Rebecca Fons/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo
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ART
Anti-Money Laundering Bill Proposed For Art Market
A bill proposed earlier this month, the Art Market Integrity Act (pdf), “would amend the Bank Secrecy Act to require art dealers and auction houses to comply with anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations,” reports ARTnews. “It would also apply to art advisors, consultants, custodians, galleries, museums, collectors, or ‘any other person who engages as a business as an intermediary in the sale of works of art.’” A press release clarifies that the proposed bill “specifically targets high-risk art market transactions while exempting artists themselves and businesses with under $50,000 in annual art transactions.”
Why Becoming A Therapist Appeals To Artists
There are good reasons “an artist might want to become a therapist,” considers Art In America in a historical trend piece. “One is that the practices involve many of the same skills: soul-searching, analyzing, and embracing the complexities of life that cannot be easily resolved. Another is the flexible, part-time-friendly yet steady nature of seeing patients, which nicely complements the routine of an artist.”
DESIGN
Municipal Innovation In The Land of Robocop
“At a city-owned beach in Detroit, a pilotless vehicle can be seen roaming over the sands as it picks up flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore,” reports The Byte. “The machine is a BeBot litter robot, and it and other mobile bots have become increasingly common signs in Motown, according to Crain’s Detroit Business, as they clear beaches of litter and do other important tasks such as removing snow from streets, cut grass next to highways, pick up food waste, and even provide on-demand charging to city shuttle buses wherever they may be located.”
Major Construction Commences At Chicago And Halsted Next Week
Reconstruction of the Chicago Avenue bridge at the Bally’s Casino site will begin next week, with roads closed and lanes reduced through the end of 2026, reports Block Club. The project “includes fully replacing the temporary river bridge and its foundation along Chicago Avenue. The current structure was installed in 2018 as a short-term fix… Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street will also see major upgrades, including new bus-only lanes on Chicago Avenue, a full replacement of the Chicago-Halsted viaduct, a riverwalk connection under the bridge, upgraded street lighting and protected bike lanes along Halsted Avenue.”
Wicker Park’s Lubinski Furniture Redevelopment Plan Scrapped
“A proposal to add a nine-story addition and dozens of apartments to Wicker Park’s Lubinski Furniture building is no longer moving forward,” reports Block Club. “Envoi Partners wanted to build a nine-story addition with seventy-five apartments at the building, which houses art spaces and galleries. The plan was nixed due to setback requirements.” Before the residential conversion was proposed, Heaven Gallery planned to turn the building into an arts hub called Equity Arts.
DINING & DRINKING
Chicago Restaurants Are Under Stress
Crain’s published a wide-ranging report (free link) summarizing all of the issues Chicago restaurants face in this era. For example, Manny’s Deli “lost large swaths of its customers when hybrid work schedules became the norm. Manny’s is finding other ways to cut costs and stay alive. It had forty-five pre-pandemic employees. Now it has thirty-seven. It opens later and closes earlier. Fourth-generation owner Dan Raskin has changed vendors in search of better prices, and makes weekly deliveries to suburban customers. Despite those efforts, sales continue to trend downward. Profit margins for the eighty-three-year-old restaurant are down. And now, when Raskin orders supplies and ingredients for the restaurant, the platform he uses shows more items subjected to tariffs. He is considering introducing a smaller sandwich to give customers a more affordable option and try to boost sales.”
Kumiko Named World’s Best Bar
Kumiko was named the world’s best bar at the Spirited Awards in New Orleans. The award is given by the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. Kumiko was also awarded best U.S. restaurant bar. View the full list of winners here.
What Eateries Do Chicagoans Miss Most?
There’s serious nostalgia for sixteen lost local restaurants, aggregates Block Club from more than 700 reader responses. The leader? “Hot Doug’s, the famed hot dog—and hot dog-adjacent—emporium in Avondale run by Doug Sohn, who had a habit of describing each customer as ‘my friend.’”
Dining Innovation In the Land Of Meatpacking
“White Castle will deliver some of its Uber Eats orders using Coco Robotics delivery bots in Chicago,” reports Restaurant Dive. “The robots and Uber Eats systems are integrated with White Castle’s point-of-sale system.” Robotics firm Coco said its Chicago operations “have been an important proving ground for its technology.”
Uptown Lounge Bookends The Day
Uptown Lounge, which has a 4am liquor license, “is now open 7am weekdays, serving coffee to commuters heading to and from the newly reopened Lawrence Red Line station,” reports Block Club. Says the co-owner, “It’s kind of a dream come true to be able to do this. We’re hoping we can make this a community workspace and get people in here to drink really good coffee.”
FILM & TELEVISION
Siskel Film Center Programmer Rebecca Fons Headed To London’s Barbican
Hailing from a family of exhibitors behind her Winterset hometown’s Iowa Theater, Rebecca Fons [Newcity Film 50], the Film Center’s program director since 2021, is taking her extensive experience to London, where she will become head of cinema for that capital city’s Barbican Centre performing arts complex on September 1. (As she told us last year, “Essentially, if there is something on screen at the Film Center, I touched it in some way: I saw a film and pursued it, I curated a series around a theme, region or auteur, or I collaborated with and facilitated or supported a partner. There are a lot of spreadsheets.”)
Hands In The Honey Pot That Is “The Bear”
As the fourth and perhaps penultimate season of “The Bear” washes over the culture since its June 25 drop—its succession of privileged moments from individual characters taking over from the details of the day-to-day of making a flailing high-end restaurant stay afloat—commentary continues. Screenwriter Jessica Ellis posts: “The fact that ‘The Bear’ got made, and has stayed true to its own ideas, is frankly incredible and I wish to god more filmmakers and screenwriters were given the room to do that. In the era of immediate series cancellation, that show is a miracle… And then people complain about nothing feeling original.”
At New York magazine, Roxana Hadadi describes how season four’s “Worms,” written by co-stars Ayo Edebiri and Lionel Boyce, could be the best of the series, with “a script that sent Sydney on an unexpected babysitting adventure, allowing her to bounce ideas off her introspective young cousin… offer some wisdom of her own, and deliver a zhuzhed-up serving of Hamburger Helper, all while showing off the historically Black Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville.” At his new podcast, “Cannonball,” Times cultural columnist Wesley Morris communes with chef Samin Nosrat about the show: “I started watching ‘The Bear’ three years ago because I was seduced by a great poster. Every time I’d go into a station, Jeremy Allen White’s silent movie eyes, two joyless planets, would be rolled upward as I headed down” to the platform.
Deadly Prey Brings Hand-Painted Ghanaian Movie Posters To L.A.
Chicago-based Deadly Prey Gallery’s current exhibition, “VHS Dreams: The Art of Ghana’s Mobile Cinema,” continues in Los Angeles at Beyond The Streets gallery until August 23. Beyond the Streets has a history here: “This exhibition showcases one of the largest collections of original, hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters ever shown in a single space—each one a riot of color, imagination and cinematic energy. These works, often painted on recycled flour sacks, are bold, unfiltered reinterpretations of global cinema, rendered with stunning individuality by master painters from Accra and beyond. They evoke connections to traditions of sign painting, agitprop art and street-based visual culture of the region.”
Hi-Fructose has more: “‘Tastes in Ghana have always been much more eclectic than here in the United States,’ says Brian Chankin, owner of one of North America’s last great video stores—the [now-closed] volunteer-run Odd Obsession in Chicago. ‘American action and horror were always huge, regardless of budget.’” Says Ernie Wolfe III of the gallery, “The romcom did not come to Ghana. They like action!”
MEDIA
A Look At Alden’s Failed Bid For The Dallas Morning News
“After a few comparatively quiet years, [Chicago Tribune owner] Alden Global Capital opened up its playbook again,” relays NiemanLab, “when it announced a bid for The Dallas Morning News, offering $88 million. This came twelve days after the Morning News had taken itself off the market by announcing it would be acquired by Hearst for $75 million. Classic Alden! Would the shareholder pressure brought by that extra $13 million force Dallas’ daily [to Alden]? Alden won’t get the prize—because of one particular shareholder… The DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer.”
MUSIC
The Reader Is Skeptical Of Lollapalooza; Why So Little Room For R&B?
“This Lolla lineup is one of the worst in recent memory, a wasteland of frat rappers… Temu yacht rock… bros named Landon… and Spotify wallpaper pop… Live Nation bears most of the responsibility for this mess: Now that the company has made its shows at United Center or Soldier Field so expensive… Chicago’s biggest music festival seems almost reasonable,” writes Leor Galil at the Reader. “Of course, Lollapalooza still has its powerful defenders: If you’re a politician desperately trying to seem cool, a Chicago tourism group that spends too much money devising nonsense slogans, or the conservative editorial board of a local daily newspaper, you might find it in your heart to praise the festival’s economic footprint. But I don’t like live music more because it’s profitable, especially when fans’ money gets funneled to people who aren’t the musicians.”
“Despite Chicago’s rich contributions to R&B and soul,” writes the Sun-Times, “music insiders feel that the style of music has yet to get its due at Lollapalooza. The genre was initially absent from the event, which began as a tour more than thirty years ago before becoming a permanent festival in Chicago in 2005. Although R&B acts have appeared more consistently in the last fifteen years, they typically only account for a small share of each lineup, which leans more heavily toward rock, hip-hop and electronic dance music.”
Lyric And Black Leadership Arts Collective Partner For Recital
Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Black Leadership Arts Collective (B.L.A.C.) will present “Echoes of Excellence: Celebrating the Legacy of Chicago’s Black Voices,” a recital “honoring the profound contributions of Black artists to Lyric, to the city of Chicago and to the broader operatic field,” followed by a fundraising gala at Lyric for B.L.A.C. Saturday, November 8 at the Lyric Opera House. Tickets and more here.
STAGE
Jackalope Announces Sixteenth Living Newspaper Fest
Jackalope Theatre Company has announced the playwrights for the sixteenth annual Living Newspaper Festival. Inspired by the 1930s Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project, “this year’s festival includes five one-act plays inspired from recent news headlines,” with works by Ike Holter, Jesse Jae Hoon, Nora Leahy, Paloma Nozicka and Jasmine Sharma. Plays and casts will be announced in August. The opening night performance is in partnership with the Goodman Theatre, part of the Goodman’s 100 Free Acts of Theater. More here.
Actor-Director-Critic William Burghardt Was Seventy-Two
William J. Burghardt “was a playwright and author who spent a dozen years as a theater critic and entertainment editor for local newspapers before returning to college at age forty-five to pick up a teaching certificate and spending the rest of his career teaching high school English, drama and American studies in Naperville,” reports the Tribune.
Republicans’ Latest Kennedy Center Notion: Strip JFK’s Name, Add Trump’s
“A new GOP bill would scrub former President Kennedy’s name from D.C.’s famed arts center and slap President Trump’s name on it instead,” reports the Daily Beast. “Missouri Representative Bob Onder’s proposal comes after Republicans on a House panel voted last week to rename the center’s opera house after first lady Melania Trump. Without acknowledging that his bill would erase Kennedy’s name from the center—an honor bestowed on the president after his 1963 assassination—Onder suggested that Trump would be a more deserving namesake.”
ARTS & CULTURE & ETC.
Northwestern Faculty Petition Not To Cede Millions, Unlike Columbia And Harvard
“Northwestern University is reportedly in discussions with the Trump administration for a deal that would resolve investigations over alleged antisemitism on campus in an effort to free millions in frozen federal funds,” reports Crain’s. The Daily Northwestern outlines the demands here. The New Republic describes the stakes for the university and the largest contributor to its law school, Governor Pritzker, here.
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