It’ll have Tom Hanks, a session on tattoos, but shhhh ... the Chicago Humanities Fall Fest is good for you.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the fall semester is almost in session.
The Chicago Humanities Festival would probably recoil at its annual offerings being presented that way, as a version of adult education.
And certainly there is more dynamism, more contemporary cultural currency, in the event’s admixture of art explanations, author talks, music performances and issues forums than you would typically find in a set of class offerings aimed at luring the post-collegiate crowd out of its living rooms.
Just glance, for instance, at this year’s list of CHF Fall Fest speakers, who’ll appear in more than 80 events over two weeks, in venues from Evanston to Hyde Park (but mostly downtown), beginning Oct. 27.
There is Abbi Jacobson, the co-creator and co-star of the TV series “Broad City.” There’s Eve Ewing, the poet, University of Chicago sociologist and activist on behalf of the city’s economically disenfranchised. And there is good ol’ Tom Hanks, the freshly minted short story writer bringing his humble superstar self to the Harris Theater, to be interviewed by “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” host Peter Sagal.
We could go on — and will: Jose Andres, the D.C. superstar chef and Puerto Rican aid hero; Doris Kearns Goodwin, popular historian; trans poet Jos Charles; Steve Kornacki, MSNBC election results whiz; rapper and essayist Dessa, talking, and composer Philip Glass, playing; the authors George Saunders, Caroline Fraser and Ron Chernow, all receiving Chicago Tribune literary awards; public intellectuals Jill Lepore, Camille Paglia, Rebecca Traister and Francis Fukuyama (appearing separately); and so on.
(We’ll highlight in more detail a few events that are especially intriguing — and aren’t yet sold out — at the end of this piece. At www.chicagohumanities.org, the full schedule is easily searchable, and stocked with “If you like A, then perhaps B” links to further the discovery process.)
When the events are keyed more to an idea than a personality, as many are, they tend to go deep: the history of Chicago street art, Americans during the Holocaust, the life and work of crusading journalist Ida B. Wells.
There’s not a tax-secrets-of-the-superrich or how-to-start-your-own-handbagline class in the bunch, to cite a couple of adult-ed cliches. And the authors on hand tend to be deep thinkers or literary darlings, rather than the self-help authors you might find holding forth on the secrets of “The Secret” at a Learning Annex. (Spoiler: The secret of “The Secret” is to write “The Secret.”)
Still, though, what the humanities fest does — and has been doing for almost three decades now — is pepper its attendees’ brains with more knowledge than they contained previously. Put another way: adult education.
And people soak it up: About 30,000 have attended Fall Fest programs each of the last two years, the festival reports, with another 12,000-plus going to Chicago Humanities Festival events the rest of the year.
The hunger for lifelong learning is strong, to say nothing of the enduring draw of people’s intellectual heroes. Yes, there are pockets of America where minds close up and proudly stay that way, but those are not the folks you’ll find over these coming couple of weeks in CHFrented theaters at Northwestern, the U. of C., Parker School, Millennium Park and so on.
“There's a civic dimension to this, right?” said Alison Cuddy, the festival’s artistic director. “It's about the power of conversation and it's about the power of engaging with one another through dialogue. And so to me that feels, you know, more and more relevant in a moment when it can feel like people can't talk to one another if they have different views.
“The festival, its very premise is that you need multiple views on an idea or on a subject to really fully understand the complexity of it. So it feels like in some ways we're 30 years old, but we're really arriving in terms of what's needed right now.”
Glancing through the foregoing list of names and topics, you probably didn’t guess that the Fall Fest, the biggest part of what CHF does, is organized around a theme (as are, beginning this year, all its offerings throughout the year).
The current theme is “Graphic!,” implying an extra level of engagement with the visual world, which CHF leaders see as a major influence in contemporary art, business, journalism and beyond.
This does not mean that “The Emoji Movie” will receive a screening, followed by a learned deconstruction (although that is happening with scenes from “2001: A Space Odyssey”). It does mean that many, many of the programs deal with seminal art exhibitions or significant photographic collaborations or new frontiers in mapmaking. (It also means that the Terra Foundation and its yearlong Art Design Chicago initiative exploring the city’s visual legacy across cultural institutions is a main CHF sponsor this year.)
“The visuals (have) become so important to how we communicate and work and even think, and we just have to look around us on our commute at how many people are glued to their screens,” Cuddy said.
“But beyond entertainment, visual forms are redefining how we make art, do business, cover major events, and make sense of the mountains of data and information we now produce.”
So, for instance, the festival features a Johns Hopkins professor sharing his work digitally mapping the life of Billie Holiday and the MacArthur “genius grant” winner Trevor Paglen, billed as an artist and geographer, talking about his efforts to photograph the often hidden elements of the American surveillance state.
“I think we've done a really good job of making sure the themes speak to the times and speak to the conversations people are already having,” said Cuddy. “I think as we've moved toward that we have become increasingly agile in terms of how we interpret the theme and what we're able to bring in through it. And this year it feels very, very robust.”
Cuddy is also proud of the way the festival has moved, in recent years, into specific neighborhoods that are not typically visited by the usual CHF attendee. The Ida B. Wells event will take place in Bronzeville, and this year there’s a South Shore night on Nov. 7.
Attendees at that evening at the South Shore Cultural Center will get three events for the price of one. Included in these is Chicago photographer Tonika Johnson, whose Folded Map Project, bringing diverse sections of Chicago together through geography and photography, has captured the city’s imagination.
The other two events at South Shore treat projects dealing with home movies and with that smallest, unofficial and yet highly significant aspect of Chicago government, the neighborhood block club.
Collectively, said Cuddy, those three events address “this perception of Chicago neighborhoods, especially on the South and West sides, that these are places in crisis, that they’re dysfunctional … What gets erased from that picture is that … there are many people working in those communities, in making them resilient places and developing resources.
“This night is all about sort of shifting that perception.”
Now for the bad news. Tickets for almost 20 of the CHF events are sold out as of this writing, including Hanks, Jacobson and Ewing, but that means 60-plus still have availability.
Here are the promised three more events, in more detail, for which tickets were still available as of midweek and which perhaps give a further sense of the scope of what is on offer:
“Tattoo History,” 3 p.m. Oct. 27, First United Methodist Church, 77 W. Washington St. Body ink scholar Anna Felicity Friedman will talk about the rich, crosscultural lore of tats. She’s the editor of “The World Atlas of Tattoo” and recently launched the online Center for Tattoo History and Culture.
“Manuel Lima: Visualizing Knowledge,” 12:30 p.m. Nov. 3, University of Chicago Gordon Parks Arts Hall, 5815 S. Kimbark Ave. Lima is the design lead at Google and one of the gurus of data visualization, the burgeoning practice of making raw information more comprehensible, and definitely more beautiful, by turning it into something approaching art. He’s also the author of books on the topic including “The Book of Trees” and the new “The Book of Circles.”
“Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything,” 3 p.m. Nov. 11, First United Methodist Church, 77 W. Washington St. Lanier is such a virtual reality pioneer that he is credited with coining the term. He’ll speak with Cuddy about his own relationship with technology and his belief in VR’s potential to enrich our lives.
The Chicago Humanities Fall Festival “Graphic!” is Saturday to Nov. 11 at various locations; most tickets are $10-$20 (less for CHF members) at www.chicagohumanities.org