Posts tagged with "University of Chicago"

Lanre Idewu

Actor, Producer, and Social Entrepreneur

Listen to Lanre Idewu speak to Vaughn Lowery via 360 MAG wherever podcasts can be found.

Lanre Idewu is a Nigerian American actor, producer, and social entrepreneur. He grew up on the south side of Chicago and majored in biochemistry with a minor in German and theater arts. Additionally, Lanre attended the University of Chicago School of Medicine.

There, he was drawn to the ability to heal and help through Film and Fitness. Today, he has become a celebrity fitness expert and on-air personality and is dedicated to positive programming in both fields. He has over 20 years of Exercise, Nutrition, and Personal Development. ”I run a lot,” says Lanre. This is a form of meditation and relaxation. Although, he notes that “what I’ve been working on most recently is sitting quietly.”

Joe Dispenza is a doctor and writer who has become essential in Lanre’s life. His books on silence and listening are wonderful for him: Joe Dispenza who I have been reading a lot about listening to a lot has taught me to be able to control my breath and just allow the energy to flow.”

Lanre Idewu is known for several well-known series like South Side (2019), Sherman’s Showcase (2019), and Arrested Development (2003). Additionally, he was the COO of Queen Nefertari Productions (QNP), a film and television production company. A fun fact is that through QNP, he was able to help launch Gersh’s Film Finance and Packaging division.

In 2010, Variety magazine named him a ‘Future Media Maven’ as COO. Lanre manages a multi-million-dollar film fund and equally focuses on analytical, creative, and visionary responsibilities. ”We’re bringing a new level of transparency to the deals we make and we’re demanding the same from everyone we choose to do business with,” he says, noting that the market is now strong for projects that require little capital.

He has worked on various film and television projects for FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, ComedyCentral, Showtime, BET, E!, CW, iTunes, TF1, ZDF, Netflix, Magnolia Pictures, and more. Idewu produced the Cannes Film Festival “New Growth” and “Die Expats”.

Lanre has not only become the Vice President of The Geffen Playhouse Advisory Council but also a mentor to the NFL Player Association’s Pro Hollywood and ultimately a founding member of the Catalyst Board for the Sundance Film Festival. He is also a certified trainer and fitness model for the P90X fitness system.

‘’Believe in yourself as if you have to find a way to channel the noise and stay focused on what you want, not necessarily how things look right now,’’ says Lanre Idewu. Wellness, Mental Health, Justice, Women’s Empowerment, and Homelessness are the causes near and dear to his heart.

Follow Lanre Idewu on Instagram I Twitter

Article: Andrea Esteban, Vaughn Lowery

Persepolis Reimagined

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Getty has launched Persepolis Reimagined, an immersive web experience that lets visitors explore the ceremonial capital of the ancient Persian Empire at its height. Visitors can walk in the footsteps of ancient dignitaries through the most accurate recreation of Persepolis to date, and learn about the art, architecture, and customs of this iconic monument to imperial power.

The experience is available across desktop and mobile and will soon be viewable in multiple languages, including Arabic, Farsi, French, Hindi, Spanish, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and English.

Founded by Darius I around 518 BC, Persepolis was an embodiment of the Achaemenid imperial ideology, which is reflected in its art and architecture. It served as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian kings and thrived for nearly 200 years. Though Alexander the Great looted and set fire to Persepolis in 330 BC, its ruins survive and are a source of national pride for modern-day Iranians as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Visitors begin their tour at the Gate of All Nations, the main entrance into Persepolis. After traversing a massive flight of 111 steps, they reach a gateway flanked by two massive and brightly painted bull statues that served as symbolic guardians of the city.

After the grand entrance, visitors encounter the Apadana (a great reception hall), the Palace of Xerxes (a place for ceremonies and rituals), the Southeastern Palace (royal residences), and the Royal Treasury, ending their journey with the impressive Hall of 100 Columns.

Along the way, visitors can also click to learn more about the many art objects and rituals that characterized the city, including modes of proper tribute and gift-giving, royal banquets, and Persian court dress. Additional present-day views of surviving architecture and artworks can also be viewed on the website.

The experience highlights that Achaemenid royal art incorporated craftsmanship and traditions from their vast and diverse empire, including Iranian architecture, Assyrian and Babylonian palace decorations, Egyptian design motifs, Greek and Indian craftsmanship and more.

Persepolis Reimagined is the result of a collaboration between historians, creatives, and technologists, including Getty’s own experts in the Museum and Digital departments, academic consultants from the University of California, Los Angeles and creative and technical production from MediaMonks. The immersive website is a part of the Getty Villa Museum exhibition, Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World, on view through August 8 at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. The web experience presents select objects from the exhibition in the context of life at Persepolis, bridging surviving physical artifacts with this standalone digital recreation.

Weinberg/Newton Gallery Features MacArthur Fellows

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WEINBERG/NEWTON GALLERY PRESENTS MACARTHUR FELLOWS WENDY EWALD AND AMALIA MESA-BAINS IN TOWARD COMMON CAUSE, A COLLABORATION WITH THE SMART MUSEUM OF ART

Weinberg/Newton Gallery (688 N. Milwaukee Ave.), a non-commercial gallery dedicated to promoting social justice causes, announced a collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago as an exhibiting gallery for a multi-venue exhibition taking place throughout 2021. Featuring the work of 29 MacArthur Fellows, Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 is centered on the idea of art as a catalyst for social change. Through speculation, reflection and action, Toward Common Cause explores our current socio-political moment, in which questions of inclusion, exclusion, ownership and rights of access are constantly challenged. Extending from the exhibition’s main venue at the Smart Museum, Weinberg/Newton will present work by MacArthur fellows Wendy Ewald and Amalia Mesa-Bains, whose projects focus on Latinx migration in Chicago. Weinberg/Newton’s participation in the exhibition will run from Sept. 24 through Dec. 18.

Wendy Ewald, a collaborative photographer known for weighing questions of identity and cultural differences, will feature a newly commissioned project that explores the personal challenges facing refugees and immigrants from Mexico. Together with teaching artists from the Smart Museum and Diane Dammeyer Initiative, Ewald conducted a series of photographic workshops with youth at Centro Romero, a community-based organization that serves the refugee immigrant population on the northeast side of Chicago. The students created photographs and writings that express their inner lives, dreams and concerns about contemporary immigration. Ewald will incorporate these works into the exhibition, along with a series of photographs and a film made in Chiapas, Mexico in 1991.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, a multi-media installation artist and cultural critic, weaves together intricate stories of her Mexican heritage and Chicana identity at the intersection of art, science and history. At Weinberg/Newton, Mesa-Bains will present Dos Mundos, a personal and historical meditation on migration to Chicago through the lens of her own family that makes visible the countless vital contributions the Mexican community has made to the building of Chicago. Dos Mundos is composed of maps, digital prints, shadow boxes, folding books and ofrendas to celebrate this history through imagery and stories collected by Mesa-Bains.

Additionally, The Circle of Ancestors, an ofrenda from Amalia Mesa-Bains, will be featured at another Toward Common Cause venue: the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA), in the exhibition Día de Muertos – A Time to Grieve & Remember. The installation at the NMMA honors the Cornejo family of Mesa-Bains’ mother, while her work at Weinberg/Newton Gallery presents the archival and public record of the larger Mexican community in Chicago.

Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 is presented in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program and connects more than two dozen exhibitions, programs and research partner organizations across Chicago, allowing artists to present new and re-contextualized work. The organizing principle of “the commons” is a concept defined in MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, as “a social regime for managing a common resource.” This comprehensive presentation considers the extent to which resources including air, land, water and culture can be held in common. Each venue will create a space to raise questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership and rights of access. Toward Common Cause considers art’s pivotal role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness and a potential act of resistance.

About Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40

Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 is organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic and research partners across Chicago. It is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Toward Common Cause is curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. The full curatorial statement can be read HERE.

Additional support for individual projects has been provided by Allstate; the Terra Foundation for American Art; the National Endowment for the Arts; The Joyce Foundation; David Zwirner; Hauser & Wirth; a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry; the Visiting Fellows Program at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society; and the Smart Museum’s SmartPartners. In-kind support is provided by S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio, F.J. Kerrigan Plumbing Co. and JCDecaux.

About Wendy Ewald
Originally from Detroit, Wendy Ewald collaborated on photography projects for more than 50 years with children, families, women, workers and teachers. Engaging with communities internationally, she has been drawn into the lives of those with whom she works in the United States, Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico and Tanzania. Ewald’s practice encourages individuals to utilize cameras to photograph their lives, families and communities and to create images of their fantasies and dreams. In addition, she asks her collaborators to alter their images by drawing or writing to engage questions concerning individual authorship, power and identity. Ewald describes her conceptual work as expanding the role of esthetic discourse in pedagogy, challenging the viewer to see beneath the surface of relationships. She Is the 2010 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Award.

About Amalia Mesa-Bains
Amalia Mesa-Bains is a multimedia artist who contemplates the meanings of multiculturalism and demographic shifts in today’s climate within the United States, while drawing from the experiences of her Mexican heritage. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, in which she focused her doctoral dissertation on the influence of contemporary culture and climate on the personal development of 10 Chicana artists. Her scholarly research established her role as a cultural critic, and her clinical work has pushed her to investigate the psychological effects of colonial artifacts. This work has been at the core of her approach to making art a cultural process, deconstructing these stereotypes about non-European heritage and establishing new dialogue about Chicana culture. Mesa-Bains is the 1992 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Award.

About Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Weinberg/Newton Gallery is a non-commercial gallery with a mission to collaborate with nonprofit organizations and artists to educate and engage the public on social justice issues. Through artwork and programming, the gallery provides a vital space for open discourse on critical contemporary issues facing our communities. Connecting artists with social justice organizations, we work to drive change and cultivate a culture of consciousness.

History of Weinberg/Newton Gallery
In 2016, David Weinberg Photography became Weinberg/Newton Gallery. The change reflected the values of The Weinberg/Newton Gallery Family Foundation, which has been led jointly by David Weinberg and Jerry Newton since 2009.

LOLLAPALOOZA × DELTA VARIANT

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By: Clara Guthrie

Public health experts are warning that the crowded Lollapalooza music festival in downtown Chicago this past weekend may lead to a dramatic surge in Covid-19 cases, especially given the increasing risk of the Delta variant. Festival organizers estimate 100,000 people attended the event each of the four days, and neither social distancing nor mask wearing (for vaccinated attendees) was enforced.

Despite concerns from medical professionals and a steady rise in Delta variant cases leading up the festival, both the Chicago Department of Public Health and Lollapalooza’s health experts approved the production of the festival as planned ahead of time.

Although operating at full capacity, the festival did have certain security measures in place in order to protect its guests; to enter, people had to show either their Covid-19 vaccination card or proof of a negative Covid-19 test from the preceding 72 hours. According to the festival’s website, they also required those who are unvaccinated to wear a mask.

In a statement released Monday by festival organizers, it was revealed that 91% of the attendees showed proof of vaccination, and 8% showed negative Covid-19 tests. The last 1% were denied entry due to a lack of proper documentation.

These statistics are complicated, however, by a claim from a Chicago Tribune photo intern, Vashon Jordan Jr., that fake vaccination cards were being used at the event. On August 1st, he tweeted, “Fake Covid-19 vaccination cards are 100% a thing at Lollapalooza in Chicago. You can get it with a single-day wristband for $50. I have confirmed that it does work.” In a separate tweet he clarified, “And by ‘fake’ I mean it doesn’t belong to the holder.” Jordan Jr. also recorded maskless concert goers dancing in large crowds and boarding public transportation—where masks are explicitly required—after the day’s events.

According to Dr. Tina Tan, a professor at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who specializes in infectious diseases, the precautions taken by Lollapalooza were simply insufficient given the prevalence of the Delta variant. Tan said that a safer event would have maintained smaller crowds, enforced social distancing and masks, and only allowed vaccinated individuals to attend. “When you have 100,000 or more people who are in a fairly enclosed space and there’s no social distancing, the vast majority are not wearing masks, you are going to get some transmission of the Covid-19 Delta variant,” she said.

As of August 2nd, Chicago was reporting an average of 206 new cases each day, and many of those who are being hospitalized for Covid-19 are not vaccinated. These data reflect a recent and definite uptick in cases as the Delta variant poses a serious threat across the globe. Given the roughly two to 14 day incubation period for Covid-19, it is currently unclear just how Lollapalooza will affect these numbers in Chicago and its surrounding areas. According to Dr. Robert Citronberg, an infectious disease physician with Advocate Aurora Health, “The next couple of days you could potentially see cases. I think by next weekend we’re probably going to be having a good idea about how much transmission occurred because of Lollapalooza.”

What experts already know with certainty is that any transmission from Lollapalooza will not only affect Chicago and its suburbs but also the areas that people return home to after the festival, seeing as thousands of people travelled to Chicago just for the weekend. “The real problem is not so much that a bunch of young people who come into Chicago getting COVID at this event. The real problem is them taking it back to places that have very low vaccination rates,” Dr. Emily Landon, executive director for infection prevention and control at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said.

According to the New York Times, roughly 70% of American adults have received at least one shot: a goal that President Biden set for the country to hit by July 4th but that took almost an extra month to achieve. And many individual states are struggling to vaccinate their population and thus are grappling with new Covid-19 cases and Covid-related hospitalizations. Alabama and Mississippi have the lowest vaccination rates in the country, at 43.2% and 44% respectively. Illinois falls somewhere in the middle with 59% of its adults being fully vaccinated.

Lollapalooza’s controversy did not stop at Covid-19 concerns. On Sunday, the final day of performances, rapper DaBaby was pulled from his headlining spot after festival organizer caught wind of his previous homophobic comments. While performing at the Rolling Loud festival in Miami on July 25, DaBaby made discriminatory and incorrect comments about gay men and HIV, which he later defended in a series of 19 videos on his Instagram stories. “What I do at a live show is for the audience at the live show,” he said. “It’ll never translate correctly to somebody looking at a little five, six-second clip from their goddamn crib on their phone. […] Me and all my fans at the show, the gay ones and the straight ones, we turned the fuck up.”

Lollapalooza officials tweeted to announce DaBaby’s removal, saying, “Lollapalooza was founded on diversity, inclusivity, respect, and love. With that in mind, DaBaby will no longer be performing at Grant Park tonight.” Fellow rappers Young Thug and G Herbo took his place. On Monday, DaBaby took to Instagram to apologize “for my misinformed comments about HIV/AIDS and I know education on this is important.”

Looking beyond the festival’s drama, Rolling Stone took a moment to celebrate the most positive and powerful moments from Lollapalooza, saying, “it was full of life-affirming musical moments.”

Bruno Schulz’s Lasting Impact

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Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) created a rich symbolic world in his small body of literary work and in his graphic art that left a huge legacy in Polish literature and in Jewish literature outside Poland. His stories contained mainly in two collections, Cinnamon Shops (1934) and The Hourglass Sanatorium (1938), along with a few other stories published separately, critical works, and letters, are a testament to the fecund cultural environment of the East European region of Galicia between the wars. Schulz is a secular Jewish writer whose stories, which we know from the recent discovery of an early work entitled, Undula (1922) seem to come out of the themes in his artwork, but were forged into their mature form as letters to the Yiddish modernist poet Debora Vogel. He wrote them in Polish, was celebrated in Polish avantgarde circles, and the most extensive body of Schulz scholarship is in Polish. His work reflects the influence of German writer Thomas Mann, as well as Franz Kafka and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (author of Venus in Furs), who were German-language writers of non-German cities of the Austro-Hungarian empire like Schulz Prague and Lemberg (Lviv) respectively. Postwar Jewish writers in a variety of languages such as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Danilo Ki¡, David Grossman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, have created characters on the model of Schulz’s biography. In the confluence of cultures brought about by modernization and aggressive industrial forces in the Drohobycz-BorysŽaw oil producing region, Schulz’s idea of the writer sifting through the trash tandeta to find and reassemble mutilated fragments of cast-off mythologies or systems of meaning would become a model for generations of writers following the upheaval of the Second World War, post-Communism, and even post-Colonialism.

In this episode of “Encounters with Polish Literature,” we are focusing on Karen Underhill’s research into Schulz in the Jewish modernist context of his own day, rather than his post-Holocaust legacy among the international community of Jewish writers, or strictly in the Polish-language modernist context of writers like StanisŽaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (“Witkacy”) and Witold Gombrowicz or Polish writers influenced by or responding to Schulz in their work like Tadeusz Kantor, Agata Tuszyska, Stefan Chwin, and Olga Tokarczuk.

Finally, Prof. Underhill says a few words about the extensive interdisciplinary offerings in Polish studies at The University of Illinos Chicago.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York’s website. The linked page includes a bibliography of works in English by and about Schulz: Episode 5.

Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer

Natalia Iyudin, Producer

Upcoming Episodes

Episode 6 (July 1, 2021): Tadeusz Racewicz with Joanna Trzeciak (Kent State University).
Episode 7 (August 1, 2021): Zofia NaŽkowska with Ursula Phillips (translator)
Episode 8 (September 1, 2021): StanisŽaw Lem with Bozena Shallcross (University of Chicago)

This project is a part of the anniversary celebration of the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

David Axelrod & Karl Rove

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MasterClass, the online education company that enables anyone to learn from the best in the world, announced today that David Axelrod and Karl Rove, two of the most esteemed political strategists best known for respectively orchestrating winning presidential campaigns for Barack Obama and George W. Bush, are setting aside party affiliations to come together to teach the first MasterClass on campaign strategy and messaging. In this class, Axelrod and Rove will demystify the political campaign process and break down their philosophies on what it takes to plan and execute a winning campaign. The class is now available at www.masterclass.com/dakr. Enrollment for the class is $90 for lifetime access, or $180 per year for the All-Access Pass, which grants unlimited access to all new and existing classes.

“It has never been more important to understand how this world of politics works and how to win the hearts and minds of voters,” said David Rogier, co-founder and CEO of MasterClass. “The class isn’t about being a Democrat or Republican — it’s about two of the best political minds of our generation teaching how to win elections. David and Karl break down their respective campaign strategies and debate what is happening in the country today, and how we got here.”

In their MasterClass, Axelrod and Rove will provide perspectives from their professional experiences, as they share their passion for their work and for democracy. They will dive into successful communication and planning strategies from past presidential campaigns, covering the full scope of campaigning — from developing messages and mobilizing voters, to planning, fundraising and budgeting, as well as preparation tactics for debates. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the state of politics today and feel empowered to find their unique voice and place in the political process to help make an impact.

“Ronald Reagan used to say that our American experiment, our American democracy was always one generation away from extinction,” said Rove. “I hope that our MasterClass not only provides a better understanding of the inner workings of elections and politics, but also inspires students to get involved.”

“This is a confusing time in politics. On the one hand, there’s an enormous amount of rancor, with a president who very consciously plays base politics. On the other hand, I’ve seen a renewed sense of citizenship in response, with peoplerealizing the importance of getting involved,” said Axelrod. “As more people are getting engaged in politics, running for office and volunteering for candidates, we’ve designed this class to break down the campaign process.”

Axelrod served as chief strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 successful presidential bids and is credited with crafting the message of “change” that helped secure Obama’s historic victory. He later served as senior advisor in the Obama White House. Over the course of his career, Axelrod worked on nearly 150 campaigns that he chronicled in The New York Timesbestseller “Believer, My Forty Years in Politics.” He is currently a senior political commentator for CNN, host of the “The Axe Files” podcast, and founding director of the non-partisan Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

Rove, the deft political operative and fundraiser credited as “The Architect” by President George W. Bush of his victorious campaigns in 2000 and 2004, served as senior advisor and deputy chief of staff for the Bush administration. He is now a Fox News contributor, writes a weekly column forThe Wall Street Journal, and is the author of two books, “The Triumph of William McKinley” andThe New York Times bestseller “Courage and Consequence.”

Politics is the fifth new category MasterClass will launch this year as it continues to expand its catalogue across a range of subjects to offer educational, inspiring, and engaging classes taught by the world’s greatest minds. With more than 40 classes that dive into processes, techniques and philosophies, MasterClass helps students progress more rapidly towards their own mastery, explore a new passion, or learn a new skill. It offers a unique learning experience, including video lessons, interactive exercises, course materials, peer interaction, and more. All classes are available as part of an annual subscription for $180, or for individual purchase at $90 for lifetime access to the class, and can be accessed online at www.masterclass.com or on the MasterClass mobile app for iOS and Android.

View the trailer for David Axelrod and Karl Rove’s MasterClass below: http://youtu.be/E_jPAd0L3IA

ABOUT MASTERCLASS

Founded in 2015, MasterClass started with the idea that everyone should have “access to genius.” The premier online education platform provides affordable, engaging, and inspirational online classes taught by world-renowned instructors, making it possible for anyone to learn from the best.

MasterClass’ current roster of courses includes:

Culinary Arts: Gordon Ramsay (cooking), Alice Waters (home cooking), Thomas Keller (cooking techniques), Wolfgang Puck (cooking)

Film and Television: Werner Herzog (filmmaking), Martin Scorsese (filmmaking), Ron Howard (directing), Helen Mirren (acting), Samuel L. Jackson (acting), Judd Apatow (comedy), Spike Lee (filmmaking), Ken Burns (documentary filmmaking)

Music and Entertainment: Armin van Buuren (dance music), Christina Aguilera (singing), Usher (performance), Reba McEntire (country music), Herbie Hancock (jazz), Deadmau5 (music production), Hans Zimmer (film scoring), Steve Martin (comedy), Tom Morello (guitar)

Writing: James Patterson (writing), Aaron Sorkin (screenwriting), Shonda Rhimes (writing for television), David Mamet (dramatic writing), Judy Blume (writing), Malcolm Gladwell (writing), RL Stine (writing for young audiences), Margaret Atwood (creative writing)

Design, Photography and Fashion: Annie Leibovitz (photography), Frank Gehry (architecture), Diane von Furstenberg (how to build a fashion brand), Marc Jacobs (fashion design)

Sports and Games: Serena Williams (tennis), Stephen Curry (shooting, ball-handling, and scoring), Garry Kasparov (chess), Daniel Negreanu (poker)

Politics and Society: Jane Goodall (conservation), Bob Woodward (investigative journalism), David Axelrod and Karl Rove (campaign strategy)

Science: Chris Hadfield (space exploration)

For more information, please visit www.masterclass.com.

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Twitter @masterclass

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Twitter @davidaxelrod

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Twitter @KarlRove