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Showing posts with label MCA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MCA. Show all posts

Thursday, April 14, 2022

CHICAGO SINGS STEPHEN SONDHEIM, MONDAY, MAY 23, AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

ChiIL Live Shows On Our Radar 

 
PORCHLIGHT MUSIC THEATRE ANNOUNCES TALENT PERFORMING IN ITS ANNUAL CONCERT FUNDRAISER, CHICAGO SINGS STEPHEN SONDHEIM, MONDAY, MAY 23,AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

The 2022 Chicago Sings Concert’s “It’s a Hit” Live Experience is SOLD OUT with tickets to the “Color & Light” Lounge Experience Still Available 

Porchlight Music Theatre is proud to announce the current roster of music theatre and cabaret talent performing in this year’s annual Chicago Sings fundraising concert, Chicago Sings Stephen Sondheim, Monday, May 23, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 220 E. Chicago Ave. This year’s Chicago Sings concert offered two opportunities to experience Chicago’s music theatre and cabaret performers saluting Stephen Sondheim. The first, which is now sold out, is the “It’s a Hit” Live Experience.Tickets for the “Color & Light” Lounge Experience, hosted by the Porchlight Young Professionals, are still available for $50 per ticket, and includes a live stream of the performance in a lounge created on the second floor of the MCA. Tickets may be purchased now at PorchlightMusicTheatre.org.

Chicago Sings Stephen Sondheim will be a fundraising celebration of the life and art of the great composer and lyricist who changed the world of American music theatre with performances co-directed by Porchlight Artistic Director Michael Weber+ and Producing Artistic Associate Frankie Leo Bennett+, music direction by David Fiorello+, choreography by Alejandro Fonseca+ and Laura Savage* and the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Music Theatre in Chicago.

The Chicago Sings Stephen Sondheim performers presenting songs featuring both music and lyrics by Sondheim currently scheduled to perform include Larry Adams+, Neala Barron*, Brianna Borger*, Justin Brill+, Christine Bunuan*, Lydia Burke*, Billy Dwyer+, Andres Enriquez+, Nancy Godinez*, Cecilia Iole*, Paul-Jordan Jansen+, Mark David Kaplan+, Parker Guidry^, Clare Kennedy*, Becky Keeshin*, Nik Kmiecik+, Evan Tyrone Martin+, Beckie Menzie*, Juwon Tyrel Perry+, Nolan Robinson+, Lorenzo Rush Jr+, Laura Savage*, Kelan M. Smith+ and Genevieve Thiers*.

Pronoun Key: + (he/him/his); * (she/her/hers); ^ (they, them, theirs); = (any with respect)

In addition to the performances, a Chicago Sings tradition continues with the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award for exceptional and lasting contributions to the state of the art of Chicago music theatre to Paramount Theatre Artistic Director Jim Corti.

Past Guy Adkins Award recipients include Felicia P. Fields, who recently starred in Porchlight’s Blues in the Night, director/choreographers Brenda Didier, currently at the helm in Porchlight’s Spring Awakening as well as Rachel Rockwell, actors E. Faye Butler, Paula Scrofano and Hollis Resnik, music director/conductor Doug Peck and directors Gary Griffin, Dominic Missimi and L. Walter Stearns. The committee that chooses the annual award winner is composed of past recipients and other leaders in Chicago’s music theatre industry. 

ABOUT CHICAGO SINGS STEPHEN SONDHEIM
 “It’s a Hit!” Live Experience is now SOLD OUT and included
  • Reserved seat in the Edlis Neeson Theater to see this special concert live and in person
  • An exclusive pre-concert reception on the MCA’s second-floor tented terrace overlooking the sculpture garden with complimentary food and wine
  • Elegant piano entertainment during the reception
  • Viewing of the Nick Cave exhibit showcasing Cave’s unique fabric sculptures 

“Color & Light” Lounge Experience includes
  • An exclusive viewing party of the streamed Chicago Sings concert, hosted by the Porchlight Young Professionals, in the MCA’s second-floor lounge space
  • Viewing of the new Nick Cave exhibit showcasing his unique fabric sculptures only one week after its opening at the museum
  • Mingling with young art enthusiasts and have fun with our Lounge hosts and interactive piano accompanist
  • Complimentary wine and snacks

ABOUT STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Saturday Night (1954), A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Follies (1972), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd(1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into The Woods (1987), Assassins (1991), Passion (1994) and Road Show (2008), as well as lyrics for West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965) and additional lyrics for Candide (1973). Side By Side By Sondheim (1976), Marry Me A Little (1981), You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow (1983), Putting It Together (1993/99), Moving On (2001), and Sondheim On Sondheim (2010) are anthologies of his work as composer and lyricist. For film, he composed the score of “Stavisky” (1974), co-composed the score for “Reds” (1981), and wrote songs for “Dick Tracy” (1990). He wrote songs for the television production “Evening Primrose” (1966), co-authored the film The Last of Sheila (1973), and the play Getting Away With Murder (1996), and provided incidental music for the plays The Girls Of Summer (1956), Invitation To A March (1961), Twigs (1971), and The Enclave (1973). His collected lyrics with attendant essays have been published in two volumes: “Finishing the Hat” (2010) and “Look, I Made A Hat” (2011). In 2010, the Broadway theater formerly known as Henry Miller’s Theatre was renamed The Stephen Sondheim Theatre in his honor. Stephen Sondheim died November 21, 2021. 

ABOUT PORCHLIGHT MUSIC THEATRE
Porchlight Music Theatre is the award-winning center for music theatre in Chicago. Through live performance, youth education and community outreach we impact thousands of lives each season, bringing the magic of musicals to our theatre home at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in the Gold Coast and to neighborhoods across the city. Porchlight has built a national reputation for boldly reimagining classic musicals, supporting new works and young performers, and showcasing Chicago’s most notable music theatre artists, all through the intimate and powerful theatrical lens of the “Chicago Style.” 

Now in its 27th season, Porchlight's quarter-century production history includes more than 70 mainstage works with 15 Chicago premieres and five world premieres. Porchlight’s commitment to the past, present and future of music theatre led the company to develop the Porchlight Revisits and New Faces Sing Broadway program series, both quickly becoming audience favorites. 

Porchlight's education and outreach programs serve schools, youth of all ages and skill levels and community organizations, most notably the ongoing collaboration with Chicago Youth Centers. Porchlight annually awards dozens of full scholarships and hundreds of free tickets to ensure accessibility and real engagement with this uniquely American art form. 

The company’s many honors include 178 Joseph Jefferson Award (Jeff) nominations and 45 Jeff awards, as well as 33 Black Theatre Alliance (BTA) nominations and 12 BTA awards. In 2019, Porchlight graduated to the Large Theatre tier of the Equity Jeff Awards, and was honored with eight nominations in both technical and artistic categories and won three awards in its inaugural year in this tier, most notably Best Ensemble for Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies

Through the global pandemic, Porchlight emerged as one of Chicago’s leaders in virtual programming, quickly launching a host of free offerings like Sondheim @ 90 Roundtables, Movie Musical Mondays, Porchlight by Request: Command Performances and WPMT: Classic Musicals from the Golden Age of Radio. For the 2020-2021 season, Porchlight’s fall schedule included all-new ticketed virtual programs including Broadway by the DecadeNew Faces Sing Broadway 1987Chicago Sings Rock & Roll BroadwayNew Faces Sing Broadway 1961 and the return of The Ruffians’ Burning Bluebeard as well as collaborations with Hershey Felder and L.A. Theatre Works. Porchlight recently launched its first summer performance schedule in 2021 that included a sold-out performance of New Faces Sing Broadway 1979 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, the premiere of its outdoor music series Broadway in your Backyard, performed throughout Chicagoland this summer and special appearances at Sundays on State and Navy Pier’s Chicago Live Again. 

Porchlight Music Theatre is partially supported by generous contributions from Actors’ Equity Foundation; Allstate; Bayless Family Foundation; Michael Best & Friedrich LLP; Chapman | Spingola, Attorneys at Law; Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation; Gen Ops Plus; Elegant Event Lighting; James P. and Brenda S. Grusecki Family Foundation; Hearty Boys; A.L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation; The MacArthur Fund for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at Prince; the Pritzker Traubert Foundation; Ryan and Spaeth, Inc.; Daniel and Genevieve Ratner Foundation; The Saints; Dr. Scholl Foundation and the Topfer Family Foundation.  

The season program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency, and by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

Porchlight Music Theatre wishes to thank members of the Matching Gift Corporate Program including abbvie; Allstate; Lloyd A. Fry Foundation; Peoples Gas; Pepsico; Polk Bros Foundation and The Saints. 
Pronoun Key: + (he/him/his); * (she/her/hers); ^ (they, them, theirs); = (any with respect)
JIM CORTI, 2022 GUY ADKINS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE ADVANCEMENT OF MUSIC THEATRE IN CHICAGO RECIPIENT

Saturday, February 9, 2019

ART BEAT: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Presents Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera February 23 to May 5, 2019

Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera
a major survey of the work of Laurie Simmons

Image credit: Laurie Simmons, Big Camera, Little Camera, 1976. Collection of the artist. Photo courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, © Laurie Simmons.

I'll be out for the press opening, February 22nd, so check back soon for my recap. As a photographer, feminist, and daily creator of social media content, this exhibit particularly fascinates me. I'm also intrigued by families full of artists and creatives. Laurie Simmons' husband is painter Carroll Dunham and her children are actress/writer Lena Dunham and writer/activist Cyrus Dunham.

This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera, a major survey of the work of Laurie Simmons. This comprehensive exhibition showcases Simmons's career-long exploration of how image culture creates and perpetuates the myths of our society, and upends traditional ideas about photography as a medium. More than four decades of work by Simmons are on display, with her iconic photographs, sculptures, and films highlighting her importance both historically and as an active contemporary artist. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera is on view from February 23 to May 5, 2019 and is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and curated by Senior Curator Andrea Karnes. The Chicago presentation is coordinated by MCA Senior Curator Naomi Beckwith.

Simmons's exploration of archetypal female gender roles, for example, women in domestic settings, is the primary subject of this exhibition and is a topic as poignant today as it was in the late 1970s, when she began to develop her mature style using props and dolls as stand-ins for people and places.
  
The namesake work for this exhibition, Big Camera, Little Camera (1976), shows an actual camera juxtaposed with a miniature one, exemplifying Simmons's technique of manipulating scale. The actual camera in the image was given to Simmons by her father, a dentist who took up photography in his free time. Simmons explains, "I put the two cameras together for scale, and as a metaphor - real life versus fiction. It was also a statement about what I intended to do with the camera." Far from documenting the world as it is, her photographs represent the effects of fiction on reality.

Often isolating the dolls and photographing them situated in tiny, austere settings, in series such as Early Black and White (1976-78), Simmons uses fictional scenes that mirror and unsettle the American dream of prosperity and feminine domesticity. The resulting works turn a critical eye on tropes that dominated the era of her upbringing, including the 1950s housewife and the Wild West cowboy.

After graduating from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1971, then living in upstate New York and subsequently traveling through Europe while living out of her car, Simmons moved to a loft in the then-low-rent Bowery section of Manhattan. To make a living, she briefly worked as a freelance photographer for a dollhouse miniature company, and in her off hours she pursued her main ambition of becoming an artist. Influenced by her day job, as well as a cache of old toys she discovered at a toy store in the Catskills, Simmons began to photograph dolls and small plastic objects, particularly those from the 1950s, the era of her childhood.

Carefully chosen props, preserved by the artist over the years, are on display, including those used to create the early doll house imagery. This ephemera offers new insight into Simmons's process, revealing her continuing fascination with models and fleshing out her use of color-coding to organize vignettes into cohesive and precise imagery.

Monumental photographs from the series Walking and Lying Objects (1987-91), are on view in the exhibition. This iconic body of work features a variety of legs - from human scale to tiny metal Japanese fetish models - showing beneath familiar domestic objects. The poses create personified objects and objectified people, demonstrating how our culture defines, fetishizes, and flattens bodies - especially the female body - and material things.

The exhibition also presents Simmons's more recent series, such as The Love Doll (2009-11), which features high-end, life-size Japanese dolls in day-to-day scenarios. Just as Walking Objects represents a transition to monumental props, The Love Doll moves away from dolls in miniature, but the added element of strangeness is not unlike that evoked by the miniatures. Another recent body of work, How We See (begun in 2014), shows another iteration of the artist's longstanding interest in gender roles.

For these images, Simmons hired makeup artists to paint eyes that look open on her sitters' closed eyelids. Inverting her usual practice by making real people appear uncannily artificial, Simmons says, "Social media allows us to put our most perfect, desirable, funny, and fake selves forward, while naturally raising questions about our longings, yearnings, and vulnerabilities. In How We See, I'd like to direct you how to see while also asking you to make eye contact with ten women who can't see you."

In addition to her photography, there is a small selection of sculpture and three films in the exhibition. The Music of Regret (2006, 45 min) is shown in the gallery space, and is a three-part musical shot in 35mm by the cinematographer Ed Lachman. The Music of Regret grew out of three of Simmons's distinct photographic series: Early Interiors, Walking Objects, and Café of the Inner Mind. The theme of regret is underscored by vintage puppets that interact with actress Meryl Streep, who plays the lead role, and Alvin Ailey dancers dressed as oversized inanimate objects.

The film My Art (2016) was written and directed by Simmons who also stars in the lead role as Ellie Shine, an artist who wishes to reinvigorate her work and address her lack of recognition. In My Art, Ellie embarks on a new project where she reimagines shot-for-shot vignettes from her favorite movies, casting herself as the celluloid stars from the past. Art and life collide in the film as scenes mirror unfolding relationships in her life. The film debuted in September 2016 at the Venice Film Festival and premiered in North America at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, where it received high accolades.

A major scholarly catalogue, co-published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and DelMonico Books-Prestel, accompanies the exhibition.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laurie Simmons, born in 1949 in Queens, New York, began photographing at age six when her father bought her a Brownie camera. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and moved to New York. Simmons is an internationally recognized artist who has had solo exhibitions at P.S. 1, Artists Space, and the Jewish Museum in New York; the Walker Art Center in Minnesota; San Jose Museum of Art in California; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis; the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden; and the Neues Museum in Germany. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997, and a Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome in 2005. She currently lives and works in New York and Cornwall, Connecticut. Her husband is painter Carroll Dunham and her children are actress/writer Lena Dunham and writer/activist Cyrus Dunham.


RELATED PROGRAMS

Talk: Laurie Simmons
Saturday, February 23, 3 pm, MCA Theater
Artist Laurie Simmons leads audiences on a journey through the history of anti-feminist films on the opening day of her exhibition.

Screening: Laurie Simmons
Sunday, February 24, 11 am - 5 pm, MCA Theater
A marathon screening plays a selection of Laurie Simmons's films.

Screenings of My Art 
February 26, March 26 and 31, April 7 and 9, MCA Theater
Screened as part of the exhibition, My Art is ­a feature-length film written, directed by, and starring Laurie Simmons who plays Ellie Shine, a single artist living in New York City. As her decades-old dream of a respectable place in the art world becomes more elusive, her frustration with her lack of recognition feels alarmingly urgent. When she is offered the summer house and studio of a famous friend she seizes the opportunity to hit the reset button on her life and work.

Curator Tour: Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera
Tuesday, March 19, noon, exhibition gallery
MCA Senior Curator Naomi Beckwith leads an in-depth tour of Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera and discusses the artist's practice.

Talk: Laurie Simmons with Genevieve Gaignard
Thursday, April 10, 6 pm, MCA Theater
Laurie Simmons has sometimes been cast as a "reluctant feminist." In this conversation, the artist brings together a panel of next-generation thinkers to consider the tension between personal politics and the making of feminist art in a moment when gender is increasingly deconstructed. They also address how the feminist reading of her work by younger artists has changed her own perspective and her work.

Lead support for Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris; Becky and Lester Knight; Zell Family Foundation; Julie and Larry Bernstein; and Cari and Michael J. Sacks. Major support is provided by Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. Generous support is provided by Robert J. Buford; Anne L. Kaplan; Kovler Family Foundation; Jennifer and Alec Litowitz; Phillips; Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund; Marilyn and Larry Fields; Efroymson Family Fund; Katherine and Judd Malkin; Ellen-Blair Chube; Susie L. Karkomi and Marvin Leavitt; One Bennett Park; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Salon 94 New York; Mirja and Ted Haffner; Vicki and Bill Hood; Susan D. Goodman and Rodney Lubeznik; The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York; and Penelope and Robert Steiner.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

ART BEAT: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Presents West by Midwest November 17, 2018 to January 27, 2019

This fall, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents West by Midwest, an exhibition tracing how artists with ties to the Midwest helped shape art and culture on the West Coast where they migrated to find career opportunities, art schools, and warmer weather. 



Image credit: Jerry McMillan Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan (self-portrait), and Ed Ruscha with Ed's 39 Chevy, 1970. Courtesy the artist and Craig Krull Gallery. 

I'll be out for the press preview November 16th, so check back soon for my photo recap at ChiILLiveShows.com. Spanning the early 1960s to 2010s, works by artists such as Billy Al Bengston, Andrea Bowers, Judy Chicago, Anna Halprin, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Senga Nengudi, Laura Owens, Sterling Ruby, and Ed Ruscha among many others, demonstrate the ways that contemporary art practices spread and developed across social and geographic lines. West by Midwest presents more than 80 artworks drawn primarily from the MCA Collection and is on view from November 17, 2018 to January 27, 2019. The exhibition is organized by MCA Curatorial Fellow Charlotte Ickes with MCA Chief Curator Michael Darling.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, against a backdrop of a new national interstate highway system and the lure of Jack Kerouac and Beat culture, the thriving art schools of California were a powerful draw for young artists. Los Angeles' emerging art scene offered the possibility of creative freedom, experimentation, and collaboration, compared to that of New York, often considered the center of art and culture. Communities of artists, many from the Midwest, found a collaborative spirit that developed into social networks across generations and geographies where they attended school, shared studios, exhibited work, engaged in activism, and developed relationships with one another.



Edward Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1969. © Ed Ruscha Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago. 

One of the exemplary documents of this migration is Ed Ruscha's iconic artist's book, TWENTYSIX GASOLINE STATIONS (1962). Inspired by Pop Art and the writings of the Beat Generation, Ruscha (from Oklahoma) methodically photographed gas stations along the historic Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, a journey he made back-and-forth numerous times after leaving his home town for California. He assembled 26 neutral, documentary images into an artist book with no text entitled TWENTYSIX GASOLINE STATIONS.

Artists Billy Al Bengston (from Kansas) and Judy Chicago (from Illinois) met in in Los Angeles where both were fascinated by the use of new materials, such as spray paints, plastics, and lacquer, and other techniques that became central to the emerging Finish Fetish movement. Blending the aesthetics of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Light and Space, Finish Fetish featured glossy, slick finishes that recalled staples of Southern California culture such as automobiles, motorcycles, and surfboards.

In the early 1970s, Judy Chicago brought the Feminist Art Program she founded at Fresno State College to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) with fellow artist Miriam Schapiro (studied in Iowa) producing an alternative method of consciousness-raising and collaboration. Prior to that, Schapiro had collaborated with a physicist in San Diego on computer-aided drawings that would be used for her hard-edged paintings. In her work Computer Series she combined technology with geometric minimalism where the strict lines of interlocking squares rested against a background of atmospheric color, characteristic of much Southern California art in the 1960s.

David Hammons began making his famous body prints in the late 1960s after moving from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois to study art in Los Angeles. The artist would grease his skin with margarine, press his body onto the paper, and add a coat of powdered pigment to the surface of the print. In this unorthodox self-portrait, Hammons meditates on how stereotypes flatten the self.  


Senga Nengudi, Freeway Fets, 1978. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York Photo: Quaku/Roderick Young.

The urban landscape of LA also served as a site of improvisation, performance, and collaboration for artists involved in Studio Z, a loose collective of African-American artists that included Hammons and Senga Nengudi (also from Illinois). Nengudi's Ceremony for Freeway Fets is one example of their collaboration, this one involving a performance under a freeway overpass that was subject to protest by communities of color whose neighborhoods were under threat by the expansion of the city's freeway system.

Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley started the band and collective Destroy All Monsters while attending the University of Michigan, and later moved to the West Coast as graduate students at CalArts. The exhibition features Kelley's large-scale installation, Craft Morphology Flow Chart, which consists of crocheted dolls and sock monkeys arranged on tables, recalling the display of specimens in a natural history museum as commentary on the museum's role in collection and preservation. Kelley went on to teach another generation of artists with Midwestern affiliations, such as Jorge Pardo (born in Chicago), Sterling Ruby (from Michigan), and Aaron Curry (studied in Chicago), who once shared studio space in East LA with friend and former Chicago artist Amanda Ross-Ho (born in Chicago).

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive microsite that expands on the themes of exhibition at: www.mcachicago.org/west-by-midwest.

RELATED PROGRAMS

Talk: Al Ruppersberg with Amanda Ross-Ho
Saturday, November 17, 3 pm, Tickets: $15
On the opening weekend of West by Midwest, groundbreaking conceptual artist Al Ruppersburg and contemporary artist Amanda Ross-Ho use their collaborative artwork, The Meaning of Plus and Minus as a launch point to a larger conversation on their individual practices and careers spanning the Midwest to the West Coast.

Talk: Barbara Kasten Walkthrough of West by Midwest
Sunday, December 9, 2 pm, Free with museum admission
Barbara Kasten, known for her conceptual photography using mirrors, lights, and props, leads an illuminating walkthrough of the exhibition with exhibition curator Charlotte Ickes, discussing her artistic practice and pointing out some of her favorite works by fellow artists.

This exhibition is organized by Charlotte Ickes, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, with Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator. Lead support for West by Midwest is provided by Cari and Michael J. Sacks, Karyn and Bill Silverstein, and the Nancy Lauter McDougal and Alfred L. McDougal Exhibition Fund. Major support is provided by Jennifer and Alec Litowitz.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

OPENING: KANEZA SCHAAL: JACK &, A Genre-Bending Comedy of Errors at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Chi IL Live Shows On Our Radar:

KANEZA SCHAAL: JACK &
May 24 - 26, 2018



Image credit: Kaneza Schaal: JACK &. Image by Amani Ragland.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents JACK &, a genre-bending comedy of errors directed by Kaneza Schaal and starring Cornell Alston that considers the unmeasurable damage of incarceration on one's dreams and aspirations. Through the lens of rituals for entering society, such as prison re-entry programs and debutante balls, this three-part performance explores the lived experience of rebuilding one's life after prison and the transitions and transformations that bridge society's disparate worlds. Whereas the state sees in black and white -- who is innocent and who is guilty -- JACK & focuses on the internal lives of the incarcerated, exposing the complexities and downfalls of how society trains humans to live. With design and text by Christopher Myers and live music by Rucyl Mills, JACK & takes place at the MCA Stage May 24-26, 2018 and is organized by MCA Associate Curator of Performance Tara Aisha Willis.

Building a portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed, Cornell Alston as 'Jack' comes home from working the night shift at a bakery to make a cake for his wife 'Jill.' Marking the return to his own, internal life, Jack whirls through a dance that is part-dream, part-transformation ritual. The play is enacted through familiar forms of expression adapted from stand-up comedy, soul music, recipes, sitcoms, and social dance, with a set that serves as a comedy club, a 1950s kitchen, and a ballroom.

As social rituals both real and imagined play out in these spaces, JACK & resists a linear narrative, offering entry points to broader conversations. Encouraging civic dialogue outside of the performance itself, Schaal, Alston, and Myers led an engagement residency at the MCA earlier this year, sharing the themes of the performance with high school students, educators, and organizers in Chicago, and building audiences with support from Jane M. Saks and Project&.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theater artist. Her recent work GO FORTH premiered at Performance Space 122, then was shown at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River-to-River Festival; the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and Wesleyan University. Schaal received a 2017 MAP Fund award, a 2016 Creative Capital Award, and is the current Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage.

JACK & was co-commissioned by Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, PICA, and Center for Contemporary Art Cincinnati with support from the National Performance Network and NEFA National Theater Project. This spring her new work CARTOGRAPHY, a collaboration with artist/writer Christopher Myers, is being workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and will show at the Kennedy Center's New Vision New Voices. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to various venues globally, including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, Whitney Museum, MoMA, and Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Cornell Alston (Jack) is a long-time member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a non-profit that uses the arts as a springboard to teach life skills to individuals both inside and outside of state correctional facilities. He initiated the Youth Empowerment Through the Arts initiative that launched in Queens, New York, and he continues to work as an arts-in-education advocate. Alston performed and collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on PLEASE, BURY ME at Baryshnikov Arts Center and GO FORTH during a Performance Space 122, RAMP residency. Other performance highlights include One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 12 Angry Men, and the title role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

TICKET INFORMATION
JACK & runs 75 minutes and takes place at 7:30 pm on Thursday-Saturday, May 24-26, with an additional 2 pm show on Saturday, May 26. Tickets for the performances are $30 and are available at the MCA Box Office at 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org.

The MCA gratefully acknowledges Creative Engagement and Presenting Collaborator Jane M. Saks and Project&.

Lead support for the 2017-18 season of MCA Stage is provided by Elizabeth A. Liebman. Generous support is provided by Lois and Steve Eisen and The Eisen Family Foundation, Ginger Farley and Bob Shapiro, the Martha Struthers Farley and Donald C. Farley Jr. Family Foundation, Sharon and Lee Oberlander, Maya Polsky, Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund, Susan Manning and Doug Doetsch, D. Elizabeth Price and Lou Yecies, and Ms. Shawn M. Donnelley and Dr. Christopher M. Kelly. Additional generous support for MCA Stage is provided by Enact, the MCA's performance affinity group. The MCA is a proud member of the Museums in the Park and receives major support from the Chicago Park District. Season support is provided by Alphawood Foundation. Hotel sponsorship provided by Residence Inn Chicago Downtown Magnificent Mile.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

ART BEAT: MCA Chicago Opens Interactive Summer Commons Artist Project, Joan Giroux, Eco Monopolies

JOAN GIROUX: ECO MONOPOLIES
May 1 - October 7, 2018

Image credit: Joan Giroux, eco monopolies in the Commons (working models), 2018. 
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announces the summer Commons Artist Project, Joan Giroux: eco monopolies, an interactive installation that explores the impacts of development on different Chicago neighborhoods and how it connects with larger global movements. Using map-making and games, the artist invites visitors to consider their role in shaping the future of open, green spaces in cities and preserving natural resources. Giroux's project for the Commons is inspired by recent local and national land rights activism, with a focus on the ways Chicago's residents and government define and maintain public land that is threatened by political decisions and commercial development in the city's diverse neighborhoods. Joan Giroux: eco monopolies takes place in the Commons May 1 to October 7, 2018 and is organized by January Parkos Arnall, MCA Curator of Public Programs.

Giroux's practice considers the nature, identity, and ownership of public green space in her work. Early conversations about climate change, especially during the presidential debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, were central to Giroux's first work on public land ownership. Titled Eco Monopoly, the piece was part of a symposium of artists, educators, and environmentalists advocating to save a public park in Yokohama, Japan. The site-specific project took the form of an interactive sculptural board game that visually layered public green space above city maps showing densely populated areas with these open areas removed.

Similarly, Giroux's installation in the Commons comprises a set of interactive stations for the public to play games, using mapping as a conceptual framework to understand place and notions of home and ownership. Through the recognition that citizens have rights to and agency in public spaces, Giroux asks participants to consider their role in the conservation of precious green spaces that have been integral to Chicago's identity and community building.

The installation includes books, games, and iPad content that is provided through partnerships with other local institutions and organizations, including the Chicago Park District.

ABOUT THE COMMONS
The Commons is both a physical space and an ongoing program, bringing together artists, thinkers, and audiences in a constellation of art projects, conversations, performances, interactions, workshops, presentations, and readings that explore culture and contemporary life. It is a place to experience socially-engaged and audience-focused practices, and an invitation for visitors to participate in projects led by Chicago artists. The launch of the Commons in 2017 also signaled the start of a new engagement and partnership program. Civic and cultural organizations who make up the rich and diverse cultural communities throughout Chicago will be offered opportunities to be short and long-term participants in the work of the museum.

ABOUT JOAN GIROUX
Joan Giroux lives and works in Chicago, New York, and Santa Barbara. In her practice, Giroux provides context for community and personal reflections on loss and absence through active play and participation. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago (2017); University of Buffalo, New York (2017); Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Ace Gallery, New York, (2002); and Artist's Space, New York (1991); among others. She has performed at Queer, Ill, and Okay, The Storefront Theater, Chicago (2015); Terrain, Oak Park (2012); Darmstädter Kunstbiennale, Darmstadt, Germany (2007); Yatoo Biennale, Gongju, South Korea (2001); Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin, Germany (1993); BACA Downtown, Brooklyn (1991); and other venues. She is an Associate Professor in Columbia College Chicago's Art and Art History Department.

RELATED PROGRAMS
Opening Brunch and Letterbox Workshop
Saturday, May 5, 11 am
Joan Giroux celebrates the opening of her Commons Artist Project with a conversation about letterboxing and the kickoff to a challenge that asks visitors to extend their experience beyond the Commons to 15 other cultural centers throughout Chicago.

Screening, Fieldwork Collaborative's Public Park
Friday, June 8, 6 pm
In tandem with eco monopolies, the MCA presents a preview of "Public Park," a mini-documentary focusing on the Field House in Chicago's Humboldt Park, where hurricane Maria evacuees received medical assistance, coats and winter gear, interpretation services, and safe housing while the storm ravaged mainland Puerto Rico. Their experience is captured in this documentary-in-development by Fieldwork Collaborative.

Game Night
Friday, June 15, 6 pm
An open invitation to Chicago's analog gaming community to come and share their latest creations with friends, other creators, and museum visitors, inspired by Joan Giroux's Commons Artist Project.

Screening, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Friday, June 29, 6 pm
Jane Jacobs upended the field of urban planning with her 1960 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and was a life-long activist in the fight to keep New York City's public spaces sacred. Jacobs' life story provides a timely example of the activism and ethics necessary to keep cities livable and functional for all. This screening of "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City" is followed by an open discussion led by Joan Giroux. 

Edible Garden Workshop
Saturday, July 14, 11 am
Guests are guided in a project on the MCA's Kern Terrace to create their own edible kitchen gardens.

Talk: Food Activism
Friday, July 27, 6 pm
Panelists lead an open discussion to consider various forms of food activism and guerrilla gardening in Chicago and beyond. The panel considers food's power to save the world and gardening as a radical act.


Lead support for the Commons is provided by Rebecca W. Knight and Lester B. Knight and the Thomas Wilson-Jill Garling Foundation.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

David Bowie Is tickets on sale in July!



David Bowie Is 
September 23, 2014–January 4, 2015
Tickets on sale to the public on July 31. 

Here at ChiIL Live Shows we're lifelong fans of David Bowie (born David Robert Jones in 1947).  So, we are super stoked about the upcoming MCA exhibit--the first international exhibit of it's kind!  Get your tickets early. 



The Archer
Station to Station tour, 1976
Photo Credit: John Rowlands
© John Robert Rowlands

The MCA has just announced tickets to David Bowie Is, one of the hottest, anticipated exhibitions of 2014, begin THIS July. MCA Members will receive special access and are able to purchase tickets in advance, on July 15. 

David Bowie Is presents the first international exhibition of the extraordinary career of David Bowie—one of the most pioneering and influential performers of our time. The exhibition focuses on his creative processes and collaborative work with artists and designers, and demonstrates how his work has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design, music, and theater.

Tickets to see David Bowie Is are $25 which also includes general admission to the museum.

The MCA has extended hours during the exhibition (closed on Mondays):
Tuesdays: 10 am–8 pm
Wednesdays: 10 am–5 pm
Thursdays: 10 am–8 pm
Fridays: 10 am–10 pm
Saturdays and Sundays: 9 am–6 pm

This exhibition is organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Sound experience by Sennheiser.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Stages Sights & Sounds 2013 Kick Off Party Photo Filled Feature #originalphotos



Paige in Full and Kick Off Party for The Chicago Humanities Fest's Stages, Sights & Sounds 2013 at the MCA.   



It was a true pleasure to mix and mingle... 




We were even given a thought provoking "homework" assignment to go on our name tags.   It proved to be a good ice breaker and conversation starter.   We were asked to provide the first theatre-music-art-or event that "sparked" or inspired your love of the arts.   (even if the love of my life did write Evel Knievel)...

We met the masterminds behind the fest... 





And we got to catch a sneak peek at the excellent Paige in Full show... 











We were even sent home with sweet goody bags full of tasty treats from another of our Chi-town favs, Vosge's Chocolate
  






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