Events on Friday, October 17
Friday 10/17 @ Metro
You don't need to be a mirror-ball diva or a platform prince to know that the one thing neo-disco needs more...
Friday 10/17 @ Logan Square Auditorium
After nearly five years of silence, everyone's favorite German-bred electro-acoustic outfit makes its way back to America. On this year's The...
Ongoing Events
Friday 10/17 @ Stephen Daiter Gallery
In 2002, after finishing his breakthrough series Sleeping by the Mississippi, photographer Alec Soth traveled to Bogotá, Columbia, to adopt a...
Friday 10/17 @ Northeastern Illinois University Fine Arts Center Gallery
Fusing found objects and his own custom-made creations, Mark Porter produces one-of-a-kind pieces that gradually transform themselves — and the gallery...
Friday 10/17 @ Apollo Theater
Whether you love or fear musicals, you can delight in Baby Wants Candy, a fully improvised comedy show with song, dance,...
Friday 10/17 @ Kavi Gupta Gallery
Josh Azzarella's photographs and videos smolder with an eerie silence and a sense of emptiness. They are also faintly, unnervingly familiar....
Friday 10/17 @ Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre
Novelist Haruki Murakami may be our preeminent purveyor of dreamlike narratives, fraught with surrealist tremors, pop-culture curios, and the echoes of...
Friday 10/17 @ Smart Museum of Art
China's Three Gorges Dam has become a dark muse for many artists. One of the largest engineering efforts in history, it...
Friday 10/17 @ Chicago Art Department
Turning your artistic influences into zombies is either a Halloween-flavored Oepidal dream or a curiously macabre motion for their immortality. In...
Friday 10/17 @ Chicago Cultural Center
Can a chair be more than just a place to sit and rest your feet? In a modern-art exhibit, the answer...
Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest
Friday 10/17 @ The Arts Club of Chicago
Though it's cited as a seminal example of installation art, Marcel Broodthaers imagined his late work Décor: A Conquest (1975) as...
Friday 10/17 @ Museum Campus
Just admit it, you've ogled the sleek modern houses you pass on certain streets and wished you could peek inside. The...
Friday 10/17 @ The Art Institute of Chicago
A canonized master of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy includes a staggering number of great images, as well as his influential idea...
Friday 10/17 @ Lakeshore Theater
Fans of the bizarre, the occult, and the avant-garde gather tonight as the Residents kick off their first national tour in...
Friday 10/17 @ Donald Young Gallery
Rodney Graham's latest exhibition features both a kinetic op-art sculpture modeled after a Black Sabbath stage set and a room full...
Joe DeNardo and Aaron Henderson
Friday 10/17 @ Normal Projects
Normal Projects is a new salon-style apartment gallery that spotlights video and works on paper. The space hosts two-person shows by...
Friday 10/17 @ Chicago History Museum
In this glittering costume exhibition, the Chicago History Museum presents a rarely seen collection of haute couture fashions designed for the...
Discarded Paintings by Gifted Amateurs
Friday 10/17 @ Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Whereas most found-art exhibitions make aesthetic objects out of forgotten knick-knacks, the focus of this exhibition is, more literally, fine art...
Friday 10/17 @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
In Religulous, veteran comedian and free thinker Bill Maher travels the world, visiting a Holy Land theme park in Florida, London's...
Friday 10/17 @ Graham Foundation
Labyrinthine hedges of gleaming, die-cast metal fill the ground floor of the Graham Foundation's Prairie-style mansion, like viral arabesques from a...
Friday 10/17 @ Navy Pier
The Dark Knight might go down as Heath Ledger's final film, but it would be a shame if the actor's tragic...
Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others
Friday 10/17 @ Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
Hoping to eliminate stereotypes about Jewish people — they all subsist on gefilte fish and bagels with lox, for example —...
Friday 10/17 @ Museum of Contemporary Art
First performed in 2004, this adaptation of Rite of Spring is an expressionist dance-poem of modern barbarism. It's "simple" in the...
New Catalogue: Sergio Vieira de Mello: Rally Paris-Darfur
Friday 10/17 @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Artist collaborative New Catalogue often operates like a stock-photo agency or a design company in order to explore fictional imagery and...
Friday 10/17 @ 65GRAND
Although Ian Pedigo makes raw-feeling sculptures out of humble materials — cardboard, plastic, scraps of wood — they reflect a certain...
Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Childrens Books
Friday 10/17 @ The Newberry Library
The Newberry Library's celebrated collection boasts copies of Shakespeare's first folio and the Popol Vuh, but a new exhibition showcases a...
Friday 10/17 @ threewalls
With viscous rivers of paint and delicate black lines, Amy Mayfield conjures phantasmagorical realms that are sensuous and chaotic, sinister yet...
Chicago International Film Festival
Friday 10/17 @ Various locations
Now in its 44th year, the Chicago International Film Festival offers a sneak preview of the most anticipated movies of the...
Friday 10/17 @ Tony Wight Gallery
Should anyone need criteria by which to measure the success of emerging artists, one could investigate whether they had their first...
Friday 10/17 @ Zg Gallery
With an eye to nature as a romantic ideal, Regin Igloria explores how we carry the wilderness along with us, both...
Around the Coyote Fall Arts Festival
Friday 10/17 @ Plumbers Hall
A neighborhood operation founded 19 years ago, the Around the Coyote Festival has grown into a grander-scale platform for emerging artists....
Friday 10/17 @ City Gallery
Bill O'Donnell's color photographs offer a world of spooky little vacation homes, troubling the eye with mixed-up scales and half-focused views....
Friday 10/17 @ Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago
Jack Kerouac's On the Road — the landmark work of the Beat Generation — is a thrilling, chaotic, Benzedrine-soaked whirl of...
Friday 10/17 @ Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
Escape the roaring cars on Lake Shore Drive and the crowds at Lincoln Park Zoo by slipping through the unobtrusive entrance...
Carrie Schneider: How Not to Fall
Friday 10/17 @ moniquemeloche gallery
The northern landscape is a compelling, mysterious presence in Carrie Schneider's new photographs and films, made mostly in Finland this past...
Friday 10/17 @ Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary
If nothing else, taking up birdwatching gives you a convenient excuse to bring terms like "Magnificent Frigatebird" and "Purple Gallinule" into...
Friday 10/17 @ The Renaissance Society
Francis Alÿs is a renowned nomad who follows a global circuit of art biennials and museum commissions, but in his work...
Friday 10/17 @ The Second City e.t.c.
From the director of the recent hit Between Barack and a Hard Place comes another election-season winner, Campaign Supernova!, performed by...
Friday 10/17 @ Loyola University Museum of Art
Whether critiquing economic injustice, spotlighting social issues, satirizing public officials, or inspiring change, 20th-century printmaking has a long and storied history...
Friday 10/17 @ Golden
In personal memorabilia, frozen grins tend to dominate — smiling is the Pavlovian response to the appearance of a lens. Chicagoan...
Scavenger Constructs: Site-Specific Sculptures
Friday 10/17 @ Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans turned mass-produced objects into meaningful art. With this transmutability in mind, Scavenger Constructs features five artists...
Friday 10/17 @ Packer Schopf Gallery
In his latest exhibition exploring the phenomenon of Internet identities, painter Doug Smithenry slyly asks "Are you a nobody?" He calls...
