Events on Friday, December 2
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Empty Bottle
Hailing from Brooklyn, Crystal Stilts are a five-piece psych-pop band fronted by Brad Hargett, the newest master of an age-old indie...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Women & Children First Bookstore
Recipient of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Melinda Moustakis' critically acclaimed debut collection uses linked stories to bring to...
Lady Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Daughter
Friday 12/ 2 @ Wicker Park Arts Center
Frankenstein's monster is composed of old, lifeless, and unloved parts, which, when sutured together, create something new and amazing. That's what...
Afraid to Talk (aka Merry-Go-Round)
Friday 12/ 2 @ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema
(Edward L. Cahn, 1932, USA, 35mm, 72 min.) First brought to our attention earlier this year by visiting critic Dave...
Ongoing Events
Friday 12/ 2 @ DePaul Art Museum
The DePaul Art Museum opens their brand new building with Re: Chicago, an exhibition that is crowd-sourced from the experts: Chicago's...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Lincoln Park Conservatory
In the humid Fern Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, Steve Peters of the Experimental Sound Studio has created an immersive...
Sky's the Limit (Weather Permitting)
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Second City e.t.c.
From time to time, a Second City sketch show boldly defies precedent, taking the form in a new direction and staking...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chopin Theatre
Classic falls in love with modern when House Theatre of Chicago playwrights Phillip C. Klapperich and Jake Minton bring their fantastical,...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chicago Cultural Center
This concise display of Terence Hannum's work in the Chicago Cultural Center shows the artist continuing to productively mine the confluence...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
The contemporary complement to Minimalist art-focused exhibition The Language of Less (Then and Now), the titular Now galleries feature work from...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
Place is important to the Vancouver-based artist Ron Terada who greets the visitors to his exhibition at the MCA with a...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Glessner House Museum
Chicago's historic Prairie Avenue district — the site of the 1812 Fort Dearborn Massacre — became known after the Great Chicago...
Chicago Then and Now: A Story by Lee Bey
Friday 12/ 2 @ City Gallery
The Historic Water Tower on North Michigan Avenue is the perfect place to see architecture critic and photographer Lee Bey's Chicago...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
Controversy-courting director Lars Von Trier's latest female sacrifice is Kirsten Dunst in this film about crushing depression and waiting for the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Western Exhibitions
Saturday morning cartoons seem to take a sinister turn in Ryan Travis Christian's River Rats at Western Exhibitions. Maniacally smiling faces...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Todd Chilton is not afraid of color. In his solo exhibition at Rhona Hoffman, the paint of Chilton's geometric abstractions visually...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Public Works Gallery
Artist Veronica Corzo-Duchardt's Neche Collection is a set of minimal, atmospheric prints and print/photo diptychs that retell the story of her...
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Art Institute of Chicago
Architect Bertrand Goldberg's dramatic sculptural forms and innovative engineering have long been recognized as seminal contributions to the built environment of...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Hyde Park Art Center
Usually reserved for the illumination of Grateful Dead posters, the black is used to light fine art at the Hyde Park...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
In February of 1978, Gordon Matta-Clark created "Circus, or the Carribean Orange" in what would be his last major work before...
CROSSED (How Going South Flipped Our Script)
Friday 12/ 2 @ Viaduct Theater
Everyone can relate to the hassles of travel. Yet for those labeled "india, mestiza, negra," — the chant intoned in CROSSED...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
There is a strong sense of humor in the work of IAIN BAXTER& that you can catch even if you aren't...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Various Chicago theaters
Michelle Williams is the best thing in My Week with Marilyn, which is not a great film, but is worth seeing...
You Better Be Listening: Text in Self-Taught Art
Friday 12/ 2 @ Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
One of the hallmarks of outsider art is a nontraditional relationship between image and text — such as emphasizing text's visual...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Russell Bowman Fine Art
For the last decade there has been a mutual respect and exchange between Alabama-based, self-taught artist Thornton Dial and a number...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chopin Theatre
The Hypocrites apply their winning formula of hip deconstruction and dark comedy to the cherished operetta Pirates of Penzance. Gilbert and...
Friday 12/ 2 @ threewalls
Set aside aside some time to dig through all the information available at threewalls' exhibition Voices from the Center. In this...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Gage Gallery of Roosevelt University
While the holiday season has come and gone and the New Year just begun, Lloyd DeGrane's photographs of maximum-security prisons at...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Big Joe's
A drink purchase on a Friday night at this Ravenswood dive earns you a chance at racing glory — turtle racing...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chicago Cultural Center
The mystery and discovery of a child exploring the books and ideas in a large library is evoked in Antonia Contro's...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chicago Dramatists
Latino theatre company Teatro Vista kicks off its 22nd season with Momma's Boyz, a dark comedy, modernized and tailored to fit...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
Split into two exhibitions (with two different closing dates, take note), The Language of Less (Then and Now) looks at the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Steppenwolf Theatre Company
What seems at first like a modern story with some classical references — whiskey, Speedos, and a copy of Homer —...
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Mission
Unexpectedly comprehensive, The Mission's Oye Chica! includes artwork from historical greats like Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo, along with...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Museum of Contemporary Photography
There is no slasher movie-like gore in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Crime Unseen as one might expect guess from the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Second City
Yes, there's an obligatory farewell to Rich Daley in the Second City's 99th mainstage revue, but after sending up politics and the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Sullivan Galleries, SAIC
In the cavernous Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Wolfgang Laib has, with assistants, created more...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Graham Foundation
Perhaps because of the increasing threat to the environment, more and more contemporary artists have been looking back to the Land...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Pop Up Art Loop
Outfitted with goggles on bubble-like bodies, the recognizable characters from street artist Nice One seem to float through their world and...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Corbett vs Dempsey
It is unknown how many artists have work in major-museum collections, give guest lectures, open simultaneous exhibitions in Chicago and London,...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago
An anxiousness exists among people of color because there is still an expectation to "perform," explain and react to one's Blackness...
Friday 12/ 2 @ The Neo-Futurarium
Chicago stage history and classic French folklore meet redemption tales and pantomime in this exquisite, ambitious tale at the Neo-Futurarium. Six...
General Economy Exquisite Exchange (GEEE)
Friday 12/ 2 @ Hyde Park Art Center
The so-called new reality of the post-recession era has been in full effect at Cream Co.'s GEEE, on exhibition at the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Calles y Sueños
In the spare, intimate space of Calles y Sueños, Rey Andújar begins his solo performance with a ritual ablution, segueing into...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
With new curators, new approaches to regionalism, and new methods of stagecraft, the MCA has a serious (and commendable) case of...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Various Chicago theaters
After directing two brilliant, barbed satires, Citizen Ruth and the Preston Sturges-worthy Election, Alexander Payne became American film's poet laureate of...
Friday 12/ 2 @ EBERSMOORE
"Wallpaper" is a loaded word in art, often used pejoratively to describe work that is overly decorative with not a lot...
Friday 12/ 2 @ McCormick Gallery
Blurring the line between installation and sculpture, Bernard Williams' work at McCormick Gallery sits atop a pedestal as a standard presentation...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
This delightfully tense Spanish flick from director Pedro Almodóvar stars Antonio Banderas as the eminent and obsessive plastic surgeon Dr. Robert...
Friday 12/ 2 @ moniquemeloche gallery
Karen Reimer's embroidery work is simultaneously conceptually witty and intentionally banal. Pillowcases, hung from the ceiling like so much drying laundry,...
Dr. Seuss & The Art of Invention
Friday 12/ 2 @ Museum of Science and Industry
The exhibit chronicles the common artistic links that existed throughout Dr. Seuss' career, his unique way of looking at the world,...
Text and Drugs and Rock & Roll
Friday 12/ 2 @ Maxwell Colette Gallery
Voted the "Best Established Artist" this year in the Chicago Reader poll, most likely by himself and his friends, Weed Wolf...
Friday 12/ 2 @ 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/ 2 @ Smart Museum of Art
For almost a year now Chicago has been hosting The Soviet Experience, a citywide presentation of artists working "under (and in...
Write Now: Artists & Letterforms
Friday 12/ 2 @ Chicago Cultural Center
Save some time to read through the packed exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, Write Now: Artists & Letterforms. Featuring many...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Apollo Theater
In the days before corporate behemoths controlled the music industry — yes, there used to be one — some of the...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
Still craving text art or book art after Write Now at the Cultural Center? Head to the MCA's exhibition of Dieter...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Theater Wit
When The Santaland Diaries was first broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition in 1992, David Sedaris quickly went from struggling writer to...
Friday 12/ 2 @ MCA Chicago
The Museum of Contemporary Art has moved to replace its long-running UBS 12x12 exhibitions, which focused on a different Chicago-based artist...
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: From the Wand of the Genii
Friday 12/ 2 @ Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Free Opening Reception: September 16, 5-8pm Fascinated with botany and science, Von Bruenchenhein wrote extensively on his own metaphysical theories of...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Kavi Gupta Gallery
From the artist who brought you "EYE," the enormous fiberglass eyeball that sat next to Harold Washington Library last year, Tony...
Friday 12/ 2 @ moniquemeloche gallery
Facing busy West Division Street and visible through the windows night and day inside moniquemeloche, phrases like "I am a fighter"...
Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917
Friday 12/ 2 @ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema
Tango with Cows explores how artists and poets responded to the tumultuous years leading up to the Russian Revolution through hand-lithographed...
Poetry Presents: All Your Paths In A Single Pocket
Friday 12/ 2 @ Poetry Foundation
All Your Paths in a Single Pocket is a collaborative performance inspired by and sourced from Anna Kamienska’s “Notebooks” as translated...
Wood Type, Evolved: Experimental Letterpress & Relief Printing in the 21st Century
Friday 12/ 2 @ Columbia College Chicago
Wood Type, Evolved defines a global, burgeoning mode of activity in which contemporary artists are producing artwork through the development of...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Links Hall
An annual evening of premieres, Synapse Arts- New Works features original dances by emerging Chicago dance artists Suzy Grant and Samantha...
Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons
Friday 12/ 2 @ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema
Two decades after the fall of the USSR, Views and Re-Views offers a post-Cold War assessment of Soviet graphic arts, challenging...
90th Annual Art Directors Club Annual Awards Exhibition
Friday 12/ 2 @ Columbia College Chicago
A yearly exhibition at A+D Gallery, the ADC Annual Awards competitions identifies and honors the best work of the year in...
Friday 12/ 2 @ Columbia College Chicago
In 17th century Italy, Galileo Galilei is making the discoveries that will place him among the world's greatest scientists. Marina Gamba wants...
