Long before Lollapalooza became a fixture in Grant Park, long before Riot Fest and Pitchfork Music Festival and the myriad other concentrations of cultural events that have come to define the city’s warm-weather entertainment scene, there was the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Celebrating its 25th year this fall, the humanities festival has an edge on the music events for many reasons. Among them: Mud levels range from minimal to nonexistent, no matter how much it may rain. Fellow festivalgoers rarely chatter through the event you are trying to hear. Almost all CHF events feature that wondrous modern amenity, the chair.
And where the music fests force you to be outside, standing in a field, the humanities event celebrates people who are — forgive this — outstanding in their fields.
Through more than 100 events featuring authors, academics, scientists and performers, it offers a crash course in current thought — and almost zero risk of tinnitus.
But this year (themed “Journeys”) the CHF has made some changes. It continues the recently established traditions of having, ahead of the main festival, days of programming in Evanston (Saturday) and Hyde Park (Oct. 26). But now it is trying to concentrate the Chicago events (Oct. 28 to Nov. 9) in specific areas to make it easier to get from one stage to another.
This rock-fest-like planning will make it possible (for a superhuman) to attend 45 events, compared with last year’s maximum of 30, organizers said.
And if you’re reading those numbers and scoffing, stop. The festival’s roughly 1,500 members, in fact, average 14 events attended, Executive Director Phillip Bahar said, which may explain why it is often hard to score tickets for the one you want to see. Between one-fourth and one-third of events typically sell out.
There are also more events than ever that break away from the speaker-at-a-lectern model. Those still predominate, to be sure, but now one event is a blues tour of Chicago by bus; another celebrates William S. Burroughs’ 100th birthday with a performance by poets, writers and musicians.
Choosing what to see at CHF, thumbing through the lengthy catalog or using the website to winnow down to your areas of interest, is often half the fun.
Potential highlights could just list the famous and semi-famous people who are coming: Martin Amis, Mark Bittman, David Brooks, Renee Fleming, William Gibson, Jamaica Kincaid, Philippe Petit, Paula Poundstone, Anne Rice, Marcus Samuelsson, Patti Smith, Geoffrey Stone, Jesmyn Ward and so on. But where’s the public service in that?
Instead, here is a handful of events that sound promising, even if their main speaker is not likely to be featured prominently in People magazine:
“Eula Biss: Where We Are From”: Biss, the Northwestern University scholar and essayist, is arguably becoming too well-known to meet the criteria for this list. But maybe not quite yet. Her “Notes from No Man’s Land,” on race in America, and her new “On Immunity,” on class and parenting and immunization, will form bases for her conversation with Katie Watson, a medical humanities professor at Northwestern. 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Owen L. Coon Forum at NU’s Donald P. Jacobs Center.
“The FBI as Literary Critic”: Washington University professor William J. Maxwell shows how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept tabs on and interpreted American authors it considered dangerous, including Richard Wright and Sonia Sanchez. 4:30 p.m. Oct. 26, Logan Center for the Arts.
“La Reunion”: CHF bills this Spanish-language theatrical event (with English supertitles) as “My Dinner With Andre Meets the Inquisition,” a combination that nobody expects. The Chilean production matches Christopher Columbus with Queen Isabella to get at issues of colonialism and conquest. 7:30 p.m. Nov. 1 and 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 2. Edlis Neeson Theater at Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Sacre Bleu”: Contemporary potters refer to a certain glaze as “walkaway blue” because ceramics that bear the color almost always sell. But blue was, for centuries, a luxury color due to scarcity; blue pigment is an extreme rarity in nature. Marc Walton, a scientist with the Art Institute and Northwestern University, tells the story of one color in art over time. 4 p.m. Nov. 1, Fullerton Auditorium, Art Institute of Chicago.
“The Next Vivian Maier”: Maier, of course, was the Chicago-area nanny whose photographs were discovered posthumously and have been perpetually exhibited and battled over since. But how many other great talents died largely unknown? University of Michigan professor Philip Deloria argues for the inclusion in the American canon of Mary Sully, a Dakota Sioux artist working from 1928 to the mid-1940s. 4 p.m., Nov. 2, Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago.
“Chicago to Mexico Bus Tour”: Without actually going all the way to Mexico, WBEZ-FM 91.5 reporter Linda Lutton will tell fellow passengers the story of the steady flow of people from Chicago to small Mexican towns by bus. A veteran of the route, Lutton will be joined by two other journalists who have also made the trip, reporter Teresa Puente and photographer Alex Garcia, both formerly of the Tribune. 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Nov. 8, bus leaves from outside UIC Forum.
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