It was not a typical Sunday at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Not for those who came looking for Monet, Turner and Warhol, at least.
In Gallery 222, a satin-cloaked actor was bringing Lord Byron to life. In Gallery 206, a 19th-Century cast of characters-a Polish exile, an English feminist and an African-American-posed questions about abolition and the slave trade.
In Fullerton Hall, a cabaret of Weimar Germany filled the hall with the music of Kurt Weill, and in a corner of the Ed Paschke exhibit, neon-energized images of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley gazed down on a historian who spoke of Vietnam protests, civil rights and the women`s rights movements.
Such an eclectic celebration of the arts and enthusiasm for their role in the fight for freedom were inevitable, of course, considering these gallery
”theaters” were part of Chicago`s first Humanities Festival.
Titled ”Expressions of Freedom,” the daylong festival sold out Orchestra Hall in the morning, where 2,700 people showed up for a speech on the ”paralyzing absurdity of censorship” by playwright Arthur Miller and a performance of Olivier Messiaen`s ”Quartet for the End of Time,” a work composed while Messiaen was interned in a prisoner of war camp.
And it packed the Stock Exchange Trading Room of the Art Institute with 400 festival supporters who paid $100-per-person for a salmon-to-passion fruit mousse benefit dinner and speech by artist Ed Paschke. Proceeds will help support programs of the Illinois Humanities Council.
In between, the talents and energy of the city`s major cultural organizations joined forces to bring to life the writing, art and music-the freedom of expression-of several historical eras.
Scholars from several area universities directed the afternoon`s stage works, drawing on local talents and embracing some 1,800 festival-goers as well as a good number of museum visitors in a celebration of ”human expression as the essence of freedom.”
The festival is the brainchild of Richard Franke, chairman of the Illinois Humanities Council and John Nuveen & Co. Inc.
”I saw that (the city institutions) pursued their own art forms diligently and well, but they never crossed paths,” said Franke, just before the benefit dinner, ”and I thought how exciting it would be to show how they come together.”
So through the efforts of the Illinois Humanities Council, several of the city`s cultural institutions-the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony, the Lyric Opera, the University of Chicago-as well as the Mayor`s Office of Special Events contributed their talents and energy to the festival.
”(This) is a way to really reach people and put art in context,” said Ibrahim Sundiata, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the historian who staged the abolitionist work.
He couldn`t have been more right, considering the enthusiastic response each of the five ”historical stages” received from festival-goers and museum browsers alike.
Why, so touched by the ”stage” created for the French Revolution-the reading by Thomas Jefferson and the art by Jacques-Louis David-that when a costumed woman and two gents in tri-cornered hats sang an impassioned
”Marseillaise,” they were soon joined in song by some 50 onlookers.
