Events on Friday, November 21
Friday 11/21 @ Various locations
In a film about that favorite of French topics — what's to be done with the family legacy (including, naturally, the...
A Million Tongues Festival feat. Terry Reid
Friday 11/21 @ The Empty Bottle
Since its inception five years ago, the annual Steve Krakow-curated Million Tongues Festival has brought the finest in freak folk, experimental...
Friday 11/21 @ Debonair Social Club
Few are the bands that can appease both the indie elitists and the electronic-music junkies. Part disco, part indie rock, Louisville,...
Friday 11/21 @ The Nightingale
You don't have to be a psychic to channel the queer body politic. Curators Latham Zearfoss and Ethan White use the...
Ongoing Events
Friday 11/21 @ Abbey Pub
Of all the conceptual pranks Camper Van Beethoven have pulled off over their 25 years, nothing tops the band's inexplicable fling...
Friday 11/21 @ Zg Gallery
With an eye to nature as a romantic ideal, Regin Igloria explores how we carry the wilderness along with us, both...
Friday 11/21 @ Museum of Contemporary Photography
Photographer Michael Wolf transitioned from keen observations of Hong Kong in his Architecture of Density series to a...
Friday 11/21 @ Athenaeum Theatre
The singular H.P. Lovecraft casts a substantial shadow over modern horror fiction, and although his grandiloquent tales of "cosmic terror" aren't...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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...
Carrie Schneider: How Not to Fall
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ Gene Siskel Film Center
Originally released to much ballyhoo at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, The Exiles has sunk into an undeserved oblivion over the...
Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ Old Gold Exhibitions and Events
Selina Trepp invited dancer Ayako Kato to respond to Tina Turner's plaintive ballad "Private Dancer" for her latest collaboration. In Old...
Friday 11/21 @ Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place
If you like your holiday entertainment gentle, heartwarming, and family-friendly, this is the show for you. Based on Sally Benson's short...
Friday 11/21 @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Beautiful young black women level their gaze at the viewer from within Mickalene Thomas' large paintings. Covered with glittering rhinestones, Thomas'...
Mike Andrews and Kaylee Rae Wyant
Friday 11/21 @ Roots & Culture
Mike Andrews and Kaylee Rae Wyant's joint exhibition coyly takes the guise of a domestic scene — furniture positioned appropriately, paintings...
Friday 11/21 @ Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
It takes more than a tutorial in Adobe Illustrator to make someone an artist. Extraordinary computer design and illustration rely on...
Friday 11/21 @ Various locations
The Select Media Festival, produced by the nonprofit Public Media Institute, presents a week of experimental new-media shenanigans at Bridgeport's Co-Prosperity...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ Music Box Theatre
Ashes of Time may have been an instant wuxia classic when it was released in 1994, but Hong Kong director Wong...
Friday 11/21 @ Apollo Theater
Whether you love or fear musicals, you can delight in Baby Wants Candy, a fully improvised comedy show with song, dance,...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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...
Smashing Pumpkins 20th Anniversary Tour
Friday 11/21 @ Various locations
Some of us work out our issues in group therapy, benefiting from the wisdom of our peers. Those who can afford...
Friday 11/21 @ Donald Young Gallery
In Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's current exhibition, dusty cultural icons like the atomic bomb and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome are reborn as sleek...
Friday 11/21 @ 65GRAND
The tangible and the ephemeral have a dance in Daniel Johnson's exhibition (curated by Melanie Schiff), which pairs photographs of reflections...
Friday 11/21 @ Chicago Cultural Center
For years, the photographic collection of Chicago's LaSalle Bank has been one of the small number of corporate art collections to...
Friday 11/21 @ Rowland Contemporary
For Karen Lebergott, mapping is a conceptual departure point that sets off multiple trajectories. Her oil paintings suggest Chinese landscapes or...
Friday 11/21 @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
English actress Kristin Scott Thomas possesses a bristly elegance that has always restricted her options in English-language films. So it makes...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ Links Hall
Proposing himself as a kind of Tim Gunn for the queer performance-art set, Tim Miller took a break from his life...
Friday 11/21 @ City Gallery
Scott Fortino, a Chicago cop who used his insider's access to photograph jails, jury rooms, and public schools for his book...
Friday 11/21 @ Wilmette Theatre
Fans of coming-of-age stories like Catcher in the Rye and The Graduate should enjoy new indie film Humboldt County, the tale...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ 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...
Friday 11/21 @ 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 11/21 @ Landmark Renaissance Place Cinema
Not everyone adores the sprawling stories-within-stories that identify Charlie Kaufman's screenplays (e.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John...
Friday 11/21 @ David Weinberg Gallery
Conventional wisdom has it that art and science don't get along. For years, artists/twins Mike and Doug Starn have been gracefully...
Friday 11/21 @ AMC Loews Pipers Alley 4
A pitch-perfect suspense film from Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In is that rare bird: a chiller with...
Friday 11/21 @ Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Sure, many people find the holidays depressing, but at least you're not a functionally alcoholic Dublin undertaker whose estranged daughter shows...
Friday 11/21 @ Chicago Cultural Center
Foodies have always known that locally-grown, seasonal ingredients are fresher, tastier, and more nutritious. But facing an economic crisis and climate...
From the Arctic to the Prairie
Friday 11/21 @ Golden
Helsinki-born, Spain-based Riiko Sakkinen's work appeals to hungry global palates, offering a witty update of the pop-art aesthetic. Stealing source materials...
Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Childrens Books
Friday 11/21 @ 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...
Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest
Friday 11/21 @ 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...
A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant
Friday 11/21 @ A Red Orchid Theatre
A bunch of children singing carols about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard sounds like the recipe for an episode of South...
Friday 11/21 @ Museum of Contemporary Art
Her art may blend in with Las Vegas-strip-style lighted advertisements, but Jenny Holzer's brightly colored Truisms and arresting catchphrases are unlike...
Friday 11/21 @ Viaduct Theater
A cardboard city has sprung up inside the Viaduct Theater in Roscoe Village, but it isn't the set for a play....
