On a sunny Saturday, amidst the live music, water balloon fights, and petitions at Woodlawn’s Art in Action festival, four University of Chicago students were manning a table, armed with markers and blank maps of Chicago, and encouraging passersby to make their own maps. Their idea was to produce a collection of maps that would chart people’s impressions of where the neighborhood of Hyde Park begins and ends. The mapping society provided three blank maps: one of Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Kenwood, and Washington Park; another of the greater South Side, extending south to 95th, further west, and north through Bronzeville; and a map of the entire city of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

With a straw hat on his head and a crêpe stand that was once displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zak Arctander is hard to miss. Every Saturday, the vendor at the 61st Street Farmers Market turns four simple ingredients—flour, milk, eggs, and water—into golden, steaming, oh-so-tasty crêpes. Read the rest of this entry »

In the center of the dark space a woman in black held a silver bowl. Around her stood a circle of seven women in simple dresses, three in dark purple, four in pale blue. Seated around them on the wooden floor of the University of Chicago’s Bartlett Arts Rehearsal Space, a cramped crowd of about a hundred watched quiet and captivated. The woman in black split the circle and moved around the outside. She reached into the bowl and brought out bread, handing pieces to the dancers, who spread themselves across the few feet of the floor to distribute pieces to the crowd around them. Read the rest of this entry »

(Temple Shipley)

Benjamin Murphy wedges his cigarette butt into the gray planks of a picnic table and squints, surveying his sanctuary. In the fading light of a late-May Thursday afternoon, the 65th and Woodlawn Community Garden resembles a living patchwork quilt—some plots in this roughly 1000 square-foot space are lined with misshapen bricks, others are freestanding mounds of soil punctuated by the occasional wire trellis, tree branch, or toiling gardener. Murphy laughs, “You can’t gang-bang on this corner.” Read the rest of this entry »

Acclaimed art critic and film director Amei Wallach stood in front of an audience of about 30 last Thursday at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center to present clips from her work in progress, “How to Make a Paradise.” It was the first time Wallach had shown her clips publicly, and viewers were more than happy to give feedback on what they had seen.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the internationally renowned Russian conceptual artists, married couple, and the subjects of the film, were seeing it for the first time as well. Read the rest of this entry »

(Mehveş Konuk)

Few opportunities arise for representatives from rival nations to ask one another to please pass the orange juice. On Friday May 14th, ambassadors representing 44 nations met at the University of Chicago’s Harper Memorial Library for breakfast and conversation. The ambassadors were here as part of the U.S. State Department’s “Experience America—Chicago” tour, which was meant to give diplomats and their spouses the opportunity to learn about America’s cities and communities outside of Washington, DC. In past years tours have been made to New York City, California, Florida, and Dallas. This year, from May 12th through May 14th U.S. Chief of Protocol Capricia Penavic Marshall took the international representatives to the Windy City’s classic tourist attractions. When asked how many stops were made on the tour, one ambassador laughed and replied, “Too many to count!” Stops along the trip included the Wrigley factory, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Art Institute of Chicago. The University of Chicago was chosen due to its connection with President Barack Obama and its academic prowess. Read the rest of this entry »

A woman in a black dress and a man in a black tie and white-collared shirt stood on stage. Black binders in hand, they read from a collection of letters, diary entries, philosophical musings, and poetry from diverse authors. Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, Islamic mystic Ibn al-Arabi, and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk were all spotlighted in little more than half an hour.

“Voices of the Middle Eastern City” was performed on May 14th at the University of Chicago as part of the 25th annual Middle Eastern History and Theory Conference. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 20th, 1936, on the gravel track of the old Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Jesse Owens ran 100 yards in 9.55 seconds, and for seventy three years, ten months and twenty eight days, no one who stepped on that track ran any faster. Owens went on to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he won four gold medals, set three world records and made Adolf Hitler’s claims about the natural superiority of the Aryan race look ridiculous. Read the rest of this entry »