ARIES (March 21-April 19): Greek philosopher Socrates declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That extreme statement is a foundational idea of Western philosophy. It’s hard to do! To be ...

“The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announced William Silverstein as the new chair of the board of trustees,” reports Crain’s. “In a statement, the museum said Silverstein, who has been a trustee ...

The Cleveland Museum of Art has acquired Giambologna’s 1572 “Fata Morgana,” “one of only two marble works by the revered Mannerist sculptor in a U.S. museum,” reports The Art Newspaper. The museum ...

The Newtons were extreme collectors. During the early 1980s, I visited their four-story, eighteen-room house in Aurora filled with antiques. A secret bookshelf door in the basement opened to a ...

My first awareness of the Java Village resulted from a trip in 1989 to The Field Museum to cover the then-new exhibition, “Traveling the Pacific.” It would be wonderful to recreate the village with a ...

Ted Ishiwari discusses a lifelong grappling with racism along with his father's ordeal of being uprooted and sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

Chicago’s Peace Garden is not a particularly peaceful place. Located in Uptown next to Lake Shore Drive, just east of the Buena Avenue underpass, its tranquility is undermined by the constant roar of ...

The true Romani playing in Chicago include: Tony Bellog: A regular performer with Alphonso Ponticelli’s Swing Gitan at the Green Mill on Wednesday nights, Bellog is from a legendary family of gypsy ...

During the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the Fox captured the imagination of Chicago-area residents while liberating the environment.

Lou Raizin's big idea is to create cultural projects in and around the Loop. Many of them. As sports teams ask for subsidies to build singular behemoths, he envisions downtown Chicago as a Cultural ...

It is two-thirty in the morning at Carol's Pub. Most of the other bars in the neighborhood have closed, and customers of all ages—from twenty-one to sixty—file in to order more beer and whiskey, and ...

An accidental visit to the Wilson Men’s Hotel may scare off unsuspecting, if apocryphal, visitors today, but the Near West Side, Chicago’s legendary Skid Row, is no longer “Land of the Living Dead,” ...