Results tagged “artinstitute”

When you’re a dancer, your career ends a lot earlier than most because unfortunately, your body stops cooperating past a certain point. So unless you’re Mikhail Baryshnikov (who is still dancing at 61), you need to transition into a different career. And like many athletes become coaches, dancers become choreographers. However, learning the trade can be tricky so Hubbard Street Dance Center gives its company the opportunity to choreograph for the workshop “Inside/Out,” which goes up tonight.

In an effort to balance next year’s budget, the Art Institute of Chicago is laying off 22 staff members, accounting for 3% of their workforce. The cuts are being made across the board, and take effect immediately; employees were notified on Thursday.

• Speculation abounds that none other than Virgin's Richard Branson may be interested in buying Playboy.
• The Aqua building looks like it's landed itself a hotel tenant.
• The USOC has turned to none other than former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to help them out.

A slightly reduced admission fee increase for the Art Institute of Chicago. After weeks of huffing and puffing from Ald. Ed Burke, the Chicago Park District Board, who sets the admission price, voted to increase adult admission from $12 to $16 instead of the proposed $18 and students/seniors admission from $8 to $10. One added bonus: they also raised the age limit for free child admission from 12 years to 14 years. [AP via WBBM]

• Gov. Quinn's reform panel made their recommendations today, including limits on campaign money.
• Speaking of politicians and money, State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias is now mum about issues surrounding the Bright Star program.
• More trouble for the Toddler: the Cook County State's Attorney's office is now poking its nose into the hiring scandal surrounding Tony Cole.

• We had this pop up about a dozen times in the inbox today: Google Map used to track Swine Flu.
• The Tribune takes a look at the new modern wing at the Art Institute, due to open in a few weeks and the possible ramifications of the new admission hike.
• Speaking of the Trib, Crain's is reporting today that circulation for the paper in the six months ranging from October '08 through March '09 is down 7.4 percent, while the Sun-Times also saw a drop, but a far smaller one of 0.04 percent. The decline for the Trib was right at about the national average of 7.1 percent.

With the 50 percent admission hike coming to the Art Institute of Chicago in a little over a month, Ald. Ed Burke has forced through a resolution (via the Finance Committee) that would force the Art Institute to charge locals a reduced admission fee. Burke has previously threatened the AIC over the admission hike, but the problem is, as the Trib points out, that the City Council has no authority over the Park District Board, which sets the admission fees, so any passage of the resolution would be moot. [Tribune]

          

Have you seen the new wing of the Chicago Art Institute? Yesterday evening the International Olympic Committee, along with city officials and visiting dignitaries got a private, behind the scenes tour of the venerable institution's Modern Wing as part of the Evaluation Committee's visit to the city. Besides meeting with such luminaries of Chicago as Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett, the IOC was greeted by an angry crowd of about 50 protesters from No Games Chicago and Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. The group of community activists met up at the Bean in Millennium Park and, escorted by a group of (not unsympathetic) Chicago police on bicycles, headed south east to the rear entrance of the museum, where media were lined up along a barricade next to a red carpet, awaiting the arrival of Patrick Ryan and other Olympic boosters.

The Art Institute is learning a hard lesson: you don't screw around with Ald. Ed Burke (14th). Responding to the AIC's recent decision to raise admission prices by 50 percent, Burke, along with Ald. Virginia Rugai (19th), has introduced a measure to the City Council that, according to the Tribune, "would block city fee waivers to any not-for-profit Chicago Museum that charges more than $10 for general admission," including cutting off free water. Said Burke, "They are making it almost impossible for the average Chicago citizen to take his or her family to view these Chicago treasures...At the same time they are paying to subsidize the institution, they are going to be required to pay $18 to go into the institution? That doesn't seem fair."

The Chicago Park District Board has unanimously voted in favor of raising admission fees to the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting May 23, admission for students and seniors will go from $7 to $12 and regular adult admission will increase by 50 percent, from $12 to $18. That same month, the museum's new 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing is set to open. Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner defended the unpopular move, saying, "The Art Institute is a world-class museum with rising expenses like any other entity. With the number of free days that they have, it still remains accessible to the citizens of Chicago.'' Those free days include every Thursday evening year-round and Friday evenings in the summer. [CBS 2]

600 S. Michigan Ave., Ferguson Lecture Hall, 10/23 @ 6 p.m., Free

The New York Times Home and Garden section (yes, we sometimes read the Home & Garden section) checked in yesterday on the West Town home of two Art Institute faculty members, Frances Whitehead and James Elniski, whose West Town home is starting to turn heads. According to the article (which is accompanied with a nice slide show), the couple has approached their home like a conceptual art project, and in so doing, they've pretty much set a new standard for sustainable urban design.

At this point, most of us have graduated from decorating the walls of our humble abodes with the typical college posters of yesteryear. The dilemma then becomes a matter of how to display our personal sense of artistic style without succumbing to the availability of “artwork” sold at places like Bed Bath & Beyond, and without dropping vast amounts of money at the River North galleries or the summertime street art festivals.

The double whammy of the Mondays and cabin fever can drive the most stout constitutions deep into their comforters. Here are some things to inspire you to layer up and head out.

"Museum of Modern Ice", was officially unveiled in Millenium Park Friday. Canadian artist Gordon Halloran, who started as an abstract painter, created the work out of large pieces of colorful ice, and according to the Sun-Times, "he and a team of six have been working 12 to 14 hours a day since mid-December to ensure the project is complete [in time for its] unveiling." The exhibit stays up through the end of February.

We all have existing (read: delightfully painful) memories of our adolescent years, so now that your life is all pulled together (ha), why not pay those memories a visit?

This was a good year to be a large cultural institution. If cuts in state arts funding and unstable financial markets made a dent in Chicago’s largest museums, they sure weren’t letting on. The Art Institute remained one of the city’s prime attractions, attracting hordes of frugal visitors on free Thursday nights to piece together Richard Misrach’s disorienting beach photography and William Pope.L’s naïvely charming travelogue, or to enjoy Jeff Wall’s mind-bending photography — his mid-career retrospective was the year’s most breathtaking exhibit.

Liar, liar, half-man half-goat sculpture on fire! Turns out the Art Institute's "Faun" sculpture is a big fat forgery. The sculpture is not in fact the work of French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin but is instead a fake, made by Shaun Greenhalgh, whose family has been running an international art forgery business from England for the last 17 years. The Art Institute bought the statue from a private dealer in 1997, and the dealer...

Tatsu Aoki might be best known for his steady bass playing alongside Fred Anderson and Yoko Noge's Jazz Me Blues. He's also an educator (he teaches film at the Art Institute), founder and artistic director of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, record label head and producer, and a tireless musician exploring the limits of his instrument and himself. Aoki's endeavors earned him designation as a "Chicagoan of the Year" by the Tribune in 2001.

This week Missed Connections entered a big of a segregation war, with a few groups banding together to try and prove that more MCs happen in their respective neighborhoods than any other. (Let Chicagoist give you all a little tip: if your locale is full of arty, emotional, sexually fueled 20-somethings, more connections are made rather than missed. Trust us.)

Today Chicagoist launches "Current Conditions." In this new weekly feature, we'll be taking a look at the most recent health inspections of a series of restaurants on file at the city Health Department, so you don't have to.

Here's what happened while a punk rock choir distracted us from Doomsday: Fall arts season preview season is here. If you didn’t pick up a Reader over the weekend, you can still bookmark their A & E preview online. The Trib’s writers chose their 10 most promising in theater, art, dance, music (rock and otherwise), comedy and architecture. The Bright One previews Broadway in Chicago and upcoming rock concerts and CDs (remember those?). New City...

Although Chicagoist has some photographers on staff, we don't always "get" modern photography. Something about many trendy fine art photographs can seem too "snapshotty" in nature, a bit too sterile, or somewhat void of emotion. As such, we were thrilled to find the current Jeff Wall show everything we hoped for in a photography exhibit: beautiful, inspired, intriguing and unique. After selecting his "Outside a Nightclub" as our unequivocal favorite piece at the Museum of...

While many of you shuffle back and forth from stage to stage in Grant Park this weekend, we thought we'd take the opportunity to show you how it looked about 80 years ago. It's just a touch different today, isn't it? While the landscaping had yet to take its place in 1929, Buckingham Fountain and the general layout of the park are clear. The Art Institute is in place and looks exceptionally lonely, and while...

The city's biggest music festival of the summer kicks off tomorrow, and you can feel the excitement building in the Chicagoist offices. However, we've had to put our cub reporters through some summer festival basic training, since this one blows all the others out of the water in sheer scope and size. The bands are the draw, and the primary source of fun, but there are a few other things you -- and our cub...

Where Do I Take Mom?

A relative newcomer to Chicago's art gallery scene, 40000 (119 N. Peoria) has received a great deal of buzz since its start in 2005. After living and working in New Mexico and Austin TX, gallery owner/curator Britton Bertran set down roots in Chicago after receiving a Master's in Arts Administration from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Bertran made the leap to full-time gallery owner after several years of working in...

Chicagoist loves parenting in Chicago; we’re happy for now to give up the sprawling lawns of suburbia to enjoy all the city has to offer in the summer months. Recently, we discovered a new favorite: “Niki in the Garden,” an exhibition of sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle at the Garfield Park Conservatory.

This week, the Cubs announced plans to build a statue of Ernie Banks outside Wrigley Field, honoring Mr. Cub himself. The new statue will be in place before the 2008 season. While discussions about erecting a statue honoring perhaps the greatest Cubs player ever had been going on for a while, Jess Jackson recently got the ball rolling with a public petition, appearances on the Mike North morning show, and a publicized meetings with Tribune...

Well, we've been hearing about Looptopia for awhile. A big overnight festival held in the Loop, blah blah. We didn't think too much about it. We pretty much dismiss the Loop after 5 p.m. and give it up for lost on the weekends. Looptopia is obviously working hard to change all that. It's going on this Friday through early Saturday morning and since we're going to be down there, we decided to check out the...