McDonald’s, 2011/Photo: Ray Pride
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ART
Anonymous Pranksters Push Tale Of The Man In The Bean
An anonymous organization “claims there is a full-grown man living inside the Bean,” reports the Sun-Times. “You can see him—when the sun hits the Bean’s silver skin in just the right way, they say. The so-called Man in Bean Coalition claims Anish Kapoor, the British sculptor responsible for one of the city’s now best-loved attractions, ‘stole a baby and put that Baby inside of The Bean’… As hundreds of thousands of Lollapalooza fans descended on Chicago,” flyers were passed out “demanding the release of the now-grown man inside. They also shared videos online, including some that received hundreds of thousands of likes.”
Portable Gray Launches Issue Fourteen, “Pope.L: The Chicago Years”
Gray Chicago will host a launch event for Portable Gray’s fourteenth issue, “Pope.L: The Chicago Years,” a limited hardcover edition of the journal “dedicated to remembering and considering the life and work of artist Pope.L, with a particular emphasis on his time in Chicago (2010-2023).” The event is Wednesday, August 27, and “will feature a panel discussion with contributors Mami Takahashi and Theaster Gates, live DJ performance by contributor Dieter Roelstraete and issues available for purchase.” Register here.
A New Detroit Art Fair Hosted In An Albert Kahn-Designed Building
“Detroit Warehouse: Art and Design Fair” is a three-day event that will showcase “contemporary, affordable works by emerging and mid-career artists. Held in one of Detroit’s most iconic industrial spaces—the Albert Kahn-designed Boyer Campbell Building—the fair offers a unique platform for artists and designers to showcase their work and connect with art buyers. Timed to coincide with Detroit’s Month of Design, the fair captures the city’s energy and industrial roots while spotlighting the future of creativity.” More here.
Cleveland Arts Prize Announces Winners
The sixty-fifth Cleveland Arts Prizes have been announced, posts Cleveland.com. “This year’s recipients include poet and educator Ali Black, Grammy-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux and visual artist Mark E. Howard, whose bold public works invigorate the city. They’ll be joined by special honorees like architectural photographer Jennie Jones, arts education leader Robin Pease and Land studio’s Greg Peckham.”
DESIGN
“For Mecca” Highlights Bronzeville History In Inflatable Form
“Demolished in 1952, the U-shaped Mecca Flats was once the world’s largest apartment building and an incubator for influential Black artists during the early twentieth century,” reports the Sun-Times. “An inflatable likeness—in tribute to the Black people who called the Mecca Flats home, a place where the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey and Cab Calloway came to lay their heads after a night dazzling audiences in Bronzeville” is now placed “in front of Mies van der Rohe-designed S.R. Crown Hall… a building that replaced the original Mecca.” It will soon travel to Chicago Park District sites through the summer of 2026. The exhibit is free.
Grant Park’s Agora Iron Sculptures Could Relocate Next Year
“The new Grant Park Framework Plan includes refashioning Hutchinson Field into a ‘neighborhood-oriented amenity’—but doesn’t mention ‘Agora’ sticking around for it,” reports Lee Bey at the Sun-Times. “The sculpture ‘Agora’—a striking work composed of 106 nine-foot-tall iron human figures—has been a fixture on the southern edge of Grant Park for nearly twenty years… Installed in 2006, ‘Agora’ is the work of internationally celebrated Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, who died in 2017 at age eighty-six.”
Trump Tower Ground Floor Space Still Empty After Sixteen Years
“The double-decker retail space at the base of Trump Tower, 401 North Wabash, has sat empty for sixteen years,” reports Block Club, “except for a hairdresser near the hotel lobby and a tour boat company docked near the building’s plaza. The 70,000-square-foot space holds the record for the longest-running Downtown retail vacancy over 5,000 square feet.” Says Chicago-based broker James Schutter, “The waterfront visibility, Michigan Avenue, the river, it’s almost ground zero for Chicago. People take selfies with Trump Tower behind… To me, it’s a business opportunity we’re presenting. The Trump name can have a negative and a positive connotation. We’ll find some people the Trump name happens to be positive to.”
DINING & DRINKING
Where Will Dining PR Go Without Chicago Staff For Eater?
“Chefs will, I think, have mixed reactions to the news about Eater Chicago and Ashok Selvam,” writes Michael Gebert at his Fooditor newsletter. “It seems pretty clear that what is happening is much like what happened with Eater’s onetime rival Grub Street, which had city versions (including Chicago’s…) [and] cut all the regional sites and shrank to a New York focus… As other news outlets shrank or vanished entirely, Chicago’s PR industry relied on Eater Chicago as the go-to place for the news that Bunch of Food Group was opening a new pan-Latin concept in River North. As the frequent recipient of such announcements, if I saw one in my mailbox, it was pretty much a sure bet that Eater had posted the story exactly one minute before they sent it to me and everybody else.”
Cocktail Bar Opens In Chicago Fire-Era Pilsen Home
Cerdito Muerto is “a speakeasy-style cocktail bar with a contemporary Mexican American kitchen that’s transformed an old family home that survived the Great Chicago Fire,” writes Louisa Chu at the Trib. “The name translates in Spanish to ‘the dead piglet,’ but is meant in a playful way, said owner Emidio Oceguera… ‘Being a first-generation Mexican American son of farmers and ranchers, pigs and piglets are pretty endearing in our culture.’ … The space was his mother Consuelo Oceguera’s restaurant, Tacos Palacio, and his late father Miguel Oceguera’s neighborhood pool hall.”
All-Vegan Farmers Market, Chicago’s Only, Opens In West Town
Fox 32 interviews founder Betty Alper about how “her passion for plant-based food” inspired Chicago’s first all-vegan farmers market. The “weekly farmers market featuring fresh produce, baked goods, vintage clothing and other items has kicked off in West Town—and its offerings are one-hundred percent vegan,” Block Club reported earlier. “The inaugural Chicago Vegan Farmers Market launched at 2054 West Grand, the home of vegan restaurant Liberation Kitchen. The restaurant closed in June after twelve years, but it is hosting the indoor-outdoor market through September.”
FILM & TELEVISION
Chicago Underground Sets Festival Slate
The longest-running underground film festival in the world, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, “builds on its history of discovering and presenting the most genre-defying, groundbreaking, and unique films emerging from the indie scene in this, its thirty-second edition, running September 17-25, 2025, with twenty-two feature films and seventy-four shorts organized into ten shorts programs, with an additional four shorts that will screen before feature presentations, on screens at the Siskel Film Center and Harper Theater in Hyde Park.”
Opening night holds the Midwest premiere of “Room Temperature,” the third collaboration between novelist Dennis Cooper and filmmaker Zac Farley. Closing night’s film is “$Positions,” “a ferociously funny, full-throttle debut from Chicago filmmaker Brandon Daley. Premiering earlier this year at SXSW, this hyper-anxious comedy-thriller follows a blue-collar Midwesterner who thinks he’s found salvation for his struggling family in the crypto market. Instead, he plunges them, and himself, into a volatile spiral of gambling addiction, screen addiction, and emotional ruin.” Schedule details and tickets here.
Could The Ellisons Be Coming For Warner Bros. Now?
“As Skydance completes its acquisition of Paramount, the stage is set for more deal making in the crowded streaming wars,” prompts the New York Times’ DealBook. “Now Paramount, a relatively small player in the streaming wars, is getting a second wind just as Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery, two of its larger rivals, are rearranging their businesses… Skydance’s chief executive, David Ellison, has long been interested in Warner Bros. Discovery… And Warner Bros. Discovery is preparing to spin out its streaming and studio business by mid-2026, a move that insiders see as a potential precursor to selling one of the last major libraries of its kind.”
LIT
StoryBoard Festival Returns This Weekend
StoryStudio Chicago’s eighth annual StoryBoard Festival, curated by artistic director Rebecca Makkai and program curator Ananda Lima, takes place August 16-17 at the Newberry Library. “The two-day Festival will offer classes, panels, and social events to help writers develop their craft, learn about publishing and build a supportive writing community.” More here.
AP Ends Weekly Book Reviews
Associated Press has notified its contributors that they will no longer publish book reviews, relays Media Nation. “The AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning September 1,” writes AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor. The decision was “made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews. AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will be handled exclusively by staffers.”
Roxane Gay On The Plan For Criticism At The Rumpus
“Professional criticism is not the same as individual reviews. They can both be useful but criticism is a skill-based genre like any other writing. The yelpification of criticism isn’t evolution,” posts The Rumpus partner Roxane Gay. “We will be publishing cultural criticism every day at The Rumpus. We hope to fill some of this egregious void being created by the mainstream media. Relaunch is in October but we are also publishing between now and then.”
MEDIA
Illinois-Based News Media Corp. Closes, Including Dozens Of Newspapers Across Five States
“Dozens of communities in the Midwest and West learned Thursday they had lost their newspapers after an Illinois-based publisher announced it would abruptly close because of financial problems,” reports AP via ABC News. News Media Corp., “which owns local newspapers across five states, said it will close fourteen operations in Wyoming, seven in Illinois, five in Arizona, four in South Dakota and one in Nebraska… Touting itself as ‘the voice of small town America,’ NMC’s closure affects longtime newspapers that were often the primary source of news in numerous small towns, worsening the problem of news deserts in rural areas.”
You’ve Got Hell: AOL’s Dial-Up Ends Next Month
AOL, now part of Yahoo, will discontinue its dial-up service on September 30, reports CNN. “About 160,000 people connect to the internet through their landline telephone service.” Synonymous with the 1990s, the service lasted over thirty years.
Tribune Owner Still Wants Dallas Morning News, Purchased By Hearst
Chicago Tribune owner Alden Global Capital, “known for gutting newsrooms, has bumped up its offer to buy the paper—but Texas law may be what stands in the way of an acquisition,” reports Nieman Lab. Wrote the company in a Monday morning missive, “We are perplexed by your refusal to have a single discussion with us in the weeks since our original proposal was submitted. Both our original proposal and enhanced proposal offer substantially more economic value to your shareholders, and—unlike Hearst—we are offering to continue publishing the beloved print edition of The Dallas Morning News.”
MUSIC
Ravinia Renovations Begin With Opening Of The Audrey
“The Audrey, home to the Sandra K. Crown Theater, has been updated with flexible seating and a brand-new sound system,” reports the Sun-Times. “The $75 million multi-year renovation of Ravinia’s thirty-six-acre music park in north suburban Highland Park is underway ahead of its grand reopening in 2026, but one of the indoor venues is already open to the public. The Audrey, formerly known as the Ravinia MusicBox, was revealed at a press event on Thursday. Inside The Audrey, in the north corner of the park, is the newly renovated Sandra K. Crown Theater. With approximately one hundred seats, it’s an indoor live performance venue meant for intimate, immersive audio and visual experiences.”
STAGE
Jeff Equity Nominations Announced
“The number of Jeff Award nominations has ballooned in recent years. There are a total of fourteen Actors Equity-affiliated productions nominated in the best play categories for both large and midsized theaters (nineteen if the ‘short run’ and solo performance categories are added), ranging from ‘Primary Trust’ at Goodman Theatre to ‘A Case for the Existence of God’ at Steep Theatre,” enumerates Chris Jones at the Trib. “Thirteen nominees were honored in the categories of musicals and revues, including ‘Falsettos’ by Court Theatre (with Timeline) and ‘Always… Patsy Cline’ at the Drury Lane Theatre. Other very strong shows with multiple nods included ‘Translations’ at Writers Theatre and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ at Court.”
Joffrey Sets “Nutcracker” Children’s Auditions
The Joffrey Ballet will hold open auditions for the children’s cast of Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Nutcracker” at its Joffrey Tower studios. “All students in the Chicago area with dance experience that meet casting criteria are welcome to audition. This annual audition is for all young dancers, from any studio or school, whether or not they have participated in the Joffrey’s ‘Nutcracker’ in the past. The audition will be directed by artistic staff from The Joffrey Ballet.” Friday, September 5-Sunday, September 7. Audition details here.
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