Avante-Garde in the Alley: Modern Art, Theatrical Innovation, and the Chicago Artistic Renaissance in Towertown

"Avant-Garde in the Alley" pulls back the curtain on the creative art and theater scene of the bohemian enclave of Towertown. The Near North Side neighborhood served as a laboratory for performance art, modernist sensibilities, and counterculture during the 1920s. Presented by Zac Bleicher, Executive Director of Edgar Miller Legacy, this talk will explore how Chicago’s Interwar art scene became a melting pot of interdisciplinary creativity, where radical thought was openly championed– and challenged– on soapboxes in park squares, in local homes and salons, and in back-alley theatres. The city's performing arts spaces allowed creative professionals to experiment with small-scale, avant-garde aesthetics that would define a uniquely American modernism. Approached through the perspective of renowned Chicago artist Edgar Miller and the avant-garde performances presented in spaces like the Dil Pickle Club, this talk will highlight how Chicago artists of the Twenties brought new ideas to life, first on the stage and then out into a modernizing urban environment. Learn how Edgar Miller’s art, the work of other artists, non-traditional staging and set designs, and avant-garde literature merged to establish Chicago as a central site for American modernism. Several original pieces of Miller’s art will be on display. This talk is being presented in conjunction with a staged reading of “Dear Rhoda” at Glessner House on Monday, November 16, performed by The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, which takes place in the Towertown scene of the Roaring Twenties. $20 per person / $15 for members Purchase Tickets Co-sponsored by Glessner House and Edgar Miller Legacy