Calendar for 5/18/16

The Oriental Institute’s first-ever Teacher Appreciation Night & Award Ceremony also marks the opening of a special exhibit, Don’t Take My Stuff. Tell My Story. The exhibit features artwork by K-12 students around Chicago, on themes of cultural heritage; the award ceremony will feature a curator talk, award presentations, and a curriculum showcase. (Hafsa Razi)

The Provident Hospital was founded in the late nineteenth century, in part to provide the city’s first nursing college for black women. This Wednesday, the Provident Foundation is holding a scholarship fundraiser in celebration of the hospital’s quasquicentennial. All proceeds will go to the Foundation’s scholarship fund. (Christian Belanger)

Join eminent Chicago educators for a convention on how education can support underprivileged children throughout their development. Hear about policies and practices that help children and students become leaders from researchers at the UofC Consortium on Chicago School Research. (Anne Li)

Join The BRIJ Embassy for Black America for a two-day celebration of the centennial of the Great Migration. On Friday, there will be a showing of Michael Bradford’s play, Migration (reviewed in this issue) and on Saturday, join a bus tour of South Shore. (Christian Belanger)

What does the future look like for the Calumet River? Great Rivers Chicago will hold a public meeting at Rowan Park next Tuesday to answer exactly that. Join the conversation and help to finalize a vision for the river’s access, development, and sustainability. (Joe Andrews)

The DuSable’s upcoming exhibition aims to recover the lost history of the Grupo Antillano movement, a cultural group that privileged the African and Afro-Caribbean roots in the formation of the Cuban nation. Just as all roots grow, the paintings leap from the ground of the canvas with bright colors, unique textures, and symbolic stories. (Corinne Butta)

With focus on health and wellness, Heal Our City is a South Side community arts event featuring poetry, photo narratives, oral histories, and documentaries. The free event will include food from Soul Vegetarian and transportation—catch a shuttle to the event from 59th and University or 51st and King Drive at 4:30pm. (Joe Andrews)

What happens when science-fiction and the history of the Americas are combined? Broadcast from a Serpent-Headed Spaceship is an experimental lecture, somewhere between performance and pedagogy, that attempts to remix history in order to recast the past and the future as open to interpretation. (Corinne Butta)

Set out this Saturday just to look inside: Mindy Rose Schwartz’s work references domestic spaces and personal memories just familiar enough to channel a path through their viewer’s eye and into their personal headspace. (Corinne Butta)

Spring into step this weekend and make your way to High Concept Labs to reflect on our human movement. No experience required; just the desire to learn how to use your body to create form and perform. (Corinne Butta)

Harmonica virtuoso and Chicago blues innovator Billy Branch will feature this Saturday at the Promontory in a blustery homecoming. A disciple of Chicago blues legend Willie Dixon, Branch began touring with Dixon after catching the “blues bug” in college and has since become a figurehead of blues education worldwide. (Clyde Schwab)

Soul Brother #1 will be rocking the wheels of steel at the Promontory next Saturday. With twenty-five years of DJ work under his belt, expect to keep your head nodding as he spins the classic, the obscure, and everything in between. (Joe Andrews)

Los Angeles singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe will be bringing her heavy, moody neo-folk to Thalia Hall, along with A Dead Forest Index. Sway to her gothic experimental guitar playing, smoky vocals, and surreal soundscapes that are sure to leave the crowd in a trance. (Hester Shim)

Performances at the self-described “biggest party of the 23rd Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival” will include the experimental duo Pedestrian Deposit, known for their “highly composed, often abstract sound textures” as well as Hogg, a “Chicago-based post-punk industrial psycho-sexual abstraction.” There are three more DJs and artists on the lineup as well. Get ready for a night of fun…abstract fun! (Jake Bittle)

A Compton-bred artist in hip-hop and R&B, Gemaine has a Soundcloud following numbering in the tens of thousands. If, like the singer’s latest EP, you are “Curious,” come participate in this sweet live event; maybe it’ll go viral! (Neal Jochmann)

What could this be? It’s a pair of DJ sets by Soundcloud stars Kevin Hsia and Tony Rainwater (a timely name, given our recent heavy downpours). The two are scheduled to rock Blank Haven, a clandestine religious space located in the lower west side of downtown.  (Neal Jochmann)

As the weather warms up and summer creeps ever closer, so does JODB Productions’s Can I Live Block Party, set to take Washington Park by storm in July. Catch the event’s third preview with this latest installment of freestyle performances. (Julia Aizuss)

Perhaps Kartemquin’s most famous film, the 1994 documentary that’s received accolades from Roger Ebert, MTV, and everyone in between will be streaming for free as the next film in Kartemquin’s fiftieth anniversary lineup. Hoop Dreams’s “educational companion piece,” the thirty-minute Higher Goals, also serves as one of the extra treats available online. (Julia Aizuss)

Spend your Saturday taking in a quartet of animated short films based on folktales from Pueblo, Ashanti, First Nations, Japanese, and Chinese traditions. Viewers will learn about the challenges of dealing with birds who steal the sun, monkeys who try to steal the moon, and dragons generally. (Jake Bittle)

This presentation by the contemporary art barons at the UofC’s Renaissance Society will show a black-and-white “live-action cartoon” by the experimental artist Sadie Benning. The 1998 film “investigates the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old” with her mother and gay roommate, and explores how to inhabit the space between identities. (Jake Bittle)

David Boykin and the SEBAU have composed an “avant-garde soul jazz hip h-opera” in response to the killings of unarmed blacks by police officers and white civilians. This performance, inspired by nationwide protests and demonstrations, tells the story of two activists and lovers fighting for black liberation. (Joe Andrews)

With a comic title and a fondness for fish and chips, Two Guvnors—an adaption of Carlo Goldoni’s classic The Servant of Two Masters, retrofitted for 1963—all but Union hi-Jacks the source material’s hijinks. It’s fast-paced, farcical, and generally ridiculous: in short, quintessentially British. (Christopher Good)

The history of the Great Migration can be overwhelming—a confluence of important cultural strains, people, and institutions all loaded with historical import. Migration tries to capture the complicated interactions that brought thousands of African Americans to northern cities through music, dance, and dialogue. (Adam Thorp)

The Smart Museum’s Monster Roster exhibition investigates the history and impact of the Chicago-based group’s work. At this special event, groups will present poetry and prose, and attendees will partake in a mixed-media art activity emerging from the literary inspirations of Monster Roster artists. (Sarah Claypoole)

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement, a panel of activists from the 1960’s—Don Rose, Mary Lou Finley, Prexy Nesbitt, and Brenetta Howell Barrett—will talk about the time during which Martin Luther King lived in North Lawndale. Moderated by Chicago Reporter editor and publisher Susan Smith Richardson. (Sarah Claypoole)

Come listen, come tell. Come to share, and to show. Spend an evening with other storytellers of all stripes, except professional ones, in a casual and unrehearsed setting. Tell us about something funny, something crazy, something heartbreaking, something that happened to you—tell us a story about life. (Anne Li)

Chicago-born author and DePaul professor Ana Castillo talks about her new book, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, an intergenerational and cross-country account of her life and family. The novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist will be in conversation with Laura Demanski, editor of the University of Chicago Magazine. (Sarah Claypoole)