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Amina Ross, the curator of Links Hall’s new Eclipsing Festival, doesn’t want you to be afraid of the dark. Instead, she and a team of multimedia artists want to shatter socially reinforced associations surrounding light and darkness. “The connotations around darkness are almost wholly negative,” says Ross. Although the connection between racial injustice and language can seem abstract, she believes that connection is really tangible. “If we’re taught from the most basic ages that to be dark or to be black is bad,” she says, “how can we expand our imagination around people who are called by the same name?...

Harold Washington Library Center Conrad Sulzer Regional Library Finalists: The Newberry, Bezazian Branch

For the better part of the 20th century the Art Institute hosted “Chicago and Vicinity,” an annual exhibition that focused on art made by artists living in the city. The museum discontinued the series in the mid-1980s, but Shane Campbell Gallery has now revived it in the 8,550-square-foot space of its new South Loop location. In this edition of “Chicago and Vicinity,” 91 separate works produced by 50 artists currently residing in Chicago are sporadically arranged around the gallery....

The Montford Point Marine Association Chapter Two, on the 7000 block of South Vincennes, is a veterans organization whose founding members were part of the first segregated unit of Marines during WWII. These Leathernecks were similar in importance to the Tuskegee Airmen but remain much less known. Though MPMA has opened membership to honorably discharged veterans of all races, the local chapter currently has only 35 members, down from a high of more than 150 decades ago....

741 604 Owen & Engine Lady Gregory’s Finalists: Cheesie’s Pub & Grub, R Public House, Pizzeria Uno

Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974) is artless, cynical garbage, advancing a misanthropic view of American cities in which disenfranchised people roam the streets like savages, raping, looting, and killing as though it were all they knew how to do. This lays the groundwork for the action classic’s crude celebration of vigilante justice, which shows how one good guy with enough brute force can clean up the city. Playing the good guy, Charles Bronson projects little charisma, and his unfeeling performance works hand in glove with Winner’s clodhopper direction....

It seems like a silly distinction to me, OPENS, one that comes from a place of insecurity. (And a “no other dick” rule would make most gay open relationships impossible.) But sometimes, working with your partner’s insecurities—accepting them, not fighting them—is the key to a successful open relationship. And since many bisexuals in monogamous opposite-sex relationships often ask to open the relationship because they want to act on their same-sex attractions (or, indeed, have their first same-sex encounter), keeping outside sex same-sex—at least at first—isn’t an entirely unreasonable request....

We’re excited to bring you another fantasy gig poster this week, honoring musician and professional skateboarder Tommy Guerrero. Skateboarding is conducive to social distancing, as sports go, and it reminds us that summer can still offer good times even if live music is on hold. Not everybody can make a fantasy gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems....

There’s no one in the world quite like Brazilian polymath Hermeto Pascoal, who at 81 continues to produce music in a world all his own. Since the 1970s, when he traveled to the U.S. and worked briefly with Miles Davis—he appears on the classic 1971 album Live-Evil—he’s pursued a feverish hybrid of frantic jazz fusion, Brazilian folk, and outward-bound exploration akin to that of Sun Ra’s Arkestra (though without the extraterrestrial themes)....

Buried in an April 9 Chicago Sun-Times editorial was this line: “[Mayor Lori] Lightfoot is free to move large sums between departments, without City Council approval, under executive powers granted to her last month.” “During these unprecedented times we cannot proceed with business as usual when the health and welfare of our residents and communities are at risk,” the mayor was quoted as saying. But in the most potent move, the order gave the mayor’s budget director the power to revamp the city’s budget “as needed to maximize effectiveness of the City response” to the pandemic....

Last Tuesday’s mayoral election was barely over before I started hearing rumors about Governor Bruce Rauner trying to talk third-place finisher Willie Wilson into endorsing Rahm Emanuel. OK, let’s run through the cast of characters in this saga. Good luck, fellas. In any event, if the governor is afraid that the mayor will stand up to his budget cuts, he’s got a funny way of showing it: by maneuvering to help Emanuel win reelection....

Multidisciplinary artist Charlotte Moorman’s experimental cello performances and avant-garde festival curation shaped New York City’s cultural underground in the latter half of the 20th century. Moorman died of cancer in 1991, and for the last 25 years her legacy has been felt largely as a footnote to the histories of her better-known collaborators: John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono. But now the Block Museum of Art has opened a retrospective exhibition this month on Moorman’s legacy of performance and provocation....

Chicago Diner Runner-Up: Handlebar

Every Chicago Public League gymnasium contains idiosyncrasies of design and utility, and Uplift Community High School in Uptown is no exception. The most exciting high school basketball game of the year plays out here on January 16. The players, coaches, and the scorer’s table are under crepuscular lighting and jammed against a concrete wall on the south side with just a narrow band separating them from the court. The Uplift Titans are playing the Whitney Young Dolphins, a nationally ranked program....

Chicago native Henry Threadgill has been on a tear lately with his inventive and versatile band Zooid, whose interpretations of his dazzling compositions are guided by fixed harmonic intervals embedded in the material. That means everyone improvises all at once, in a context that demands the highest levels of concentration but yields dividends worthy of the investment. The music keeps on giving, rich in sophisticated interplay and melodic and harmonic detail....

In retelling Charles Dickens’s perennial holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, playwright Maya Malan-Gonzalez performs the theatrical equivalent of completely gutting a building, keeping the foundation and outer walls, but changing everything else. Her A Xmas Cuento Remix, set in a contemporary urban area, concerns a sour Christmas-hating Scrooge of a woman, Dolores, successful in business but mean to her employees and estranged from the only family she has left, her niece’s family....

Few things excite a devoted music fan more than new discoveries, especially a discovery that’s new to everyone else too. That goes a long way toward explaining the swollen reissue market, as well as the obsession with old private-press albums over the past decade or so—because contemporary music is relatively easy to find, it can’t satisfy the demand for obscurity. When the 1970 album Obnoxius by Brazilian singer, songwriter, and guitarist José Mauro was reissued in 1995 by British label Far Out—then a key player in the burgeoning rare-groove scene, with a decidedly Brazilian emphasis—it certainly qualified as “obscure....

Annie Saunders, 46, grew up in the Chicago area, and as a teenager she moved into a punk house and began putting on shows. These days, she works as a veterinarian in Wisconsin and sings and plays bass in Chicago-based punk and power-pop band Time Thieves. Inspired by the Instagram page @punkhouseoakland, Saunders launched @punkhousechicago last month to document the city’s punk houses past and present. She’s accepting photo submissions at punkhousechicago@gmail....

“Open Season,” which debuts today at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, is artist Larry Achiampong’s first show outside of the UK. The exhibit features 16 blackboards; each one contains chalk-written text in the style of a student being disciplined for a transgression; line after line is repeated for the purpose of being burned into memory. Inspired by various images, words, and sound clips mined from social media, Achiampong compiles each source to reflect a wide range of opinions, such as sentences that read “The people on the podium are black women” and “Build the Wall....