2025

The Smart Museum of Art: Family Day Make Some Noise

The Smart Museum of Art welcomes families

Families are invited to explore the Smart’s newest exhibition Theaster Gates: Unto Thee & create handmade instruments from everyday materials, with a special musical performance from 11 AM-12 PM by artist and musician Joe Rauen. Families will transform tools, toys, boxes, bits & more into objects that hum, drum, clang and chime!

Joe Rauen is an artist and musician who makes playable musical instruments from everyday items.

Studying Oak Woods

Emily Crews, Pranathi Diwakar, Adam Green, and Na'ama Rokem on the history of Oak Woods Cemetery

The Oak Woods project is an initiative to encourage research, teaching, and public programming initiatives in connection with the historic Oak Woods Cemetery, located about a mile and a half south of campus, in Woodlawn/Grand-Crossing. Join us for a brief presentation about the rich history of the cemetery, and a report on the activities of the project.

Breathing Room: On Bob Dylan’s Harmonica

Steven Rings on listening for non-verbal eloquence

Associate Professor Steven Rings previews material from his new book What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan. Steve will discuss the one instrument that necessarily stops the flow of Dylan's celebrated lyrics: the harmonica. As we will hear, this instrument creates “breathing room” in Dylan’s songs, a space to focus on sounding breath free of the word.

Two Decades of Preserving History: South Side Home Movie Project at 20

Jacqueline Stewart on the origins and ongoing work of the South Side Home Movie Project 

Dr. Jacqueline Stewart will share highlights from two decades of the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP), which she founded in 2005, and which now holds more than 1,200 reels of 16mm, 8mm, and Super-8mm footage shot by South Siders from the 1930s to the 1980s. The South Side Home Movie Project is dedicated to collecting, preserving, digitizing, exhibiting, and researching the rich tapestry of home movies created by Chicago's South Side residents.

Theaster Gates: Unto Thee Campus Tour

Vanja Malloy and Galina Mardilovich offer guided tour of architectural and campus spaces at the University of Chicago 

Join Vanja Malloy and Galina Mardilovich, curators of Theaster Gates: Unto Thee, for a guided tour of architectural and campus spaces at the University of Chicago that have contributed to Theaster Gates's artistic practice. The tour will begin at the Smart Museum of Art and end at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. RSVP information forthcoming: this is an outdoor walking tour, so please do dress accordingly.

Charting Imaginary Worlds: Why Fantasy and Games are Inseparable

Exhibition at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center

Since the emergence of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and the digital text adventure Zork, both in the 1970s, gamers have been enchanted by the iconography and underlying structures of the fantasy genre—mages, castles, monsters, and rogues; fated quests and unlikely fellowships; magic spells and ancient riddles.

Maria Antoniak

Maria Antoniak is a Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and also affiliated with Information Science.

Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. She completed her PhD in Information Science at Cornell University, advised by David Mimno, and also received a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

Ted Underwood

Ted Underwood is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign in the School of Information Sciences and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once.

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