Blog — In Practice: The Official University of Chicago Arts Blog

Pope.L, renowned interdisciplinary artist and UChicago scholar, 1955‒2023

Professor remembered for creating ‘humane, generous, combative’ art that is ‘among the most important bodies of work in the 21st century’

Logan CenterJanuary 26, 2024

Lush. Green. Public.

Ten years ago, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago began its stewardship of the Arts Block on Garfield Boulevard in Washington Park. Now, the launch of its Arts Lawn marks a new step in community-centered artistic space. Occupying a set of formerly undeveloped lots next to the Green Line Performing Arts Center, the Arts Lawn is an opportunity for the expansion of ambitious outdoor arts programming and community reclamation of public green space.

Logan Center Exhibitions: ‘Makes Me Wanna Holla’ puts injustices of carceral system on display

Logan Center Exhibitions presents “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment,” open through Sept. 10 at the Logan Center for the Arts. The exhibition explores the injustices of the carceral system through the voices and art of those who have experienced them firsthand.

Ten Years of Collaboration, Community, and Creativity

The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is a living building. On any given day, the halls are full of every permutation of artistic practice—a double bass preparing for a concert on the Lower Level; community members flocking through the doors for a panel in the Performance Hall; a jazz concert in Café Logan; student circus performers perfecting acrobatics in Performance Lab 701; an open mic in the Performance Penthouse; countless classes and meetings and practices and rehearsals happening on all levels, in all spaces.

UChicago director and dramaturg is making classic theater feel fresh

Gabrielle Randle-Bent didn’t start off as a theater kid. The Texas native took AP science classes and grew up playing volleyball and basketball. But bad asthma kept her off the court and brought her to the stage.

TheatreGuest UserMay 1, 2023Theater, Court Theatre, Dramaturgy

The Gospel According to Court Theatre

Learn more about Court Theatre’s production of The Gospel at Colonus, its next installment in the Oedipus Trilogy, opening May 2023.

Performing, TheatreGuest UserMay 1, 2023Theater, Court Theatre, Dramaturgy

The Blues in Community & Conversation: an interview with Matthew Skoller

Matthew Skoller sat down with Jess Hutchinson, Editorial Content Manager to talk about the April 1st Blue Geographies event at Logan - and about the shared histories and false divisions driven by corporate greed and white supremacy culture in American music.

Made at Logan, MusicGuest UserMarch 30, 2023Blues Music, Blues, Logan Center, Matthew Skoller, Interview

“Sans Pareil” - Unparalleled: a new cohort of artists joins the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project

Jess Hutchinson, Editorial Content Manager for the Logan Center and UChicago Arts, sat down virtually with Princess Mhoon, Director of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project, who divides her time between Chicago and Washington D.C., for a conversation about her history, perspective, and why the CBDLP is a vital force in Chicago’s contemporary artistic landscape.

Dance, Performing, Community ArtsGuest UserMarch 25, 2023Community, Dance, Logan Center, CBDLP, Interview

Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts celebrates past and future of Black women’s filmmaking

As Elizabeth Myles’s, AB’20, sizzle reel played, sighs of recognition, claps and cheers rang out at each clip. Many of the filmmakers were in the audience. “I’m in tears because you’ve put all our films in conversation with each other,” said festival co-organizer and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon.

Film, Media and Cinema Studies, Civic EngagementLogan CenterMarch 16, 2023Film, Festival, Symposium, Faculty, ne

Elegant & messy, revelatory & unendingly mysterious:

The psychoanalytic technique of dreamwork, says Gray Center Director and executive editor of Portable Gray Seth Brodsky, “is a kind of work that’s much weirder and more randomized and less censored than what goes into a lot of art-making. But nonetheless, there’s a will to create, and a will to assemble, and to cipher and to displace, or to condense, to create new metaphors.”

Ruth Duckworth’s Masterpiece “Clouds Over Lake Michigan” Joins UChicago’s Collection of Public Art

Then the resulting work, Clouds Over Lake Michigan, is installed in its new home in the first-floor reading room of the Joseph Regenstein Library on the University of Chicago’s campus in 2023, the acquisition will be a homecoming of sorts: while the piece hasn’t been seen at UChicago before, its creator spent many years on campus, making important contributions to her field and the University. The mural comes to UChicago thanks to a generous gift from Cboe Global Markets.

Exhibitions, Visual Arts, Public ArtGuest UserFebruary 21, 2023public art, Ruth Duckworth, Clouds Over Lake Michigan

“Everyone is welcome”: Booth School’s world-famous art collection

“I’m going to show you a whole sequence of things that people now think of as art,” Canice Prendergast says to a group of staff, students, faculty, and arts appreciators in the lobby of the Harper Center. The regular tour led by the W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics is so well-attended that spots are raffled off, and with good reason—it’s a rare opportunity to explore the world-renowned art on display at the Booth School with the person perhaps most responsible for its presence in the building.

Faculty, Visual ArtsEllen WieseJanuary 17, 2023Visual Arts, Booth School of Business, Faculty

Dinner & A Show: ArtsPass Exclusive takes students behind the scenes at Goodman Theatre

“What brings a molecular engineering student to the theater?” We’re on a yellow school bus heading north from the Logan Center on the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus toward the sparkly downtown lights. It turns out that Livia, the first-year student who’s studying how molecules affect each other is interested in how humans do that, too.

Guest UserDecember 8, 2022

Class immerses students in monochromatic art exhibition

A group of students sit in a white room filled with white art. The class clusters around a piece by Robert Ryman, who painted almost exclusively white paintings. Seated beneath the painting, co-teachers, Prof. Christine Mehring and Orianna Cacchione, gesture upward, prompting students to look closely. Look at the brush strokes. Is this really all white? What does the white allow you to see more of?

Exhibitions, Faculty, Visual ArtsGuest UserDecember 1, 2022Smart Museum of ArtArts, Visual Arts, Smart Museum

Eve L. Ewing’s1919 brings story of Chicago race riots to the stage

During an Oct. 12 conversation with WBEZ’s Sasha-Ann Simons at UChicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, Ewing emphasized that learning about an important historical event for the first time isn’t a cause for shame. “It is a moment to ask yourself: ‘Who is invested in your not knowing? What systems are perpetuated by your not knowing?’”

Since 2011, the APL-CSRPC Artists-in-Residence program has centered Black and Brown artists working on Chicago’s South Side

All That Light celebrates the AIRs program. Originally conceived by Prof. Theaster Gates—himself an acclaimed artist—the Artists-in-Residence program is a joint effort between UChicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) and Arts + Public Life (APL), a community-centered arts organization based in Washington Park.