UChicago Arts

On the fourth floor of the New Museum, a Hammond B3 organ waits to be played, keys in want of fingers. Thick black cables connect the instrument to a set of seven Leslie speakers hung on the walls—arteries made to pump the room full of vital sound. The organ and the speakers gesture toward the heart of Black music and religious intonation. Together, they form Theaster Gates’s A Heavenly Chord (2022), a ready-made sculpture and—occasionally on Saturdays—an active instrument. Read more

“Monochrome Multitudes” at the Smart Museum reimagines the ways and methods in which color and monochrome can be translated to the public. Red can be seen as rage, blue can be gendered and all color can be heard. The exhibition groups 120 works various sections and alcoves around similar themes. One grouping is self-reflective, another about monochrome sound, another looks at urban spaces, and one focuses on the body. While the themes are the same, the works range in material, color, context or history. Weavings, sculpture, painting and video are among the mediums used by the global artists in the show. Read more

On July 27th, 1919, Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old boy from Chicago’s South Side, was cooling off in the waters of Lake Michigan near 31st Street when he drifted into a whites only section of the segregated lakefront. Having crossed an invisible racial line, a group of white beachgoers began throwing stones at Williams, causing him to drown. Williams’ murder – and the subsequent refusal by a white police officer to arrest the murderer – set off a week of shootings, arson and beatings in Chicago, in which thousands of homes were destroyed, more than 500 people were injured and nearly 40 killed - the victims of which were mostly Black. Read more

Adrienne Brown, associate professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and in the College, has been appointed director of the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life (APL) initiative, a dynamic hub of exploration, expression and exchange on the South Side of Chicago that centers people of color and fosters neighborhood vibrancy through the arts. Read more

First impressions can be deceptive. When Miuccia Prada initially encountered Theaster Gates at the jazz club Ronnie Scott’s in London, Gates was performing on stage with his band The Black Monks. “I thought, my God! He looks so intimidating and unreachable,” says the co-chief executive officer and co-creative director of Italian fashion house Prada, who is also the creative director of Miu Miu. Gates, a multidisciplinary artist whose oeuvre spans sculpture, performance, installation, space theory and land development, laughs at the memory: “We had been rehearsing so much I had lost my voice. I was concentrating on making sure the notes that came out were good.” Read more