Around this time of the year you’ll begin to hear the phrase “the giving season.” It’s the moment when donation-dependent organizations ramp up their campaigns in the hopes of being included in the gifting air that comes in on a wind of mailers, calls, and fundraisers. For the Nonprofit Issue, we thought it would be […]
Author Archives: Kerry Cardoza
Posted inFeature
The Reader’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide
1 Chicago stepping lessons from award-winning south sider Shaun Ballentine of Effortless Stepping. —Salem Collo-Julin Open group lessons Wednesdays at 7 PM, Effortless Stepping Studio, 1850 E. 79th. $20 per person, 21+ only. For private lesson rates or information about having Ballentine do a stepping class at your event, message through Instagram or Facebook. 2 […]
Posted inDance
Man meets monster at the Joffrey
Just before the lights dimmed and the Lyric Opera Orchestra signaled that the show was about to begin, two glamorous older women beside me kept repeating to each other, “We are blessed.” The characters in Frankenstein are not so lucky. In this Joffrey Ballet production, the story is condensed into three acts that use tension […]
Posted inArts & Culture
How much plastic is in Lake Michigan?
Plastic has been found in the corpses of elephants in Sri Lanka, in human breast milk, in fish in Lake Michigan, in bottled water, in Antarctica. You’ve probably heard of the Great Pacific garbage patch, a floating mass of disintegrating plastic between Hawai’i and California that’s estimated to cover 620,000 square miles. Or the statistic […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Look but don’t touch
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” So begins Valerie Solanas’s incendiary, prophetic SCUM Manifesto, SCUM of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fall in love with Chicago’s visual arts scene
With shorter days and a slight chill in the air comes the fall art season, and 2023 has a bounty of cultural offerings. Launching this season is the first-ever Chicago Exhibition Weekend, presented by Expo Chicago and cultural agency Gertie, taking place September 29 through October 1. The event is aimed at getting more visitors […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Finding poetry in flyover country
“A writer of nonfiction discovers their own authority by telling. The good essays tell. They pronounce. They manifesto. They ask and wonder and feint and layer.” So proclaims author Sonya Huber, in a few-years-old article for LitHub, about unlearning long-accepted rules of writing. Huber puts these proclamations into action in her forthcoming essay collection, Love […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Honoring the incarcerated
“Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment,” on view at the Logan Center Gallery, makes visceral the impact COVID-19 had on incarcerated people. The experience begins with a re-creation of a prison cell installed at the front of the main gallery. Designed by Chanton Bun, the “cell,” about the size of a parking space, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The future according to Derrick Woods-Morrow
Water from the Atlantic ocean, the artist’s bodily fluids, lint from laundromats in Black neighborhoods, a musical sample from Tyler, the Creator, and “believing in the possibility of a safe future” are just a handful of the materials used in Derrick Woods-Morrow’s “Gravity Pleasure Switchback.” The artist’s first major solo exhibition, on view at Gallery […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Who gets to stay in Wicker Park?
Alma Wieser has long had a dream. It involves saving Heaven Gallery, the Wicker Park vintage shop and arts space founded by David Dobie in 1997. Dobie is now president of Heaven’s board of directors; Wieser has spearheaded the gallery for the past several years. When Wieser speaks of what the gallery means to her, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The RenBen makes space for the unexpected
After more than an hour in traffic on Lake Shore Drive, I made it to the Renaissance Society Thursday night just minutes before they closed. (The gallery had special afternoon hours for those attending its annual gala, the RenBen.) The unnamed exhibition on view, seemingly organized by Bruce Hainley and Shahryar Nashat, is just the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
An artistic life
“I always said I was going to be an artist,” Kay Hofmann says. “It’s all I was interested in.” The 90-year-old artist has a startlingly clear statement of purpose: to make art, primarily hand-carved stone sculptures, no matter what. And she has done exactly that, creating countless works over her long and storied career, just […]
Posted inArt Feature
Spell casting
A sigil is a symbol believed to have supernatural powers. In Simiya, an Islamic branch of occult practice, letters and numbers are arranged into sigils in order to conjure up metaphysical powers, like the ability to fly or to disappear. Artist Maryam Taghavi has long been drawn to these sigils, and other magic-imbued symbols, ornamented […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best art show on the southeast side’s ecology
It can be hard to wrap your head around the complex ecological makeup of the areas surrounding the Calumet and Little Calumet rivers. Formerly heavily concentrated sites of industry, parts of these southeast neighborhoods are now in the slow process of getting cleaned up, via the green development of places like the Marian R. Byrnes […]
Posted inCity Life
Best abolition-oriented mutual aid project
Chicago Community Jail Support is one of many vital mutual-aid groups that sprung up following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as local protests against racism and police brutality resulted in mass arrests of demonstrators. The all-volunteer effort aims to support anyone being released from Cook County Jail, the majority of whom are discharged with […]