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ART

MacArthur Foundation Pledges $1 Million For Art Near Public Transit

“Elevated Chicago, which promotes transit-oriented developments citywide, will use the grant to fund local art projects that preserve identities amid displacement of Black and Brown residents,” reports Block Club. “Elevated Chicago will grant $350,000 a year for three years to support public arts projects at developments near transit.” The group promotes “equitable transit-oriented developments citywide [and] received $1.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation to manage the program.”

Gustave Caillebotte’s Work As “Homoerotic Art”

“‘French Impressionism’ conjures a hetero world of frilly images—from Degas’ dancers, to Monet’s women with parasols, to Renoir’s female bathers,” posits Ignacio Darnaude at Out magazine (via Yahoo). “This overly simplistic story has been upended and queered by the exhibition ‘Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men,’ currently at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, and moving to the Art Institute of Chicago on June 29.

“The exhibition’s outstanding catalog explains how, unlike his peers, who painted female images which were easier to sell, Caillebotte, who received a sizable inheritance from his parents, was able to paint what interested him: his bachelor friends, men on balconies over Paris’s boulevards, muscular rowers and sultry workers.”

Designing A $15 Million Future For The South Side Community Art Center

“As the country’s oldest, independently run and continuously operating Black arts institution, the South Side Community Art Center is an anomaly,” reports South Side Weekly. “In response to the Great Depression, the New Deal’s Federal Art Project funded 110 community art centers nationwide. Only a fraction were located in majority-Black communities. [This] is the only one… still in operation.” Despite “disinvestment in arts and DEI initiatives, the historic art center is doubling down on its commitment to support Black artists and Black culture by pursuing a $15 million rehabilitation and expansion project.”

DESIGN

Designing The Quantum Prairie

“Chicago’s high-poverty South Side is not the kind of place big tech typically puts its money into, but the city and the state of Illinois have been building up the Windy City as a hub for quantum computing,” reports Bloomberg Citylab. “‘PsiQuantum envisions a facility that will feel like a university research or business park, not a “high-tech security closed campus,’ says Eli Lechter, a landscape architect and associate principal with the PsiQuantum facility’s designer, Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC).…The plan, which he calls the ‘quantum prairie,’ is intensely landscape focused, and will be planted with grasses, sedges and the wild onion that gives Chicago its name.

“Compared to the fire and fury of the mills, the data hall’s mute architectural character offers its own commentary on the inscrutable abstraction and inaccessibility of the modern information economy, where Ph.Ds tend to mysterious devices that base their value on being able to be, quite literally, two things at once. Meanwhile, nearly a third of residents in the adjacent neighborhood of South Chicago make less than $25,000 a year, and 70% don’t have a college degree.”

Minneapolis College Of Art And Design Names Twentieth President

Dr. Gwendolyn Freed will become Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s twentieth president on June 1. “Dr. Freed brings a deep passion for art and design, and more than two decades of senior leadership experience in higher education, the arts and nonprofits.” More here.

Metra Closes 16th Street Tower

“The interlocking tower dating to 1901 relinquished its control over the diamond crossing of Metra’s Rock Island District and Canadian National’s St. Charles Air Line” this past weekend, posts Trains (with video). “The interlocking is now operated from Metra’s Consolidated Control Facility, little more than 3,000 feet away on the opposite side of the Chicago River at 15th and Canal streets. The latest deletion from the ever-dwindling number of operating U.S. towers leaves Metra with just three.”

Pullman Community Pushes Historic Greenstone Church Reopening

Cindy McMahon is a core supporter of Greenstone Church in Pullman, reports the Daily Southtown. “But these days the church is in disrepair and has been closed for two years because the gas bill could not be paid and the heat turned off.” McMahon and the Pullman community joined “to pay the roughly $20,000 bill and reopen the church. They’ve raised $14,000 from a GoFundMe campaign and about $4,000 more from private donations, the Historic Pullman Foundation and the Pullman Civic Organization. Another donation just came in from Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives.” (No word on any contribution from the utility.)

Milwaukee: Midwest Home Of Timber Skyscrapers

“Milwaukee is fast gaining a reputation as an ideal city to build skyscrapers out of wood,” reports Australia’s WoodCentral, “with work underway on the Edison (a new thirty-one-story mass timber building out of the ground) and plans for a second, a fifty-story skyscraper, ‘which will use as much wood as possible.’”

Former Inn Of Lincoln Park On Diversey Goes Residential

Plans have been shown for the redevelopment of the former Inn at Lincoln Park at Diversey and Lehmann Court, reports Chicago YIMBY. The property has been vacant since sometime around 2004. “The four-story hotel was constructed in 1916 for $150,000 and has been a hotel ever since, at one point even housing Al Capone’s rival, Vincent Drucci. In the 1990s, it was converted into a Comfort Inn, and later rebranded as the Inn at Lincoln Park in 2004… Several failed attempts were made to demolish the building and replace it with a new hotel.”

Two-Story Addition Rises Beside East Village’s Former Happy Village

“Renovation and expansion work on what was once the Happy Village bar is progressing on Wolcott Avenue in East Village,” reports Chicago YIMBY, with extensive photos. The “lot where the demolished single-story portion of the bar [once was] has been [replaced by] a two-story building that stretches to the rear of the construction site.”

DINING & DRINKING

Gus’ Sip & Dip’s “Fab Ham”

“At Gus’ Sip & Dip, the new River North cocktail bar from beverage director Kevin Beary and bar manager Scott Kitsmiller, classic cocktails are rethought with such a laser focus that they can make you think about a drink you’ve imbibed for years in a whole new way,” savors Chicago magazine. “Take the gin gimlet. Typically made with equal parts Rose’s lime juice and gin, here it’s made with gin, housemade lime cordial, and a drop of absinthe that fully opens the drink up.” Menu highlight: “a savory smoked ham dip ($23) and a brown-sugar-glazed pork roast sandwich on Spanish pan de cristal bread with mustard jus for dunking.”

Italian Village’s Ray Capitanini Passes

“It is with heavy hearts that we share the passing of Ray Capitanini, second-generation owner of the Italian Village,” the Capitanini family posts on Facebook. “For decades, Ray carried forward the legacy of the Italian Village. He was a man of habit, high standards and generosity. A true champion of Italian wine and fine service, he was instrumental in building our renowned ‘Cellar in the Sky,’ helping shape the future of the Italian wine industry, always reminding us that ‘hot food should be served on hot plates.’ … He was friends with everyone, and a supporter of hundreds of charities—from music to homelessness to cancer to kids to dogs… Next time you have negroni, a glass of wine (or three), or a cognac, please think of Ray and wish him well.”

Class Act Finds Bucktown Berth

“Class Act grew from a college student’s apartment,” reports Eater Chicago. “Chef Nicolai Mlodinow was in college at San Diego State [and] would cook dinner for… students out of his apartment, thrilling folks with an option outside of the usual dining hall fare. Diners would send him money via Venmo.” When the Bucktown boîte opens in summer, Mlodinow “wants to keep the address a secret from diners until they make their reservations. A speakeasy-style bar… will be open to the general public… along Damen Avenue… Class Act will start with a thirteen-course menu, and dinner will cost around $200 per person, with sixteen customers crowding around one table.”

Michigan’s Got A New Dining Destination

“On the calendar this year at Farrand Hall, named for its perch 250 feet off the small town’s Farrand Road, are chefs Michael Taus of Boucherie, Zach Engel of Galit, Andrew Zimmerman of Sepia, Lamar Moore, formerly of Bronzeville Winery and Lee Wolen of Boka,” locates Crain’s. These chefs travel to downtown Colon, Michigan “for a weekend and take over the culinary operation… Dinner guests purchase tickets for $150-$200 and are served whatever the chefs desire.” Says partner C, “A lot of the chefs that are saying ‘yes’ (to come to Farrand Hall) are just eager to get out of the city, be in a very idyllic setting and to be able to cook in this particular fashion, which is also just not as common as a traditional restaurant.”

Liquor Park Is Back

Liquor Park, “a liquor, beer and wine store that’s operated out of Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Arts Building for a decade, has a new and larger location across the street from its original storefront,” reports Block Club. It hopes to reopen by the end of the month.

LIT

Wesley Lowery Reads Gatsby As A Black Man

“Read as the story of a passing Black man, ‘The Great Gatsby’ is the great American novel,” posts Pulitzer Prize-winner Wesley Lowery, tracing recent interpretations to find cues to such a secret history. “‘Gatsby‘ takes place in a time such as ours, inside an America full of disruptive change and white racial anxiety; a time when the Klan became the most powerful force in American politics by stoking fear of immigrants, Jews and Black Americans who’d spent the decades since the war migrating north and at times, in cases in which their skin was light enough, passing within white society.

“‘If we don’t look out, the white race will be utterly submerged,’ Daisy’s husband, Tom, an aristocratic purebred, declares in the book’s first scene of significance. ‘It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ As Nella Larsen would later observe, Tom Buchanan would have known that ‘appearances (have) a way sometimes of not fitting facts.’ And he would have harbored no deeper fear than that a racial imposter would make him a cuckold.”

MEDIA

WBEZ Union Files Grievance On Chicago Public Media Reorganization

“SAG-AFTRA, the union representing staff at WBEZ-FM, has filed a grievance against the public radio station’s corporate parent, Chicago Public Media. The complaint filed this afternoon claims the organization’s parent company did not practice ‘good faith’ in posting recent job opportunities created in the wake of a wave of staff buyouts,” relays Crain’s.

STAGE

Hell In A Handbag’s David Cerda On Unpacking Emotional Baggage

“David Cerda, the founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Hell in a Handbag Productions, has made a career out of camp—though, as he points out… ‘really good camp is unintentional.’ Handbag’s style draws heavily on Theatre of the Ridiculous (a genre of broad satire and homage that began in mid-1960s New York City with John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company) and is nothing if not self-conscious,” profiles Kerry Reid at the Reader. The company is “dedicated to what their mission describes as the ‘preservation, exploration and celebration of works ingrained in the realm of popular culture via theatrical productions through parody, music and homage.’”

But in Handbag’s latest, “Scary Town,” “Cerda draws heavily on his own family history. And it’s a doozy. But since he’s still Cerda, that history is filtered through… the cute anthropomorphism familiar to fans of children’s author and illustrator Richard Scarry. ‘I’ve always loved animals wearing clothes… When I was little, I used to draw lady dogs with dresses and wigs. I was really into cartoons, and I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was younger.’”

ARTS & CULTURE & ETC.

Tallying The Trump Trashing Of Chicago Arts Funding

“Illinois Humanities lost about $2 million in funding, or one-third of its annual budget, which leaders say could [affect] free programs, festivals and resources for arts organizations in Chicago and across the state,” tallies Block Club. The cuts will affect “free history, heritage and culture programs, including community book groups, tours of landmarks and museums, festivals and resources for teachers and libraries.”

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