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Chicago Arts Program Festival Will Be a Showcase of Visual Art and Performance

Chicago Arts Program Festival Will Be a Showcase of Visual Art and Performance November 27, 2009

It’s a full semester packed into just one evening. Photography, painting and drawing, ceramics, a research paper, two novels, and six plays. Plus food. And it’s all free.

The ACM Chicago Arts Program will sponsor an end-of-the-semester Arts Festival showcasing the talents and creativity of the six students who have called Chicago and its arts community “home” for the past four months.

Chicago Arts Program Festival

Saturday, December 5

5:00 – 9:00 pm

Keith House

1900 S. Prairie Avenue

Refreshments served

FREE!

The Festival, which is completely organized by the students, will be on Saturday, December 5, from 5 – 9 pm at the Keith House, 1900 S. Prairie Avenue in the Prairie Avenue Historic District on Chicago’s Near South Side. The Keith House is one of about a dozen mansions left from a time in the late 19th century when the area was the city’s most fashionable neighborhood and home to the Field, Armour, and Pullman families.

Most of the works in the Festival were produced by the students in their independent study projects. The gallery portion of the show, running from 5 – 7 pm, will feature visual art by Sarah Jones (Lake Forest College), Stephanie Lassen (Ripon College), and Britni Robinson (Carleton College).

Chicago Arts Program groupAlmost all of the Chicago Arts Program group, with a sign standing in for the sixth member, and Program Director Dave Amrein.

The performance segment, beginning at 7 pm, will include readings of excerpts from novels-in-progress by Michael Bonner (Colorado College) and Mandy Graber (Valparaiso University), as well as a talk by Molly Nelson (Beloit College) about her research on contemporary portraiture and depictions of the human form.

All of the students will get into the act to perform a set of short plays that they wrote. It’s an idea that grew out of workshop the group had with Greg Allen, the founder of the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago theatre group famous for performing 30 plays in 60 minutes in its long-running show “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” The experience led to an exercise in which each student wrote several short plays and to share in class. They decided to perform six of the plays – one by each student – at the Festival.

One of ACM Chicago Programs, Chicago Arts is a full immersion into the Chicago cultural adventure. Students interested in the full range of the arts are challenged to explore the creative process in the program’s curriculum, including an arts seminar, an internship, an independent study project, and the Chicago core course.

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