College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences > Centers & Institutes > DePaul Humanities Center > Events > Event Archive > 2020-2021

​​​​​My Brilliant Pen Pal

Hugh-Manatee With Pencil and Mail

For the 2020-21 season at the DePaul Humanities Center (DHC) we have pivoted to meet the demands of a new and newly complicated world.  As we investigate “The Year of Communicability” we realize that we will have no choice at times but to follow the suit of most other institutions, offering the occasional online event (though, we hope, with special additions and surprising reimaginings of the technology that will make our virtual events distinctive).  However, we are also committed to exploring ways to bring us together that employ non-virtual technology. 

Each event in the “My Brilliant Pen Pal” series will unfold across several weeks, with correspondences going back and forth between a special guest—the brilliant pen pal—and audience members, providing a unique experience unavailable anywhere, anyhow, or anywhen else. 

At a time in which the U.S. Postal Service is in a crisis, a time in which email has all but replaced postal mail, a time in which the remaining mail we do receive all too often includes only bills or bad news, we wish to celebrate a moment when checking the mailbox could be exciting and fun.  We wish to reinvigorate the pleasure and excitement of having a pen pal.  We wish to put aside the virtual and marvel at the wonders of the physical: the stationery, the rhythm of the correspondence, the stamps, the words and thoughts of a pen pal arriving across countless miles to speak to you. 

Each event will begin with the announcement of our special guest—the brilliant pen pal.  You will then have at least two weeks to sign up on the DHC website as an audience member (which includes providing a mailing address that will be kept confidential by Eventbrite and the DHC).  Each event will have a maximum of 250 audience members. 

In a matter of weeks, you and your fellow audience members will receive in the mail a short essay, letter, work of art, etc., from your new pen pal, something that our special guest has written or created specifically for this event and which will not be available to anyone else for at least several months.  You will then be encouraged to write back to the DHC with a question or comment for the pen pal (using the U. S. mail and the SASE we will provide with the first mailing).  The staff at the DHC will collect and curate responses and pass a selection along to the pen pal.  The pen pal will then respond to the selections, as well as some questions from DHC director, H. Peter Steeves.  You will then receive a copy of the responses by mail, bringing your brief but brilliant correspondence to a close.  (At some later point, a video documentary of the event will be uploaded to the DHC’s YouTube channel to be shared with the rest of the world.)

Ashanti Alston

“[T]he people can change this world. Mind that we're on Turtle Island and like, man, we got to figure out how to do this in a way that gets this Empire off the back of the turtle. You know, it's like whatever you do, you think about those most impacted: First Nations, Black folks, brown folks, poor folks, trans folks. Check in, let's be there for each other so that we're just not doing things off of the top. That is our strength, that is our power, transformation is there. But that's the very thing that the system will work against, to keep us, like, at each other's wits end, to keep us not caring. We can pull this off, and man, our children, we got these children, we got to do it for them."
—Ashanti Alston, July 2020

Ashanti Alston is an anarchist, penal abolitionist, and former Black Panther.  Growing up in New Jersey, he was witness to the 1967 rebellions that led to the liberation and occupation of various neighborhoods by the people who lived there—including Plainfield, his hometown.  Inspired to get involved in direct political action, he joined the Black Panther Party at the age of seventeen, and later became a member of, and went underground with, the Black Liberation Army.  For fourteen years, Alston served time as a political prisoner.  Today he is still working with the Jericho Movement, which aims to free all political prisoners, and giving talks and writing inspirational analyses concerning the dismantling of the myriad oppressive regimes in which we find ourselves enmeshed.  Reaching out to those struggling within what he terms “the matrix of resistance"—e.g., feminists, those in the LGBTQ+ community, anti-colonialists, animal liberationists, youth movements, the Zapatistas, etc.—Alston, a “Panther for life," reminds us that core, personal relationships are at the heart of our power and that together “we can revisit the belief in victory being ours if we want it."

In his 1999 essay, “Beyond Nationalism," Alston states that, “Anarchism HERE in Babylon must reflect our unique problems and possibilities for struggle. Our struggles are not just against capitalism. Too simple. Our struggles are not just against racism. That's also too simple. There are all kinds of negative 'isms' we are fighting against and, just as important, all kinds of worlds we are fighting for."

In 2018, Alston added: “We were reaching back for multidimensional modes of understandings and living and fighting back. In our languages you heard talk of Ancestors, Elders, forgotten sheroes and heroes. We were trying to recapture rituals that would help us to remember: reconnect with the Past and understand that the so-called Past is never disconnected from Now and Future. Also in this re-membering we are connecting to acknowledging how the Monster has caused our dismembering as a body of people and as individuals. We want to bring healing through justice to our folks in this counter-nation. We want to reconnect the ancient with the present with the future…to see how we within this matrix of resistance can mutual[ly] assist each other in bringing down the imperial monster. Dig it?"

 
Ashanti Alston

“I am a physicist. More exactly, I am a theoretical physicist. People often wonder what a theoretical physicist does. You might not believe it, but most of the time I think. Sometimes, I scribble funny looking things with a pencil on a notebook. Processes like this usually involve lots of coffee and walking up and down the corridor." 
—Sabine Hossenfelder

Sabine Hossenfelder, Ph.D., is a physicist, artist, and popular author.  Her celebrated book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (which has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Romanian, and Korean) is an attempt to sound an alarm in contemporary physics.  Hossenfelder argues that the reason there has been no progress in the foundations of physics for more than forty years is that physicists are being led by mathematics rather than empirical observation—and more troubling than this, even, they are being led by a mathematical sense of aesthetics, by the belief that “beautiful" math must lead to “true" descriptions of reality.  In some ways, Hossenfelder is even claiming that physics has stopped being a science when it comes to the search for quantum gravity, for the smallest particles that make up everything, for the foundations of the universe itself.

Currently a research fellow at the Frankfort Institute for Advanced Studies, Hossenfelder has published numerous scientific articles on topics in general relativity, quantum gravity, particle physics, quantum foundations, and statistical mechanics.  But her work has also been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist, Nautilus, Aeon, and the New York Times.  With degrees in math, physics, and theoretical physics, Hossenfelder's keen ability to make complicated ideas understandable for non-scientists without sacrificing meticulous attention to technical detail makes her an exemplary model of “the public intellectual."  Her curious mind has led her to think about questions of free will, artificial intelligence, cryptography, time travel, and, recently, the nature of human consciousness.  All of that, plus she has given the world really cool quantum physicist trading cards, the opportunity to pay to chat with a scientist, as well as some pretty amazing music videos about antiparticles, racing light, and a very famous cat that might very well be both alive and dead at the same time.

“Black love is Black wealth and they’ll/probably talk about my hard childhood/and never understand that/all the while I was quite happy.”
—Nikki Giovanni, "Nikki-Rosa" (1968)

Nikki Giovanni is a poet, essayist, and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. She began publishing her work in the late ‘60s, after graduating with honors from Fisk University in 1967. Her first two collections appeared in 1968, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment, the same year she received a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among the manifold collections she has published since are three New York Times and Los Angeles Times Best Sellers, a rare distinction among poets.

Giovanni has been a practitioner of an explicitly Black poetics throughout her career, and was involved with the Black Arts Movement from its inception as one of its foremost authors. In 1970 she founded a publishing cooperative, NikTom, to support and promote the work of African American women writers, among them fellow poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Rodgers, and Mari Evans. She also began writing poetry for children in the ‘70s, including Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1973) and Vacation Time (1980).

A seven-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award and the first recipient of The Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, she has been involved in activism throughout her career as a public intellectual, often appearing on camera to discuss contemporary social and political issues. She taught at Queens College, Rutgers University, and Ohio State before arriving at Virginia Tech in 1987. Giovanni was named one of “25 Living Legends” by Oprah Winfrey in 2005.

"We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained."

 

“We are headed exactly where we want.”
—Jennifer Trosper, February 2021

Jennifer Trosper spent her childhood on a farm in rural Fostoria, Ohio. She grew up listening to her father’s stories of working in the space industry in the 1950s, sparking her interest in space exploration at a young age. After graduating from high school, Trosper enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a degree in aerospace engineering while minoring in music. She later earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California.

Trosper began her career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1990, where she has worked on every rover that has ever driven on Mars, including the Perseverance rover that recently landed on the Martian surface. She began her work with JPL's Mars Exploration Program as an engineer and flight director for the Pathfinder mission and continued as an operations development manager for the Odyssey mission, an engineer and mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, and a deputy mission manager and deputy project manager for the Curiosity mission. She is currently Deputy Project Manager for Mars 2020 and Project Missions Manager for Perseverance, which is seeking signs of biosignatures that may in the past have supported life in some form on Mars.

Trosper’s interests are not limited to the space exploration, however. Throughout her life she has taken time to pursue other passions, such as music (her undergraduate minor), team sports (she lettered in both volleyball and softball at MIT), and teaching. She is interested in how the arts and humanities can bring important perspectives into the sciences and is conversely keen to demonstrate why non-scientists should be interested in scientific work.


Horror of the Humanities VIII: A Virtual Haunted House Experience


Sickness and Solitude

Each event in the “Sickness & Solitude” series will unfold according to the audience member’s engagement with the material. Both events are an attempt to look at the state of the world today, especially as filtered through the lenses of COVID and calls for social justice, offering an artistic response to our states of sickness and solitude. 

The events in this series are meant to recreate the experience of being at a live DHC event, but using the technology of the U.S. mail, CDs, and View-Masters. As we search for ways to be together during these challenging times when forces threaten to tear us apart, we are pleased to be able to offer you the chance to experience the work of world-renowned visual and musical artists as we continue to think together about how the arts and humanities can point us toward a future in which our mutual flourishing—and thus the well-being of our friends, neighbors, and various communities—is the top priority.

Both events in this series will begin with something mailed (or in the case of the second event, also by means of contact-free pick-up). Once you receive your special envelope or kit, the rest is completely up to you.

For the first “Sickness & Solitude” event, musical artists will be asked to contribute an original piece of music to a CD produced by the DePaul Humanities Center and mailed out to the 250 (maximum) audience members who sign up to “attend” the event. Your musical experience will be a DHC exclusive, as the music featured will not be available anywhere else for several months.

For the second event, visual artists will each contribute images of their work. Those images will be turned into a custom-made, three-dimensional, View-Master-style reel. This reel, along with a View-Master-style viewer and accompanying notes, will comprise your “DHC Sickness and Solitude Kit.” The first 80 people to sign up who are local and capable of traveling to the DHC during the assigned pick-up week will stop by the DHC offices for a no-contact pick-up of their kit; the first 20 people who either have mobility restrictions or are too far from Chicago to make the trip will have their kit mailed to them, free of charge.

The DePaul Humanities Center is excited to kick off our new series, “Sickness and Solitude,” by offering you a free copy of the DHC’s first album, featuring new music and interview tracks with an array of talented musical and visual artists, including:

photographer,  author, and influential punk figure Roberta Bayley;

folk singer, violinist, and disability advocate Gaelynn Lea;

songwriter, producer, and lead singer of TYPHOON Kyle Morton;

and multi-instrumentalist composer, producer, and performer Nnamdi Ogbonnaya

More information about the artists below!

The music and interview tracks will not be available elsewhere for several months, with the resulting musical experience being a DHC exclusive. However, unlike our in-person events, this "event" unfolds according to the audience member’s engagement with the material. Once audience members receive their special envelope or box, the rest is completely up to them.

Roberta Bayley and Punk Dog

“(Punk’s biggest legacy to the world is) the idea of ‘do it yourself.’ Don’t wait to be an expert. Give it a try, make a mistake, it’s ok. You know, if you feel like doing something, you don’t have to sit in your room practicing the guitar for 5 years, just go out with three chords. That’s all you need. Do it. Because that’s why we did it. I didn’t know how to do photography.”

Get to Know Roberta Bayley

Roberta Bayley is one of the principal photographers who chronicled the punk rock music movement during the 70’s and 80’s in New York. She was born in California, grew up in San Francisco, and briefly spent time living in London before settling in New York city in the spring of 1974. Roberta started working the door at the legendary punk club CBGB and soon began photographing and befriending key punk music celebrities. She found herself witnessing the punk movement grow from a small music scene to a massive cultural movement and chronicled it all through her photography.

After becoming the chief photographer of Punk magazine, Bayley photographed pivotal punk music artists, including Iggy Pop, Blondie, Richard Hell, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, Brian Eno, Joe Strummer, Nick Lowe, X-Ray Spex, Squeeze, The Damned, The Clash, The Dead Boys, and more. She captured an image of the Ramones which became the band’s debut album cover and remains one of the definitive images of the New York punk scene. 

Roberta Bayley is the author of Blondie: Unseen, 1976-1980 (Plexus, 2007) and co-author with Victor Bockris of Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1996).  Her photographs are also featured in many other books and magazines on punk including, Blank Generation Revisited: The Early Days of Punk (Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Grove Press, 20th Anniversary edition, 2016)

Learn More about Roberta Bayley

Look: 

http://www.robertabayley.com/

Listen:

https://podhero.com/10-frames-per-second/ep-56-roberta-bayley-bef471jq

Read:

https://www.grandlife.com/culture/interviews/roberta-bayley-photographer-new-york/

https://www.lalalista.com/2018/09/14/interview-punk-photographer-roberta-bayley/

Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmGFc5eUKU&ab_channel=MarcJacobs

GAELYNN LEA

“When you start doing a lot of shows and realizing that people know you from music and go to your shows, it kind of became evidence that it was probably a good idea to start talking about disability in a more public way. It is something that I’m passionate about and music is a medium to bring up a bigger topic to me. My music isn’t really about disability per se, it’s just about what I think about, and I suppose everything in my life has been somewhat shaped by my disability, but the music itself is just what’s coming out of me at this time in my life.”

Get to Know Gaelynn Lea

Gaelynn Lea’s musical style has been described as “Velvet Underground meets Little House on the Prairie,” an evocative characterization of her experimental take on traditional fiddle music. Lea is a Duluth Minnesota native who was born with a rare congenital condition, osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. She has been playing violin since elementary school, and since then has become an accomplished musician who specializes in American fiddle and improvisational violin.  

Lea gained national recognition after she won NPR’s 2016 Tiny Desk Contest for her haunting original song, "Someday We'll Linger in the Sun." After her winning performance she went from being a part-time performer to a full-time touring musician and since then has toured in 45 states and 9 countries. Lea has released three full-length solo albums: All the Roads that Lead Us Home (2015), Deepest Darkness, Brightest Dawn (2016), and Learning How To Stay (2018). She has also performed at major festivals, played alongside musicians such as Alan Sparhawk, Charlie Parr, and Billy McLaughlin, and opened for well-known musical groups including Wilco, The Decemeberists, Pigface, and LOW.

Lea has also become an outspoken advocate for disability rights. She uses her public platform to speak about obstacles for people with disabilities, the use of art to overcome physical limitations, and accessibility issues in the music industry. She has shared her perspective through various outlets such as the PBS NewsHour, NowThis, and TEDx Talks, and is planning to release a memoir about her advocacy work and experience as a touring musician. Recently, due to COVID-19, Lea has been unable to tour, but has continued to hold virtual concerts on YouTube every Sunday afternoon. Her latest album, The Living Room Sessions–Gaelynn Lea LIVE was recorded in her apartment during the pandemic, and each track is based on an improvisational prompt she received from her YouTube audience.

Learn More about Gaelynn Lea

Listen:

https://gaelynnlea.bandcamp.com/

https://themoth.org/stories/accessibility-is-the-new-punk-rock

Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6oSeODGmoQ&t=1134s&ab_channel=NPRMusic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8ZLtiuHB8M&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

Read:

https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2019/04/16/gaelynn-lea-interview-music-public-figure-disability-justice-showcase-ordway

https://onbeing.org/programs/gaelynn-leas-voice-and-violin/#transcript

KYLE MORTON

“There's a lot of effort trying to give this feeling of like the waters of oblivion rising and consuming everything. You have chaos, you have some sort of noise, and then the tide goes out again and you see these little formations. The first time you listen to the record, it's like, imagine all of these are flooded artifacts, but every once in a while the tide goes out and you get to see them again.”

Get to Know Kyle Morton

Kyle Morton grew up in Salem, Oregon, where he helped form the influential indie rock band Typhoon. Often playing with over a dozen members, Typhoon incorporates traditional rock instrumentation and vocals with orchestral elements to achieve a lush and emotionally moving sound. In 2016 Morton released his solo debut album, What Will Destroy You, offering personal ruminations on the interplay of love, existence and suffering. Health challenges have heightened his awareness of mortality, and he expresses this understanding by creating songs of sickness that “can become the songs of healing.”

Since releasing their debut self-titled album in 2005, Typhoon has released four additional studio albums. Their 2013 album, White Lighter, reached #105 on the US Billboard top 200 chart, was voted #28 on NPR’s Best Album of the Year, and #37 on PASTE Album of the Year. Typhoon has played at major music festivals, has opened for notable music groups such as Explosions in the Sky, The Decemberists, Belle and Sebastian, and The Shins, and has toured with Portugal the Man and Lady Lamb the Beekeeper.

In January 2021 Typhoon released their most recent full-length album, Sympathetic Magic, completed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Morton states, "I wrote all these songs while puttering around the house these past several months because what else was I going to do? The songs are about people, the space between them and the ordinary, miraculous things that happen there as we come into contact, imitate each other, leave our marks, lose touch—being self and other somehow amounting to the same thing."

Learn More about Kyle Morton

Listen:

https://wearetyphoon.bandcamp.com/album/sympathetic-magic

https://wearetyphoon.bandcamp.com/album/kyle-morton-what-will-destroy-you

Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDUbGws9RhM&ab_channel=TheWildHoneyPie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpoAS9-VRxw&ab_channel=KEXP

Read:

https://www.wweek.com/music/profiles/2017/01/03/typhoons-kyle-morton-is-used-to-being-lost-in-a-crowd-onstage-but-now-hes-going-it-alone/

https://atwoodmagazine.com/tsmr-typhoon-sympathetic-magic-album-review/ 

NNAMDÏ

“I feel like there's no reason to put a restriction on your art unless you're going for a specific sound to maintain throughout the years. For me, it's kind of just the freedom of expression, and there's no need to put a ceiling on that. I think I've just been influenced by so many different things and I've hung around so many different types of artists. It's not really an active thought when I'm writing music; it's really just like a feeling.”

Get to Know NNAMDÏ

Nnamdi Ogbonnaya is a multi-instrumentalist composer and producer who performs under the name NNAMDÏ. His music is at home in many genres, including hip-hop, reggae, jazz, and pop, and his lyricism often contains a sense of satire as well as criticism. Nnamdi was born in California to Nigerian immigrants and moved around the US in his youth before settling in Chicago to earn an electrical engineering degree. His surging success as a musician led him to pursue music as a full-time job.

Nnamdi’s musical endeavors have been constituted by his participation in groups from all over the Chicago DIY scene, and through these expansive collaborations he has earned widespread respect and admiration. He has collaborated with acts such as Monobody, Vagabon, and Itto, and is considered a staple of Chicago’s indie scene. His status as a unique musical force in the city was confirmed by the Chicago Tribune, which named him a “Chicagoan of the Year” in December 2020.

Nnamdi is the founder of the label Sooper Records and has released five studio albums, including: Bootie Noir (2013), Feckin Weirdo (2014), Drool (2017), and Brat (2020).  He released his fifth album, Krazy Karl, in July of 2020, describing its sound as “untethered,” “deranged modern compositions,” and “when your brain tries to leave your skull, but you keep mashing it back into your nose.”

Learn More about NNAMDÏ

Listen:

https://nnamdiogbonnaya.bandcamp.com/

http://magazine.vinylmeplease.com/magazine/nnamdi-good-convo/

Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ixnVLgVJI&ab_channel=NNAMD%C3%8F

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fas2lVNRdSI&ab_channel=NNAMDIofficialVEVO

Read:

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/852771658/nnamdi-on-brat-and-channeling-a-decade-of-chicago-diy-influence-into-pop-music

https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-coty-nnamdi-ogbonnaya-chicago-music-1227-20201224-jqyyfniwvzeifiejvg2hzqm4xu-story.html

S&S 1 Poster

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We are excited to continue this series by offering you a free custom retro 3-D viewer and a reel with seven new images by internationally renowned artists.  These images will not be available anywhere else for several months, with the resulting visual adventure being a DHC exclusive. Artists include: 

National Book Award finalist and “America's Best Photographer,” Sally Mann

artist of the diasporic black female experience and “the future of figurative painting,” Wangari Mathenge

iconic stop-motion animators, designers, narrative innovators, and all-around visionaries, The Brothers Quay

More information about the artists below!

Unlike our in-person events, this “event” unfolds according to the audience member’s engagement with the material. Once audience members receive their special envelope or box through the U.S. mail, the rest is completely up to them.

Sally Man at the DHC

Acclaimed photographer Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, where she still lives and works. Named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine, she often uses vintage equipment and techniques to capture her iconic black and white photographs of the American South, which she has photographed since the 1970s. 

Throughout her influential career, she has engaged with various subjects, including her own family, young children, and landscapes alongside weighty themes such as death, disease, and war. Mann has produced two major series depicting landscapes of the American South, Motherland (1997) and Deep South (2005). She deals with themes of childhood in her early series, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), and later in Immediate Family (1992). Proud Flesh (2009), described as “extraordinarily wrenching and touchingly frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moment,” is an intimate and candid look at her husband’s struggle with Muscular Dystrophy. In a five-part study of mortality, What Remains (2003), Mann presents striking images of decomposing bodies, ranging from her own greyhound to bodies at the forensic study facility, The Body Farm. 

Mann’s photography has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and around the world. She is a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has received countless other honors and awards. She is also the author of several books, including her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award, and the feature film, What Remains, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her most recent show, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2019), comprises 115 photographs that explore the American South through themes such as desire, death, and family bonds, generating fundamental questions about human existence that reverberate beyond regional and national boundaries.

Wagnari Mathenge in her studio

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, and recently heralded as a painter charting "the future of figurative painting," Wangari Mathenge currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is pursuing an MFA in painting and drawing. Reflecting her life experience in Africa and the United States, her work grapples with issues of race and gender, particularly regarding the visibility of the black female in both traditional African patriarchal society and more broadly in the Diaspora. 

The paintings in her ongoing series, The Ascendants, “represent intimate interiors of a fictional diasporan home . . . reflect[ing] the loss and re-fabrication that occurs in instances of dislocation and displacement.” These spaces confront traditional African patriarchy by elevating the stature of women in these spaces, "reconfiguring the domestic space to conform to contemporary ideals of equality while simultaneously refusing the male gaze." The inspiration for her subject matter comes through her own cultural perspective, life, and family, all of which work to celebrate her identity as a black woman and migrant. 

Her works are held in private collections worldwide, including Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Her upcoming exhibitions include group shows in Europe and the United States as well as two solo exhibitions at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, and Roberts Projects in Los Angeles.

Brothers Quay

Visionary artists and identical twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay, professionally known as The Brothers Quay, are iconic stop-motion animators, directors, designers, and narrative innovators. In their early career, they studied film (Stephen) and illustration (Timothy) at the Philadelphia College of Art and worked as professional illustrators before turning to film. In 1969 they moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where they began producing their stop-motion puppet films. 

The Quays’ ethereal and uncanny films are staged on fantastical miniature sets populated by puppets in their unique style, constructed from doll parts. Focusing on the marginal and mysterious, their films typically have no spoken dialogue, and instead engage with a labyrinthian narrative structure that relies heavily on musical scores and which draws inspiration from a broad array of literary sources, from Eastern European poetry and writing to South American magical realism. 

The Brothers Quay are recognized as the most accomplished animation artists to have emerged in recent decades. Best known for their filmmaking, they have also brought their unique vision to stage design for opera, ballet, and theatre, and provided animation for the new Gucci Bloom campaign. Their work has received widespread recognition and countless awards. Their best-known work, Street of Crocodiles (1986) was selected by director Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best-animated films of all time and was included on Jonathan Romney’s list of the ten best films in any medium. They also received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play, The Chairs (1998). Their work has influenced a generation of filmmakers, including director Christopher Nolan, who in 2015 directed the documentary Quay and curated a theatrical tour featuring their work.

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THE SCHOLAR’S IMPROV IV: A NEW DOPE

Scholar's Improv Event Poster

Unlike the first Star Wars movie, which said it was chapter four but was the first to come out, this Scholar’s Improv really is the fourth to appear. And the academic rebels really are going up against the evil Ivory Tower Empire of scholarly stodginess. Join the Resistance as DePaul professors and a troupe of professional Chicago comedians go toe-to-toe, with the comedians performing improv and the professors being challenged to lecture extemporaneously on surprise topics.

Led by improv comic Pete Parsons, the comedians will present six improvised scenes, showcasing their talent, quick minds, and artistry. These moments will be interspersed with mini-lectures by DePaul professors, each accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation in his or her field but which he or she has never seen before.

By the end of the evening, you’ll see that what academicians do by thinking, thinking on their feet, and making others think is a real art, and that what professional improv comedians do is a similarly intellectually and aesthetically rich enterprise worthy of serious scholarly reflection—as well as laughter. And the Death Star blows up (spoiler alert).

Featuring:

Megan Alderden (Criminology)

Steve Harp (The Art School)

Rick Lee (Philosophy) 

Jaime Waters (Catholic Studies)

Improv Comedians" Lisa Burton, Tim Dunn, Alaina Hoffman, Terrance Rogers, and Pete Parsons

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