Events on Friday, December 5
Friday 12/ 5 @ Reggies Rock Club
In the world of glitchy electronic experimentalism, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, and Autechre tend to garner the lion's share of accolades....
Ongoing Events
Friday 12/ 5 @ Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre
If the classic Christmas stories are starting to seem like cloying guests that have overstayed their welcome, The Seafarer at the...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Museum of Contemporary Photography
Photographer Michael Wolf transitioned from keen observations of Hong Kong in his Architecture of Density series to a...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 65GRAND
The tangible and the ephemeral have a dance in Daniel Johnson's exhibition (curated by Melanie Schiff), which pairs photographs of reflections...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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...
Carrie Schneider: How Not to Fall
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ The Renaissance Society
Francis Alÿs is a renowned nomad who follows a global circuit of art biennials and museum commissions, but in his work...
12th Annual Festival of French Cinema
Friday 12/ 5 @ Facets Cinémathèque
Following our president-elect's lead, we're on track to become mindful world citizens again — there's no better place to start than...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Beautiful young black women level their gaze at the viewer from within Mickalene Thomas' large paintings. Covered with glittering rhinestones, Thomas'...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Millennium Park
Nothing could be more charmingly festive, more seasonally upbeat, more iconically Chicago, than holiday carols sung live beneath the "Bean." In...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Viaduct Theater
A cardboard city has sprung up inside the Viaduct Theater in Roscoe Village, but it isn't the set for a play....
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Peter Miller Gallery
Like the "viral components of consumer desire" she hopes to underscore, the familiar forms of domestic objects are omnipresent but elusive...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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...
From the Arctic to the Prairie
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Rowland Contemporary
For Karen Lebergott, mapping is a conceptual departure point that sets off multiple trajectories. Her oil paintings suggest Chinese landscapes or...
A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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...
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Friday 12/ 5 @ Music Box Theatre
Sergio Leone may have pioneered the spaghetti western with his "Dollar Trilogy," but the Italian director's true masterpiece is the dark,...
Friday 12/ 5 @ Apollo Theater
Whether you love or fear musicals, you can delight in Baby Wants Candy, a fully improvised comedy show with song, dance,...
Friday 12/ 5 @ Museum of Contemporary Art
Joseph Grigely's artwork has a definite visual appeal, but sound — or the absence of it — drives his practice as...
Friday 12/ 5 @ Music Box Theatre
The Flaming Lips' emphasis on splendiferous spectacle and good-natured weirdness is potent enough that a critic recently questioned if it might...
Friday 12/ 5 @ AV-aerie
In keeping with their mission of cultural community building, the good folks at art/performance space AV-Aerie have been staging this handmade-goods...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Graceland Cemetery
Hidden away on Chicago's north side, this secret memento of the city's architectural history is a large, rambling Victorian-style cemetery. Filled...
Friday 12/ 5 @ Corbett vs Dempsey
Rising alongside the Chicago Imagists in the late 1960s, Robert Lostutter is known for his richly rendered, subtly unnerving watercolor portraits...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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...
Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Daley Plaza
Chicago's Christkindlmarket takes everything that is decadent about Christmas and German culture, and combines it underneath a large, sparkling Christmas tree...
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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...
Lincoln Square Christkindl Market
Friday 12/ 5 @ Leland & Western Aves
If you're looking for the feel of a traditional German holiday celebration without the crowd at downtown's Christkindlmarket or the expense...
Friday 12/ 5 @ C33 Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
If artists ran the media, would Fox News actually be fair and balanced? And where would the voices of Sean Hannity and...
Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest
Friday 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ 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 12/ 5 @ Music Box Theatre
Young mother Marcela has never had much going for her. She got pregnant young and ran away from her tyrant stepfather,...
