin Films' Gordon Quinn, a discussion on violence and policing in Chicago with Yale University law professor Tracey L. Meares, and a concert performance of George Crumb's Voice of the Whale by flutist Claire Chase, cellist Katinka Kleijn and pianist Jacob Greenberg, hosted by journalist Andrew Patner. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, September 16; advance purchase is encouraged. Visit Chicago Humanities Festival for more information.
Open House Chicago—October 19-20, 2013
The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) presents the third-annual Open House Chicago: a free, city-wide, behind-the-scenes look at many of the city’s great places and spaces. 150 buildings will be open, including 14 sites in Hyde Park. Site hours are typically from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m; check individual site listings for times. Explore repurposed mansions, hidden rooms, sacred spaces, private clubs, iconic theatres, offices, hotels and more. CAF inspires people to discover why design matters. Open House Chicago (OHC) gives you access to buildings that tell the stories of Chicago communities and cultures. By venturing into diverse neighborhoods for self-guided exploration, OHC participants come together to discover community and place. OHC is completely free-of-charge – no registration or tickets are needed for most buildings. Visit Open House Chicago for more information.
