BEST Things To Do In Chicago Tomorrow
The Event Oracle knows ALL the fun things to do in Chicago. Select your date above then scroll down for all the Arts, Entertainment, and Events in my crystal ball...
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Chicago Water Taxi
400 N. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
Chicago Water Taxi is Chicago's river transportation service with seven stops located on all three branches of the Chicago River. Hop on/ hop off at all your favorite river locations with a Chicago Water Taxi All Day Pass. Water taxi stops include, but are not limited to; Michigan Avenue, Chinatown, The Chicago Riverwalk, Ogilvie/Union Train Stations, and more. All Day Passes are valid for unlimited rides for one person for 24 hours on Chicago Water Taxi.
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PURCHASED LIVES: THE AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE FROM 1808 TO 1865
9603 Woods Dr
Skokie, IL 60077
urchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865 illustrates the pain and injustice of the American domestic slave trade, illuminating just how widespread the practice of slavery was in American life, as well as its impact on enslaved families across the country.
This exhibition, originally curated by The Historic New Orleans Collection, showcases more than 75 original artifacts, slave narratives, and oral histories. Through interactive displays, visitors engage directly with historical records by tracking the shipment of more than 70,000 people to New Orleans. Purchased Lives also contains a collection of “Lost Friends” ads placed after the Civil War by newly freed people attempting to locate Illinois family members.
Illinois Holocaust Museum consistently uses special exhibitions to tell stories of inhumanity and resilience, both historical and present-day. Purchased Lives, combined with its related programming, facilitates a broader conversation about the legacies of the American slave trade and their manifestations in today’s world.
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Setting the Stage: Objects of Chicago Theatre
72 E. Randolph St.
Chicago, IL 60601
Design in theatre can take many forms, including costumes, lights, sound, props, and sets, among countless other examples. Setting the Stage celebrates the myriad ways design is employed in stage productions.
Using objects on loan from Chicago theaters, this exhibit will emphasize the diversity, depth, and breadth of theaters in the city and explore how words are translated by designers into a production. See the process behind the final products and learn more about how and why design decisions in theaters are made.
Celebrate the Year of Chicago Theatre with us and discover all that the city’s theatre has to offer through the objects which exemplify the soul of each institution.
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Jonathas de Andrade
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
At once intimate and historical, the work of Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade evokes love, memory, and place. His photographs, installations, and videos often respond to the geography and culture surrounding Recife, the city in the northeast region of Brazil in which he lives and works. He grapples in particular with the promises, failures, and inequities of Brazil’s “modernist project” as the often-overlooked region undergoes rapid and often rocky urbanization. This exhibition will be the artist’s first solo presentation in a major US institution. This exhibition is organized by José Esparza Chong Cuy.
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Atrium Project: Ellen Berkenblit
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611
The latest installment of the MCA’s second-floor lobby atrium project features a mural by New York–based artist Ellen Berkenblit (American, b. 1958). This new work, titled Leopard’s Lane (2019), continues two recent themes in the artist’s painting practice, the expressive potential of cats, and the inherent energy of urban elements such as trucks, stoplights, and smokestacks. For the past several years, Berkenblit has incorporated a striped, tigerlike cat into her works, finding endless compositional potential in a simplified, even cartoonish profile, that remains relatively constant. This tactic of using schematic witches, birds, clocks, flowers, and horses as starting points for complex exercises in color, surface, and space has guided much of her work. Here, that cat has grown into a menacing leopard let loose in a dark landscape, sharing space with a box truck and an abstracted chimney. Honing her craft since her professional debut in the early 1980s, Berkenblit has arrived at a place of artistic assuredness where scale, orientation, and different degrees of completion or virtuosity are all up for grabs, in service to an overall goal of making images that are captivating, dynamic, and unforgettable.
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Michael’s Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures
Chicago Children’s Museum
700 East Grand Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611-3428
Summon your inner child as you peek inside Michael’s Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures. This permanent exhibit fosters the art of collecting and features nearly 100 collections of tiny objects, including miniatures, trinkets, artifacts and curiosities donated by founder and curator Michael Horvich.
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Fragments of a Crucifixion
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611
Artists have used the crucifixion of Christ as a powerful symbol to address suffering and redemption in the history of racial violence in the United States. Fragments of a Crucifixion explores the continuing relevance of the crucifixion, even as our society becomes increasingly diverse in its religious beliefs. Rather than depict the image of the crucifixion itself, artworks in this exhibition offer only fragments—incomplete images and narratives. These works invoke agony and ecstasy through bodily traces and scenes of absence and loss. Featuring works in the MCA Collection, this show is dedicated to the spiritual in art, and to art’s capacity to evoke life and love in the face of brutality.
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Pop América, 1965–1975
40 Arts Cir Dr
Evanston, IL 60208
Pop América, 1965–1975 challenges and reframes familiar notions of Pop Art by bringing together artists from North, Central, and South America, as well as the United States and the Caribbean. Pop América is the first exhibition to unify Latin American expressions of Pop and explore how its bold and colorful imagery, references to mass culture, and representations of everyday objects, signs, and symbols were embraced by artists working across the hemisphere. The exhibition makes a timely and critical contribution to a deeper understanding of this period and the impulses behind Pop Art from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.
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THE COLLECTION: Where Art Meets Fashion
5520 Fashion Outlets Way
Rosemont, IL 60018
THE COLLECTION: Where Art Meets Fashion, the multifaceted contemporary art program of Fashion Outlets of Chicago, will welcome a rotating exhibition by 2018 Olympic costume designer Dr. Keysook Geum to the shopping center this February. Dr. Keysook Geum’s rotating exhibition will feature three life-sized sculptural forms, entitled Enlightenment III, Nirvana in Red IV and NIGHTINGALE. Dr. Geum is an author and professor of Textile Art and Fashion Design at Hong Ik University in Seoul, Korea, and recently served as the Artistic Director for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games in 2018, designing both the uniforms and dresses worn in the opening ceremony. Dr. Geum’s dramatic sculptures of elegantly posed forms embody the fusion of timeless Asian aesthetics and philosophy with contemporary air. They are constructed of paper-wrapped or enamel coated wires, gems, beads and silk. Starting with a central focal point, Dr. Geum works outwardly in a concentric manner reminiscent of a spider. As the artist weaves, twists and bends wire two-dimensionally, intricate forms and unintentional patterns emerge. The natural tensions of interlacing wire push and pulls out until ¬-figurative shapes begin to take form.
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Play It Safe
Chicago Children’s Museum
700 East Grand Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611-3428
Step into the boots of a firefighter and discover a whole new way to Play It Safe. Put on authentic gear, slide down the pole, drive the truck, and put out the “fire.” Practice escaping from the smoke-filled “Get Low and Go” bedroom. This exhibit is too important — and fun — to miss!
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Indigenous Entrepreneurship: Tribal Enterprises & Co-ops
3001 Central St
Evanston, IL 60201
As there are no reservations in Illinois, most tribal based businesses are not well known in this area. While many people are familiar with the arts, crafts, and casinos, there are many other products and services offered by Indigenous businesses today.
The Mitchell Museum is proud to present the latest exhibit showcasing Indigenous-owned businesses, tribal co-ops and enterprises; Indigenous Entrepreneurship: Tribal Enterprises & Entrepreneurs about the expansion of tribal initiatives that support tribal sustainability and the incorporation of tribal values into business models.
The exhibit also covers the challenges that many tribal entrepreneurs face, their unique opportunities based on their sovereign nation status, and the programs that offer them support. Learn about the various products and services offered by tribal enterprises and Indigenous entrepreneurs, from Ioway Honey to buffalo meat Tanka Bars!
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The Mind of a Writer Gallery
180 N Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60601
Great writing comes across as effortless, but it is not. The writers featured here in the Museum spent years honing their craft – practicing, practicing, practicing. As E.B. White once observed in his classic revision of William Strunk’s Elements of Style , “writing good standard English is no cinch.” Transcendent writing is even harder.
This gallery offers insights into how writers think: the daily discipline and habits necessary to get the work done, the deep understanding of language to make the writing sing. At the root of it all is a love of words. The right word can elevate a line or sentence into art…and if the right word does not yet exist, then inventing a new one might do the trick.
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The Photographs of Edward S. Curtis
3001 Central St
Evanston, IL 60201
Between 1900 and 1930, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) traveled from Mexico to the Arctic, compiling a vast store of information covering more than Indian tribes, in the form of 40,000 photographs, 10,000 recordings of songs and stories, and several volumes of field notes. The published result, The North American Indian (1907), spanned 20 volumes of illustrated text, accompanied by 20 photo portfolios.
Most critics agree that the work is an impressive achievement, and that Curtis overcame many obstacles, including difficult field conditions and a chronic shortage of funds, to complete such a comprehensive project. However, opinions diverge about the value and integrity of his undertaking. Do these photos have merit beyond the world of art? In his quest to preserve “vanishing” tribes, Curtis promoted, and helped to shape, the public’s view of Indians as “noble savages.” Because he staged many of his scenes with overly fancy accessories or culturally inaccurate details, some scholars have criticized his work. However, others praise Curtis’ genuine interest in the Native people he photographed, in an era when tribes had been forced onto reservations and children sent to government-run boarding schools that stripped them of their language and traditions.
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The Commons Artist Project: Brendan Fernandes
Museum of Contemporary Art
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611
Brendan Fernandes’s dance-based installation in the Commons explores the ways that society sees—and values—different kinds of bodies. Using language, architecture, and gesture to understand the nature of being seen, the artist encourages dancers and visitors to collaborate and generate new forms of physical language that move and attract other bodies in space.
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Kids Town
Chicago Children’s Museum
700 East Grand Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611-3428
Shop in the grocery store, change a tire, wash the car, and drive a CTA bus in this cityscape built just for kids. This urban neighborhood promotes role-playing, problem-solving, emerging literacy, and creative exploration through fun and absorbing activities. Nurse a baby or relax with a toddler in the semi-private Caregiver Nook. Includes special area for babies and toddlers.
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Everyone’s Art Gallery: Posters of the London Underground
111 S. Michigan Ave.,
Chicago, IL 60603
In 1919, 39 posters came to the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Underground Electric Railways London. The posters, full of brilliant colors and innovative designs, were part of an effort to encourage Londoners to use this commercial transportation system: to visit the city’s cultural attractions, go shopping, attend sporting events, and even venture into the countryside—all by taking Underground trains and buses, of course. Installed outside Underground stations on public streets and on the front of buses that traversed the city, these posters formed a vibrant civic art presence—a public gallery available to all.
