Chicago Reader February 2026 Issue

FEBRUARY 2026

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NOW PLAYING THRU MAR 22!

Written by

AUGUST STRINDBERG

In a new version by

CONOR MCPHERSON

Directed by ensemble member

YASEN PEYANKOV

A funny and ferocious masterclass in marital warfare, this wicked tale features three generations of Steppenwolf ensemble members: Cliff Chamberlain from Broadway’s The Minutes, Jeff Perry from ABC’s Scandal and Kathryn Erbe from NBC’s Law and Order.

DON’T MISS THE REST OF OUR 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON! Want two tickets to each of the last three shows in our 50th at an incredible price? You want the Black Card. That’s six flex tickets that revolve around your schedule, plus all the perks of membership. steppenwolf.org/blackcard

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FEBRUARY 2026

| VOLUME 55, NUMBER 13

THIS ISSUE:

4 Editor’s Note | Conway Our moment of rebirth

5 Reader Letters

Please, not a higher gas bill

FOOD & DRINK

6 Reader Bites | McFadden & Sula New picks from No Pasa Nada and Maplewood Brewery & Distillery, plus a few old favorites

INTERIM PUBLISHER

Rob Crocker

CHIEF OF STAFF/SALES DIRECTOR

NEWS & POLITICS 8 Just Neighbors | Prout

Chicago housing workers call the city’s homeless encampment closures “unconscionable.”

12 Feature | Lucas

Ellen Kaulig

EDITOR IN CHIEF

8

Sarah Conway CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Corianton Hale

South-side residents are organizing around a $9 billion megadevelopment, drawing on decades of resistance to corporate interests.

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

Savannah Ray Hugueley FEATURES AND COPY EDITOR

Kerry Cardoza

ARTS & CULTURE

PRODUCTION MANAGER AND STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

22 Poetry Feature | Barnes

Kirk Williamson

Maggie Queeney reflects on a decade building the Poetry Foundation’s nowdiscontinued adult education programs.

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Amber Huff

24 Book Review | Prout

GRAPHIC DESIGNER & PHOTO RESEARCHER

Shira Friedman-Parks

Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls explores America’s history of book censorship through the 1920s case against queer literary figure Margaret C. Anderson.

6

THEATER

The next iteration of the 400 Theater

NEWS EDITOR

Shawn Mulcahy PROJECTS EDITOR

Jamie Ludwig

40

12

35 Moviegoer | Sachs Fuck ICE

MUSIC

36 Feature | Galil

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Collage by Shira Friedman-Parks; illustration by cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio; photo by Miguel Limón; DJ Simmy, photo by ThoughtPoet

ADVERTISING

42 Preview | Meyer

The Frequency Festival connects a farflung constellation of sounds.

46 Chicagoans of Note | Caporale Sold, deep listening DJ

50 Calendar

A curated monthly guide to what’s actually worth leaving your house for.

SENIOR WRITERS

Leor Galil, Mike Sula FEATURES WRITER

Katie Prout

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER

Devyn-Marshall Brown (DMB)

DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

South-side native DJ Simmy works every lane.

READER RADAR

Tyra Nicole Triche

Micco Caporale

40 City of Win | Eferighe

Duke Tumatoe puts serious work into his irreverent blues.

STRATEGIC CONTENT EDITOR

STAFF WRITER

Angel Tapes helps emerging musicians take wing.

48 The Secret History of Chicago Music | Krakow

MUSIC EDITOR

Philip Montoro Taryn McFadden

As the winter theater season kicks off, several companies are preparing new homes and expanded ways of serving their communities.

32 Reopening | Silverman-Ascher

Kerry Reid

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD AND DRINK

26 New Spaces | Reid

FILM

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR

Photography by Kirk Williamson Creative direction by Corianton Hale

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ON THE COVER New egg, who dis?

Joey Mandeville

Reader (ISSN 1096-6919) is published monthly 2930 S. Michigan, Suite 102 Chicago, IL 60616, 312-392-2934, chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2026 Chicago Reader All rights reserved. Chicago Reader, Reader, and reversed R: Registered Trademarks ®

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FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 3

MONDAY NIGHT

EDITOR’S NOTE

FOODBALL

The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, now at Thattu, 2601 W. Fletcher Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

Feb. 9 It’s all Greek to Meze Table @meze.table Feb. 16 Pizza night with Tripping Billy @therealbillyz Feb. 23 Shrimpin’ ain’t easy with Jennifer Moore of South Side Shrimp @moore_flavor @southsideshrimponkedzie March 2 FatCap hits the strip and serves it @fatcapchicago March 9 Mokupuni Hawai’i meets Mexico with Estrella del Mar @estrelladelmarchicago March 16 Kimski 3.0 preview with Won Kim @kimskichicago @revisecmw March 23 Ramen and dumplings by Tony B. and Late Night Noods @eatsteakchips @latenightnoodsnola March 30 Revenge of Enmolada! @enmoladachicago

Head to chicagoreader.com/foodball for weekly menus and ordering info!

4

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

The Reader is entering its own moment of rebirth. SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

I

n subzero January, the deep green trunk of my monstera houseplant broke clean off from its pot. The leathery, split, hole-punched leaves curled away as I hurriedly placed it in water on my sun-soaked apartment mantle, wondering if it, too, would eventually root and then die, like all the other propagations I’d tried before.

Last week, while the Reader staff was putting together this issue, I noticed a new leaf emerge and unfurl, splitting for the first time before slowly opening into a broad, bold green halo above its watery roots. At that moment, I knew what this resilience—this resistance—really was: a quiet miracle.

The Reader is entering its own moment of rebirth. This is our first edition in our new monthly magazine format, available on the first Wednesday of every month at more than 600 locations citywide.

Print is very much alive here—and so is our digital newsroom. Every day at chicagoreader.com, our reporting, criticism, and investigations reach audiences across the city and beyond.

We want to be in your home, too, sharing our sharp, culture-obsessed, and opinionated coverage of the city, guided by a strong instinct for what everyday Chicagoans are talking about, or will be soon.

This month, we bring you our Winter Theater & Arts Preview, a special Reader edition that highlights the city’s upcoming arts and culture offerings. Within, we’re launching the Reader Radar, our staff-

curated guide to events worth leaving your home for, spanning music, film, visual and performing arts, literature, and cultural happenings. 2026: Analog is in.

We’re also doubling down on fearless, community-driven journalism. In this issue, award-winning features writer Katie Prout begins a new accountability series, Just Neighbors, examining the city’s homeless encampment sweeps, focusing on the human impact of a fragmented, interdepartmental process; contributor Jasmine Barnes profiles the poet and educator who built the Poetry Foundation’s recently sunsetted adult education programs; and we bring you cultural coverage that highlights emerging local artists and musicians, like south-side native DJ Simmy who’s spinning tracks, producing music, and more.

The Reader’s future is built on a fivedecade legacy of groundbreaking work and a newsroom that truly loves you, Chicago. As we step into a new future with new owners (hi, Noisy Creek), we are committed to cultivating new voices who will tell our city’s stories with rigor, clarity, and care.

At the heart of it all is service: to Chicago, to its people, and to the belief that even amid fragile beginnings, like a new monstera leaf, something vibrant, resilient, and enduring can grow. v

—Sarah Conway, editor in chief sconway@chicagoreader.com

READER LETTERS

Have a spicy or sweet opinion about a story in this month’s issue?

Bills, bills, bills

Peoples Gas’s costly plan burdens Chicagoans and the planet.

LAN TRUONG

C

hicagoans deserve to know how their gas bills are being affected by the state-granted utility monopoly, Peoples Gas. The company has requested approval from the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) for its Pipe Retirement Program (PRP), which would replace every old gas pipe in the city with a new one. This plan would not only raise consumers’ gas prices but also lock Chicago into fossil fuel infrastructure until the end of the century.

Peoples Gas filed yet another rate-hike request with the ICC in January, which would increase the average Chicago home-heating bill by $10 per month if approved by the commission.

This comes at a time when affordability is already a serious concern: roughly 20 percent of Chicago residents are behind on their gas bills each month, and this plan would only push costs higher.

Residents deserve a say in how their

money is spent, especially when safer, more affordable, and more environmentally friendly alternatives exist to prevent dangerous failures in aging gas lines. The ICC and Peoples Gas should consider alternatives such as pipe liners and targeted pipe repairs, rather than launching an expensive, decades-long replacement effort.

The ICC must step in and reject Peoples Gas’s proposal to pass its reckless spending onto residents. Chicagoans deserve a clean, affordable, and responsible plan to address safety risks.

—Eloise Lyons, DePaul University student, Lakeview Send letters about our stories or happenings in Chicago to themail@chicagoreader.com and include your postal address.

Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Or strong feelings about events in Chicago and beyond?

Send letters to

er.com themail@chicagoread address. and include your postal

r length and clarity Letters may be edited fo edium, including a and published in any m issue. future Chicago Reader

themail@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 5

FOOD & DRINK READER BITES

It's all good

New picks from No Pasa Nada and Maplewood Brewery & Distillery, plus a few old favorites

BY KERRY CARDOZA, TARYN MCFADDEN, MIKE SULA, ANDREA THOMPSON

F

or nearly two years now, the Reader has been celebrating the local culinary scene with Reader Bites, a regular column in which Chicagoans document memorable food, drinks, and atmospheres.

As the food and drink editor, I’m constantly delighted and surprised by the ideas that my colleagues and writers pitch for the column. Sometimes the pick is a no-brainer—like, yes, I could’ve bet that a chai leche flan brioche doughnut with a crackly caramel shell is indeed life-changing. But then someone else suggests a simple sandwich, a mysteriously meat-free tonkotsu ramen, or a pizza the length of a yardstick,

ALOO PARATHA AT ANNAPURNA SIMPLY VEGETARIAN

I first ate at this 43-year-old South Indian standby during an informal Devon Avenue food crawl with my friends. We started there with paratha, pani puri, and chai; shopped around Patel Brothers; nibbled on masala dosa, idli, and sambar vada at Udupi Palace, plus coffee and a long break to digest; enjoyed rose falooda and other treats at King Sweets; then ended the day overstuffed with butter paneer curry, veg thali, and more chai from Ghareeb Nawaz.

To the surprise of everyone in the group, our mutually agreed upon best bite of the day was also the first. The aloo paratha at counter-service cafe Annapurna stood out against a full day’s worth of sweet and savory delectables—and, no, I have to insist that it wasn’t just because we were hungriest in the morning.

The flaky potato-stuffed flatbread is the perfect vehicle to scoop the rich, spiced chana masala. Drizzle some cooling raita over the chickpea curry, and don’t be deterred when it drips down your hand; just shovel the bite in your mouth, use

and I have to trust in the palates of others. Of course, it always pays off, and each contribution adds to our archive of Reader-recommended establishments and menu items.

Here’s a spread of Reader Bites columns—some old, some new—featuring their accompanying delectable illustrations by local artist cori nakamura lin. It’s a fitting winter arts celebration of the original art style, to which we’ll soon say goodbye; much like the Reader has a new look and a new print schedule, cori has a refreshing R Bites redesign in the works. Watch this space . . .

Taryn McFadden

your greasy fingers to pop in a tangy piece of achar, let the layers of flavor wash over you, and go back for more.

Taryn McFadden Annapurna Simply Vegetarian, 2600 W. Devon, 773-764-1858, $11.99, eatannapurna.com Originally published in the March 27, 2025 issue

BOMBÓN AT CADINHO BAKERY & CAFE

McKinley Park’s Cadinho Bakery & Cafe is inspired by the culinary delights of Portugal. But the idea for its mouthwatering bombón espresso drink—technically of Spanish origin—actually came from a visit that proprietor Alejandra Rivera made to her hometown of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The shot-sized beverage is made by carefully layering milk foam, espresso, and condensed milk. (Nondairy milk options are available.)

Cadinho’s bombón is the perfect corrective to the achingly sweet, supersize drinks that have become ubiquitous at certain coffee chains that shall remain nameless. The drink’s layers are presented in such a way that each flavor hits your palate one at a time. It starts with warm

Aloo paratha cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio milk, followed by a strong, slightly sweet blend of Latin American espresso by Metric called En Masse. There’s just a dollop of condensed milk at the end, which adds the ideal minor note of sweetness.

From where I hail in Massachusetts, Portuguese bakeries are commonplace; in Chicago, the food of my hometown can be nearly impossible to find. Stumbling upon Cadinho, which opened its brickand-mortar in 2024, was a godsend. I’ll find any excuse I can to journey south and pick up one of Rivera’s flawless pastéis de nata—and now I’m dreaming about her bombóns too.

Kerry Cardoza

kissed char and lush, bloody beefiness.

Jauregui understands that you’re more estranged from your animal instincts than your animal is from her own, and while you’re waiting for him to build your taco, he’ll offer the beast a lagniappe, forever usurping its loyalty.

But the Jalisco native’s top priority is actually your fidelity. That’s plain in the care he applies to the small handful of things he’s focused on. Last spring, when he mounted his motto over Lawrence Avenue, signifying “It’s all good,” he was quickly celebrated for his trio of tacos al carbon, particularly for the smoky, spin-

Cadinho Bakery & Cafe, 3483 S. Archer, $5, 773-801-0508, cadinhobakery.com

Originally published in the May 29, 2025 issue

CARNE ASADA TACOS AT NO PASA NADA

Carne asada tacos cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

6

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

All this time, you assumed you were your dog’s best friend, when really it was Isaac Jauregui.

You can put this to the test by ordering a couple carne asada tacos from Jauregui’s Mayfair trailer.

The canine will pant and drool as the taquero sears your arrachera over live charcoal, then hacks it against the grain, achieving an equilibrium of crusty, smoke-

Bombón cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

FOOD & DRINK ning cones of porky al pastor, and the crispy-gooey-cheesy fungal kiss to planteaters. Wedged in front of a muffler shop, NPN almost achieved more acclaim for its molcajete mountains of chunky guac than its simple steak taco.

But simplicity on a corn tortilla is this skilled specialist’s deadliest weapon: salty, marbled nuggets topped with chopped red onion, bracing cilantro, and a fat avocado wedge, spiked with lime and lashings of chipotle or tomatillo salsa (or both).

If you’re attacking these generously apportioned tacos on NPN’s sheltered postage stamp patio, this is your opportunity to win back the dog’s affections with a bite or two from your own hand. Jauregui just wants the best for you both.

Mike Sula No Pasa Nada, 4501 W. Lawrence, $5, @npasanada57

LAZY DUMPLINGS AT MAPLEWOOD BREWERY & DISTILLERY

If one becomes what one eats, there might not be a more full-circle plate of food than the leniwe kluski that comes out of this Avondale brewpub’s new kitchen.

Chef Joanna Janczurewicz’s Polishpowered menu is just one recent diversification this decade-old brewery adopted to resist the shrinkage that’s besetting the craft beer industry.

But among the sausages, goulash, and kasha cabbage rolls, the required signature might be these silky, pillowy, pierogi leniwe, or, in Ukrainian, “lazy” varenyky, so called by virtue of being relatively less laboriously constructed than their unfilled counterparts.

Like Italy’s ricotta-based gnudi, flour and eggs are bound with farmer’s cheese and formed into diamonds, briefly boiled and drained, slipped into a warm cream sauce with bacon and sweet peas, then showered in parm, lemon panko, and fresh dill.

They’re buoyant and ethereal, and it seems a violation of physical law that they survive the journey from plate to mouth intact. But as they melt on the tongue and slide effortlessly down the throat one after another, your metabolism slows, and you’ll resign yourself to your own fate as a sentient but lazy dumpling.

Mike Sula

shelf-stable pantry staples that includes whole pickled vegetables and fruits, cheese and butter, syrups and jams, and flowers and herbs, all put up for winter, hard times, or just to bestow upon friends and family. It’s the embodiment of homemade granny food.

Walk the aisles of your favorite Middle Eastern grocery store, and they’re full of mass-produced, commercial “mouneh.” I don’t have a teta myself, but even I can tell these aren’t made with much love.

But you can find homemade mouneh in Chicago. When you walk through the doors of this Albany Park bakery, your head involuntarily jerks to the left, following your nose to the aroma of fresh manakeesh, topped with za’atar and cheese, rising from the oven.

Don’t get distracted. Look down to the left where there’s a modest display of unlabeled glass canning jars. There’s probably some labneh balls—eggshell-white orbs of soft cheese glowing through golden olive oil like the moon on a foggy night. Maybe there’s a melange of chopped vegetables that looks and tastes suspiciously like giardiniera.

If you’re lucky, makdous are in stock.

Those are oil-cured baby eggplants stuffed with a mix of coarsely chopped walnuts, red peppers, garlic, and chiles.

They’re closely associated with Syria, probably because they’re mentioned as early as the 13th century in a cookbook

Lazy dumplings cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

can’t tell you much about the woman who makes the makdous at Sanabel, but I’m sure hers are different from those of the woman who stocks Old School in Palos Hills.

The former are tart, with gentle, lingering heat, textured but soft and spreadable, like chunky peanut butter. It’s common to eat them at breakfast with flatbread—say, Sanabel’s pita or manakeesh— smeared with her labneh and topped with the chopped makdous. It’s a tangy, one-two punch eye-opener your imaginary teta intends only with love.

Mike Sula Sanabel Bakery, 4213 N. Kedzie, $13.99, 773-539-5409, sanabelchicago.com

Originally published online January 12, 2026

ORANGE DREAM SMOOTHIE AT JACKALOPE COFFEE & TEA HOUSE Orange Dream smoothie cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

from Aleppo. Most modern recipes call for blanching the eggplants, slitting them open, and salting the insides before pressing with a heavy weight until they lose their liquid. Once stuffed and packed, they’re left to marinate in the oil, developing flavor until teta says it’s time.

But methods and seasonings vary. I

Feel like going back to a more cheerful time? It seems to drive many of us in our current climate, and Jackalope Coffee & Tea House certainly has my number in this regard. Personally, one of my favorite early memories remains the pleasing taste of an orange push-up ice cream treat, and Jackalope’s Orange Dream smoothie is, well, a dream. One sip is all it takes to have my childhood dreams come flooding back.

In this case, though, the Orange Dream achieves that rare feat of being even better than my memories, since this smoothie comes with optional whipped cream to add to the decadence. With all the lure of ice cream sliding down your throat, invoking summer even when it’s chilly outside, the Orange Dream is the perfect comfort food. It’s a simple, no-frills delight that I personally find irresistible at any time of the year.

It’s always fun to treat yourself in a way that feels both nostalgically comforting and very current. Trust a small, local cafe (with a whole lot of character, if you happen to stop by in person) to deliver a treat that can not only live up to memories and expectations, but surpass them.

Andrea Thompson Jackalope Coffee & Tea House, 755 W. 32nd, $4.75–$5.50, 312-888-3468, jackalopecoffee.com Originally published in the March 13, 2025 issue v

Maplewood Brewery & Distillery, 2717 N. Maplewood, $18, 773-270-1061, maplewoodbrew.com

MAKDOUS AT SANABEL BAKERY

Not everybody has a jadda, a sitto, or a teta.

But even if your grandmother does come from Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine, does she make mouneh? That’s a Lebanese word that refers to the practice of preserving seasonal food for eating when it’s out of season—a disappearing craft that’s nonetheless practiced all over the Levant. It’s a universe of hundreds of

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about?

Makdous cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio

fooddrink@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 7

NEWS & POLITICS

Chicago housing workers call the city’s encampment closures ‘unconscionable’ Public encampments provide resources and community for people experiencing homelessness, but city crews repeatedly evict residents and leave them with nowhere else to go.

BY KATIE PROUT

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

8

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

NEWS & POLITICS

J

ay and John are two unhoused which to move. The Reader observed an lessness—they perpetuate it.

Chicagoans who live in an encampment closure on December 6, The Reader emailed Chicago’s chief encampment under the Sacra- 2024, when temperatures dropped to 16 homelessness officer, Sendy Soto, as well mento Avenue viaduct just south degrees Fahrenheit. Many, like John and as spokespeople for both Soto and Mayor of Chicago Avenue in Garfield Jay, ended up in a new camp down the Brandon Johnson, six times over the past Park. The men, both middle-aged, said street. year in an attempt to better understand they’ve survived years of homelessness in John and Jay’s experiences are not the city’s approach to evicting unhoused the city by learning to rely on and be there unique. Over the past couple of years, city Chicagoans from the shelters they build for others. To them, this encampment, like crews have systemically evicted residents to survive. In October, the Reader also others across the city, is more than a spot from public spaces in direct opposition asked how the kidnapping of housed and outdoors where one or more unhoused to the city’s own policy goals of making unhoused Chicagoans alike by federal people live. It’s a community where people homelessness “brief and nonrecurring.” agents impacted current plans for share resources that save each other’s Housing workers question why the city encampment closures. Neither Soto’s nor lives: tents and blankets, clothes and food, continues to evict unhoused people. Johnson’s offices answered the request for phones and the opioid overdose reversal There are far from enough shelter beds comment. drug Narcan. In an encampment, people in Chicago for everyone who is currently “I don’t feel that encampments should split car rides to the emergency room and unhoused as it is, and shelters frequently be closed at all,” said Ryan Spangler, street watch each other’s pets.

Encampments are “camaraderie,” said Jay. “You obviously want to stay more with people that you know versus people that you don’t.” He pointed to his friend John. “Now that he’s staying here, I trust him.”

Before moving to the Sacramento viaduct, the two men lived a few yards around the corner, underneath the viaduct on Chicago Avenue and Albany Avenue. In May, a nearby shooting left one person 0 Prior to an encampment cleaning or closure, Department of Family and dead. Shortly after, two other people Support Services (DFSS) outreach teams usually notify residents in person, were shot but survived. None of the post dated signs around the camp, and mark tents with stickers noting they’ll victims nor the shooters lived at the be thrown away if not claimed and moved. Advance notice of cleanings and encampment, according to residents closure can range from weeks to as little as 24 hours, and the city also and outreach workers who spoke with reserves the right to conduct immediate “emergency” services. the Reader, but the camp was closed within a week nonetheless.

0 On cleaning day, workers from the Department of Streets and Sanitation (DSS) “They let us know that everybody remove encampment trash and clean any city-provided portable toilets. was gonna leave, whether we wanted If an encampment is under a viaduct, residents may be required to move to or not,” John recalled. “We tried to their shelters and belongings so workers can power wash the sidewalk. not leave, to protest it, tell them we’re not going nowhere.” But when police 0 In contrast, an encampment closure, said Ali Simmons with the Law Project at showed up with guns, they had no Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness, “is when they [clean] and they force choice. “You can do nothing! It’s the the people to move, and they completely just ransack their encampment, police, the whole city. You just gotta throwing away whatever is left over.” leave. Where you go, it doesn’t matter.

But how much difference is it to be in 0 When determining which items residents can keep and which must be this one versus that?” he continued, thrown away, the city follows policies established in the Bryant Agreement, gesturing toward Chicago Avenue. “I which outlines what possessions unhoused people are allowed to keep don’t understand.” on some public property, as well as cleaning procedures, the result of The closure of the Chicago Avenue a lawsuit against the city brought by unhoused people living on Lower encampment “literally made no Wacker, although the agreement expired in 2019. Chicago police join DSS sense whatsoever,” said Ali Simmons, for cleanups and closures, and if the encampment is in a public park, Chicago senior case and street outreach Parks District staff may participate as well. worker at the Law Project at Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness. In an interview, Simmons pointed to INFOGRAPHIC BY AMBER HUFF the closure as an example of what he sees as the futility and waste of encampment evictions more broadly. “If deny available beds to Chicago’s sizable outreach supervisor with social service nonprofit Heartland Alliance Health. “It’s one person on a block is making a ruckus, disabled homeless population. [authorities] don’t come in and force the At the same time, the Trump admin- a privilege and a blessing to have people whole block to move,” he said. “So, why istration is threatening federal funding that are experiencing homelessness out in is it any different for somebody experi- cuts for housing that could return at the open, where we can serve them, where encing homelessness? [The city] collec- least 5,892 Chicagoans to homelessness. we can find them.” Homelessness itself is tively blamed everybody and displaced the These impending cuts would dramati- a tragedy, he said, a preventable outcome whole encampment.” cally increase the risk of premature death of policy choices.

“If you’re worried about our safety, put During encampment closures, people for the unhoused and worsen Chicago’s lose their belongings, relationships, and already dire lack of affordable housing. us in a hotel!” said Jay. He and John said tent homes. Chicago evicts people from Both unhoused Chicagoans and the they and other encampment residents encampments in below-freezing tempera- workers who scramble to connect them were offered no alternatives when they tures, regardless of whether or not each to housing say that the city of Chicago’s were evicted from the Chicago Avenue resident has a safe, permanent home in encampment evictions do not solve home- viaduct with less than a week’s notice.

ENCAMPMENT SWEEPS and CLOSURES

Camp residents scrambled to make other plans. Some, unaware of the upcoming closure, returned to find that their shelter and belongings had vanished. “Whatever you couldn’t carry that day, [the city] got rid of it,” said John. “The people that weren’t there, they lost everything.”

H

omeless encampments in Chicago have become easy scapegoats for the city’s social and political ills. They are blamed for neighborhood violence, and their residents are described as safety threats just for being visibly impoverished or using drugs. But encampment inhabitants are people—not symbols—and there’s a reason that people gather in tents, yurts, or other hardscrabble shelters put together in Chicago parks, along the lakefront, and on abandoned land: They’re neighborhoods, albeit neighborhoods that exist outside the law.

Encampments form when “people come together for connection, and come together for protection,” said Simmons. They include tents and rough shelters, as well as people sleeping out under the open sky.

They can be one person or dozens.

But all encampments begin the same way—“by not having housing,” explained Jay. Johnson and Soto have both publicly expressed that homelessness is not a crime and vowed that Chicago will not criminalize homelessness. Indeed, Johnson has made reducing homelessness, increasing access to affordable mental health care, and treating unhoused people with dignity and compassion a cornerstone of his public policy. He campaigned hard for Bring Chicago Home, the failed referendum that would have provided the city with a desperately needed dedicated revenue stream for homelessness services. He ran on a platform that included support for Treatment Not Trauma, the progressive campaign to reopen shuttered mental health clinics, alongside other communitycentered care. Johnson has reopened some clinics since taking office, and during his administration, access to the opioid overdose reversal medication Narcan has expanded via vending machines and newsstands throughout the city. From the streets of the campaign to his office in City Hall, Johnson has not shied away from telling the story of Leon, his brother who died “addicted and unhoused.”

“I believe my brother’s time on this earth would have been extended if he had the language to express what he needed,” Johnson wrote in a Chicago Tribune editorial.

There are unhoused people on this earth, here in Chicago, now, who say that encampment closures hurt them.

“If they move us, we don’t know where to go,” Mama, a recent cancer survivor who FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 9

NEWS & POLITICS lives in the Legion Park encampment, told Block Club Chicago in November 2025, after learning that the encampment would be closed sometime in early 2026. (“Mama” asked Block Club not to use her name.) She said she “lost everything” when the city forced her to leave a different encampment in the same park in September. That encampment included wooden shelters hand-built by camp residents: The city destroyed these shelters, but, reported Block Club, told residents they could still live in the park so long as they stayed in tents instead. Then, in November, the city sent a letter to Alderperson Samantha Nugent to announce a “directed effort towards housing and shelter” in early 2026 that “will prevent the encampment from returning at Legion Park.” Residents would be prevented from returning, the letter promised, by park security and “the City of Chicago.”

“We don’t deserve to be forgotten. We’re not bad people,” Melissa, of the now-closed Humboldt Park encampment, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2024. Like others, Melissa and her partner Porfirio did not have an apartment before they were forced from the camp.

The Chicago Department of Family Support Services (DFSS) is the lead city department on encampment closure days. According to the city’s 2025 Annual Report on Homelessness, DFSS recommends providing a minimum of four to six weeks’ notice to camp residents before turning to “enforcement mechanisms” such as arrest, “in accordance with the City’s policy to lead with a personcentered services approach.”

The report describes encampment closures as “trauma-informed . . . resolutions,” but the four housing workers and two unhoused Chicagoans the Reader spoke to for this story said they’re nothing more than evictions. “It’s not much different than throwing you out of your house,” John explained. Gesturing to the tents under the viaduct behind him, he said, “That’s your home. Obviously, you’re there because you got nowhere else to go.”

And like traditional evictions, instead of leading to permanent stable housing, encampment evictions force many people to move from one unstable camp to another, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and pain.

The city claims it “does not close encampments unless there is a safety issue, a policy change, or a project by another city, State, or private partner that requires relocation and closure.”

Currently, in practice, notification of a camp’s impending closure can come weeks in advance or as few as 24 hours, and the city says it reserves the right to conduct immediate, “emergency closures” at any time based on loosely defined safety threats.

In response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for policies surrounding encampment evictions, both DFSS and the mayor’s office pointed the

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Reader to the city’s annual homelessness report. The 40-page document outlines guidelines for when and why an encampment should be closed, but it gives the city significant leeway in making those decisions; many steps are recommended but not required. It contains smatterings of various policies from different agencies, but no cohesive strategy.

Instead, the Reader asked four homeless support service providers with decades of experience working in Chicago between them what they understood the city’s policies regarding camp closures to be.

“So, this is, like, the question, right?” responded Spangler from Heartland Alliance Health.

camp might be shut down, regardless of whether anyone who lives there was actually involved, said Simmons. Visible drug use can also put a camp on the city’s radar.

“Mostly, though, it’s complaints from community members,” he said. “That generates pressure on elected officials to do something about the encampments.”

Spangler described a similar pattern.

“Somebody complains, whether it’s neighbors or businesses, that there are people experiencing homelessness that are an eyesore or inconvenient, or [somebody is] concerned about things that are going on at the encampment,” he said. When the complaint reaches the ward alderperson, the alderperson pressures the city to shut

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

“That is a question that we’ve been trying to get answers to,” said Simmons at the Law Project at Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness.

Still, housing service providers identified similar patterns in their observations of the city’s approach to encampment closures. Morgan McLuckie, CEO of the Orange Tent Project, said that highway construction, railroad repairs, and other infrastructure work can often prompt the city to close camps. The same goes for special events, like the Democratic National Convention, Lollapalooza, and the Chicago Marathon. But as she sees it, most closures are triggered by “a mix of complaints, safety and liability concerns, and visibility, rather than by the needs of the people actually living there.”

As in Jay and John’s case, if violence occurs at or near an encampment, the

it down.

After an eviction, the city or the state often spends further resources to fence off the vacated land. In parks and under overpasses across the city, fences erected by workers serve as hostile markers of where people once lived. The land becomes inaccessible to all, housed and unhoused alike: public space for no one.

M

any outreach workers predict the number of Chicagoans who are unhoused will rise this year.

They say the city’s decision to continue responding to homelessness with encampment evictions is a futile waste of precious resources that would be better spent on housing. Under the Trump administration, severe changes to food assistance eligibility requirements took effect on February 1. These changes include work and volun-

teer requirements, even for people who are unhoused, as well as new limits on people who aren’t citizens. Those who don’t meet the new requirements will be limited to receiving food benefits for only three months within three years, which might force them to choose between paying rent and buying food. “The problem,” said Simmons, “is only going to get bigger.”

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to issue a new funding change that would have contained “unprecedented changes to HUD’s funding commitments,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH). A preliminary injunction has temporarily halted the change from taking effect, but according to NAEH, HUD has made clear that it plans to enforce its proposal, which would return an estimated 170,000 people across the country to homelessness—and keep those who are currently unhoused from obtaining housing.

“It’s another reason why the city closing encampments is so unconscionable,” said one housing director, who asked to be anonymous for fear of losing their job.

“There’s every reason to believe next year . . . will have all this horrific shit, and right now, all stakeholders need to be collaborating and planning for that. Sweeping encampments is not planning for that,” they continued. “It’s ignoring the reality that thousands of people could lose their housing if HUD is able to enforce its desired funding shifts.”

In November, when asked whether or not the city would pause encampment evictions in light of these threats, DFSS spokesperson Linsey Maughan wrote, “We are working to prepare as best we can for the challenges these cuts will create.

[T]his is an evolving situation. Our strategies must also now evolve based on changing community needs and increasingly limited resources. For all of these reasons, we cannot speak to specific closure plans and strategies at this time.”

The amount of money the city has recently spent to evict unhoused people from public spaces is a mystery. As of press time, DFSS is weeks past the legally mandated window to respond to the FOIA request submitted by the Reader for this information—but outreach workers and people evicted from their tent homes say the human cost is clear.

“It doesn’t make any sense why the city continues to think [camp evictions] are OK,” said McLuckie of the Orange Tent Project, a nonprofit that provides ice fishing tents and meals to unhoused Chicagoans. Instead, the most effective approaches to getting people stabilized are less dramatic: “Consistent outreach, safe storage, bathrooms, trash service, harm reduction, and pathways to housing,” McLuckie said. “Not dramatic at all, but they will help get people into that next step in their life, whatever that may be.”

Unless there’s a “realistic, safe [housing] alternative offered and accepted,”

NEWS & POLITICS McLuckie argued, encampments shouldn’t be closed.

Sometimes, the city uses so-called accelerated moving events (AME) to hurry up the housing process. During these one-day housing blitzes, city and nonprofit workers help unhoused Chicagoans

“That’s your home.

Obviously you’re there because you got nowhere else to go.” complete an assessment for Chicago’s housing assistance system. Workers also help people identify and apply for available apartments, if any exist. City officials stress that an AME does not necessarily signal an impending closure, according to a letter to Alderperson Nugent from the mayor’s office reviewed by the Reader.

However, two outreach workers noted that the number of AMEs offered to an encampment appears to increase the likelihood that the city is moving to close it.

AMEs are effective at getting people housing. A 2023 audit by the Chicago Office of the Inspector General found that, of 238 encampment residents who attended an AME between November 2020 and May 2022, 94 percent entered stable housing. But they require ongoing local, state, and federal funding to cover operations and housing costs, the latter of which is always rising. But the funding—a tenuous hodgepodge of money—is subject to political whims and will.

Chicago’s profound lack of affordable, desirable housing makes it even more important that the housing process, AME distribution, and the city’s reasons for evicting residents from encampments be transparent. But in 2025, Block Club published an investigation into how the city uses AMEs to empty encampments, finding that “the city’s process for determining who gets housing next is often secretive and confusing.” That doesn’t stop alders from demanding the city host an AME at an encampment in their ward, perhaps with the hope that an AME will lead to the camp’s eventual closure.

“Somebody who just moved to an encampment that’s been homeless for a week or a month could get housed through an AME because some politician has put pressure on the city to have an AME,” said Spangler. “Then, there could be somebody in a completely different area that’s been homeless for ten years with severe disabilities that is not getting the same opportunity. Obviously, there’s a lot of problems with this. If we have a severe amount of limited resources, we need to be prioritizing people based upon need, and not on political expediency.”

During an AME, not everyone is matched to housing—that depends on market availability. Instead, everyone

who participates is matched to a housing program that continues to help them apply for units if they don’t find one at the AME, explained one housing director who asked to remain anonymous, “but clients can be denied for background or credit, or they can be applying in competition with other tenants.” Block Club’s report found that it takes an average of four years for someone in the city’s housing assistance system to be matched with longer-term housing. Even then, once that match is made, it’s usually another 69 days before that person can move in.

D

uring the interview with John and Jay under the Sacramento viaduct, a van pulled up. From inside, a mother and her teenage son offered the two men packed lunches. “If you close this,” said Jay as the van pulled away, gesturing towards some tents, “where are we gonna get even that little bit of help?”

As long as people experience homelessness, being part of a visible community where they and their neighbors can pool together their resources, where folks looking to donate warm coats can see them, and where service providers can find them, is lifesaving.

“It serves no purpose,” Simmons said of the evictions. “You close one encampment, you offer no housing. You interrupt services being provided to people.”

Outreach workers help unhoused people get copies of their vital records, which are required to obtain housing and jobs. Many residents don’t have phones or regular schedules, so in-person contact is essential to help people move forward in their lives.

“When encampments are closed, and we lose contact with the person, we are sitting there with their information and have no way of getting it to them,” Simmons said.

“When people are more hidden,” said Spangler, “they’re more vulnerable to violence, and to being abandoned and not having the care that they need: the health care [like street medics], the housing, the benefits, the food, the warmth that they need to just exist and to survive. While we have a shortage of shelter beds in the thousands—not to mention noncongregate shelters in local communities that don’t exist, and a shortage of subsidized and affordable housing units numbering in the tens of thousands—we should not be putting people through the trauma of closures.” Then, Spangler reiterated something that both Mayor Johnson and chief homelessness officer Soto have echoed before: “Homelessness is not a crime.” v This story launches a new accountability series, Just Neighbors, examining the city’s homeless encampment sweeps and focusing on the human impact of a fragmented, interdepartmental process. At their request, the unhoused people who spoke to the Reader for this story are identified by their first names only.

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NEWS & POLITICS

Quantum leap or community crossroads?

A planned quantum computing campus and innovation district on the former U.S. Steel South Works site promises jobs and investment, but residents and organizers have concerns around how, and whether, the $9 billion project should move forward. BY GREY LUCAS 12

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NEWS & POLITICS

A

South-side residents organize around megadevelopment PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL LIMÓN, PHOTOS COURTESY SOUTHEAST CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY (CENTER) AND LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BACKGROUND)

dozen neighbors wearing winter coats and hats settled into dark wooden pews in a southeast-side church on a recent December afternoon. They shook off the chill from a morning of canvassing homes around Quantum Shore Chicago, a planned megadevelopment centered around a large quantum computing campus and innovation district that they fear will drastically reshape the community. We’re no strangers to having our neighborhoods treated like chess pieces by industry actors, remarked Alvyn Walker, a South Shore resident and computer consultant who works to increase local Internet access, drawing nods of approval from the group.

The volunteers, some of whom joined the cause that day, were with Southside Together, a grassroots organization designed to build power among Black, poor, and working-class people across the south side. That day, community members gathered to discuss the ambitious plan hatched by tech start-ups, together with government actors and universities, to build a facility to research and potentially develop the world’s first quantum computer. The first phase of the $9 billion project, which has received more than $850 million in public funding and tax breaks, broke ground in late September.

Supporters of quantum computing say it could change science—and life—as we know it, potentially leading to advances in medicine, energy planning, and financial management, in turn revolutionizing these industries. Critics have raised flags about its extremely high energy use and ability to break encryption and expose sensitive data—the use case for which quantum researchers have received the most money from governments across the globe. While developers insist the megadevelopment will attract billions in economic investment and thousands of jobs, some southeast-side residents worry it will bring gentrification, environmental degradation, increased surveillance in already overpoliced communities, and ultimately, leave them out of potential economic benefits.

Some residents and activists are pushing back and building collective power, drawing on a long local history of organizing against corporate interests and environmental degradation at the former steel plant. Even as community members hold differing views on what should come next, they are united in wanting accountability, safety, and grassroots investment as the South Works site moves from decades of disuse into one of Chicago’s most high-profile redevelopment projects.

“We have to put a whole lot more value on us and not depend on them to see value in us, because they don’t,” Walker said.

“They see value in their profits.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE

The U.S. Steel South Works plant was once a pillar of industry for the south side: Its closure in 1992 left thousands of people FEBRUARY 2026

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NEWS & POLITICS

Workers and new charging floors in front of furnaces in the South Works plant, 1919 COURTESY SOUTHEAST CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY without work, and the community was financially and environmentally devastated. Tens of thousands more Chicagoans left in search of economic opportunity in the years that followed, as the southeast-side site has remained empty for the last three decades.

When Southside Together organizers and other residents came out to oppose the megadevelopment’s groundbreaking ceremony on September 30, they remembered seeing Pritzker fly overhead in a helicopter. Chicago Police officers watched them as they held protest signs. “This is not for us,” Walker remembered thinking.

Quantum Shore Chicago is a planned redevelopment on a 440-acre former South Works site along Lake Michigan, stretching from 79th to 91st Street.

The vision includes a mix of advanced manufacturing, research, and innovation uses led by developers Related Midwest and CRG. A key early anchor within the site is the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, known as the quantum computing campus, in the southern portion of the property that will be anchored by PsiQuantum, a California-based quantum computing company.

Additional tenants include IBM, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Australian quantum start-up Diraq.

Future phases of the development will include a new 52-bed hospital to replace Advocate Trinity Hospital and singlefamily housing, according to officials and planning documents.

Community members fear that the

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presence of a quantum computing campus would likely push residents out of the neighborhood for good due to increased energy costs, speculative real estate investment, and pollution from construction and the environmentally hazardous land on which it sits, according to reports from state regulators, local news, and residents. They are also concerned that the federal government’s involvement will lead to increased surveillance and military and police presence in the coming years.

Some residents and local organizers who spoke with the Reader believe that a community benefits agreement (CBA) would bring much-needed jobs to the area, prevent displacement, and create a pathway for the developers to work directly with people who live in the area and organizers to meet their needs.

CBAs are often legally binding contracts between a community and a developer, advanced through a series of negotiations in which community support is often exchanged for the developer’s commitments. These promises can include affordable housing requirements, ensuring the workforce is made up of community members, and funding for community service programs.

Quantum Shore Chicago is being developed through a joint venture between Related Midwest and CRG. A spokesperson for Related Midwest did not directly answer questions about whether the developers would enter into a CBA to address community concerns. They said that developers and their partners have held over 50 public meetings and events,

in person and online, attended by more than 15,000 residents, and are “committed to protecting residents and the environment,” while prioritizing workforce development and community-based hiring.

Others demand that Quantum Shore Chicago be stopped entirely and that taxpayer dollars promised to the development instead be invested directly in the community. “We are not asking for permission to exist in our own neighborhood. We are demanding a right to decide what happens in it,” said Jerry Whirley, a Southside Together volunteer, at a December press conference calling for the development to be scrapped. “We are organized, we are informed, and we are not going anywhere. The people are watching, the people are voting, and the people will have the final say.”

FROM SOUTH WORKS TO QUANTUM

Walker, a 56-year-old veteran of the U.S. Army, grew up in the 80s when life was still centered on the South Works plant.

Remembering this through the eyes of a child, he feels nostalgic for that bygone era when “there were bustling commercial districts in South Shore and South Chicago.”

Each neighborhood had multiple movie theaters and grocery stores, businesses started by and for the thousands of people who worked at the plant and lived nearby, Walker recalled. There were bowling alleys and shopping malls, car dealerships and auto plants.

As an adult, he said he now understands

the sacrifices made by steelworkers and local activists to maintain this economic stability in the face of an industry focused on extracting as much profit as possible from the community with little regard for the health and safety of its residents. It is a lesson and a legacy he carries on in his work with Southside Together today.

The South Works plant was once a city within a city. It covered an area roughly half the size of the Loop and was composed of 12 mills, each responsible for a different part of the steel production process. From the time it opened in 1882, working conditions were inhumane, and Black and Latino workers were often relegated to the most dangerous and lowestpaying positions within the plant. People worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week and received no overtime pay, insurance, or time off, said Mike Matejka of the Illinois Labor History Society. In 1906 alone, 45 men died on the job, and 598 of the plant’s roughly 10,000 employees were severely injured or disabled, according to a news article archived by the Southeast Chicago Historical Society.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when work was scarce, steelworkers fought and died for their right to unionize South Works and other steel plants in the region.

Reflecting on this history and his own experience of South Works, Walker said he now sees the South Chicago of his youth as another part of the boom-and-bust cycle that has kept south-side residents beholden to the whims of developers and industries who do not care about their well-being.

“None of these types of developments

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NEWS & POLITICS remains a supporter of safe, unionized jobs in industry. “I’m not, after all the sacrifices that were made at South Works, in favor of just turning it over to some billionaires to make a big profit,” Wood said. “I think it should be something that has educational value or gives back to the community.”

POLLUTED GROUNDS

Republic Steel strike in 1937, as police injure strikers COURTESY SOUTHEAST CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY ever really have the answer to the question of: ‘What is good for the community?’” he said. “They’re in it for: ‘What’s most profitable for us, what’s most cost-efficient for us, and how long can we stay here until we start to lose money?’”

In the 70s and 80s, increased global competition in the steel market and stronger labor protections made operations at the South Works plant less profitable for U.S. Steel. Workers were frequently laid off during this period, not knowing when they might work again, said Roberta Wood, a retired steelworker and union organizer.

“The same amount of steel was being produced by less and less workers,” Wood said. Sometimes, those laid off were denied hard-won health insurance benefits and struggled to afford medical care. Wood was part of a broader movement of steelworkers that pushed back

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against these cutbacks.

Rank-and-file union members and progressive coalitions of Black, Latino, and women steelworkers fought for years to keep South Works open and ensure laid-off workers got the benefits they were due, Wood said. Despite these efforts, U.S. Steel closed the plant in 1992.

The jobs and investment that went with it have had a profound impact on the surrounding community. The land has sat mostly unused and environmentally hazardous for more than three decades. Businesses and schools have closed. “There have been no less than five grocery stores that have been torn down,” Walker said. Another two or three have been converted into Save A Lot or Family Dollar stores.

Over the past 30 years, many Black families have been forced to leave Chicago in search of work, as inequality for Black

residents has deepened in the city.

Chicago’s Black population has declined by 350,000 people since its peak of 1.2 million in 1980, with much of that decline concentrated in South Side communities, according to a University of Illinois Chicago study found. From 2000 to 2023, South Chicago lost almost a quarter of its population, and nearby South Shore lost nearly 12 percent, according to 2025 data from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). The majority of South Chicago residents now work in the Loop or outside the city, with 41 percent traveling outside Chicago. Although the neighborhood’s local unemployment rate has dropped from 22 percent in 2009 to 15 percent, it remains nearly twice the citywide average.

Today, Wood is retired and lives with her husband and son in a tree-lined home near the lakefront in South Shore. She

When U.S. Steel pulled out of South Works in the 90s, it left deep scars of environmental contamination across the land it sat on. Proposals to redevelop the site over the following three decades came and went, in part due to environmental concerns and the cost of addressing them.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued a “no further remediation” (NFR) letter for the site in 1997, certifying it had been investigated and cleaned up by U.S. Steel in accordance with the state’s standards and no longer presented a “significant risk to human health or the environment.” A decade later, at the request of the United States EPA, the Illinois EPA looked into soil contamination on portions of the site and issued two new NFR letters in 2008 and 2010.

Still, residents say parts of the site remain contaminated with petroleum and heavy metals from more than one hundred years of steel production. Anne Holcomb, founder of South Shore–based community group ETHOS (Environment, Transportation, Health, and Open Space), has spent years meeting with environmental remediation experts and combing through state archives to research conditions at the site.

Pressure from the city and local organizers like Holcomb led the developers to voluntarily enroll in an Illinois EPA program to conduct soil testing across the site and develop a cleanup plan to obtain a new NFR letter based on today’s standards.

The South Works property is a brownfield, meaning its redevelopment is “complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant,” according to the U.S. EPA. The agency’s standards for cleaning up brownfields are significantly stricter today than they were in 1997, when the site was cleared for redevelopment, Holcomb said. In general, NFR letters and the information used to obtain them become less reliable over time as site conditions may change, Illinois EPA spokesperson Kim Biggs said in a statement. Since the 1997 NFR letter still stands, any further cleanup developers do on the site is voluntary, though the Illinois EPA can withhold an updated NFR if the cleanup does not meet its standards.

The developers worked with Little Village–based Pioneer Engineering and Environmental Services to conduct soil and groundwater testing at the site. In October 2025, Related Midwest submitted its more than 5,000-page remediation plan and paid $15,000 to obtain a 45-day expedited review period, rather than the

NEWS & POLITICS

Pandora’s box

Q

Quantum computing—and what the military wants with it

uantum computing uses quantum mechanics—mathematical laws that define the unique and unpredictable behaviors of the universe’s smallest particles—to perform automatic calculations in ways that traditional computers cannot.

Scientists believe quantum computers may one day process more complex information far faster than our laptops and smartphones can now, potentially opening the door to new discoveries, says Danyel Cavazos, quantum instructor at the University of Chicago.

However, the unpredictable behavior of the subatomic particles means current quantum computing models are prone to errors. Calculations must be run multiple times, making the technology costly and inefficient.

BETTING ON “QUANTUM SUPREMACY” Researchers are working to produce a model that is “fault-tolerant” and runs as efficiently as a traditional computer while still being able to do more—a goal the industry calls “quantum supremacy,” Cavazos says. No one in the world has yet been able to develop this kind of fault-tolerant quantum computer. As artificial intelligence takes off, many in the tech industry have turned away from quantum computing, saying the technology “seems like it’s always five years away,” according to a 2025 Wall Street Journal article.

And yet, Silicon Valley start-up PsiQuantum— alongside other tenants of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) planned for South Chicago—are betting $9 billion, including more than $850 million in public funding, on a plan to develop the world’s first quantum computer.

standard 90 days, according to emails obtained by the Reader through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The plan was made public on October 31, and news of its existence was reported more widely by local media on November 5, leaving residents with less than half of the typical 60-day comment period to read through the 5,000-page plan and give feedback before the Illinois EPA’s December 1 deadline, according to emails exchanged between Holcomb and Illinois EPA staff. Many weren’t able to due to the quick turnaround and the Thanksgiving holiday, Holcomb said.

Testing conducted on-site found pollutants such as petroleum, heavy metals like arsenic, and man-made chemicals, according to the remediation plan. As is often the case, Black and Latino residents of the Bush, South Chicago, and South Shore have had to live near these pollut-

If they’re successful, quantum computers could be used with traditional computers to help bring new medications to market faster or create more efficient batteries for electric vehicles, according to a video produced by technology company Nvidia.

B u t q u a ntu m re s e a rc h h a s l a rg e l y focused on a use not described in the video: encrypting and decrypting information.

Why? According to Cavazos, that’s where the money is. “You need scientists, but you also need the investors to come in and give you the money, and then you need the government to clear everything up as well,” he says. “It’s not like [cryptography] is easier [than other applications of quantum computing]—it’s that that’s the one that’s easier to convince people to give you more money.”

Cavazos holds a PhD in atomic physics and runs the University of Chicago’s Quantum Educational Laboratory, where he teaches students about quantum computing. He hopes to see the technology used to protect people against hackers or replace animal testing with simulations.

His curiosity and awe for his field is existential, if not spiritual. “If quantum mechanics is sort of the operating system for the universe, then everything in our life depends on it in a way, so we should understand it more,” Cavazos says.

A MILITARY SPACE RACE Though he is not actively involved in developing new quantum technology, Cavazos says he sometimes feels torn between his passion for the field and the ways the technology could be used by governments in the future.

“When we say [quantum computing can] ‘make better passwords,’ it sounds really nice

ants for generations, which can cause an increased risk of cancer as well as damage to the brain, nervous system, and other organs. Black people in the U.S. are 79 percent more likely than white people to live in areas where industrial pollution is highest, according to an AP report.

The remediation plan identified five environmental hot spots that need the most remediation, two of which will be addressed through a full excavation and replacement of contaminated soil. Developers plan to contain contaminants at the other three hot spots within a massive, man-made barrier system, with a horizontal layer of asphalt, concrete, or clean soil spanning most of the site. A system of “slurry walls” will also be erected to keep pollutants from getting into Lake Michigan or the Calumet River.

The investigation of conditions at the site also confirmed the presence of pollution

for my Facebook account, but also passwords for military secrets,” he says. “We can use these quantum technologies to make better sensors.

So, maybe we can use it to sense cancer cells better, but we can also use it to geolocate airplanes better. That could be used for the military. There is definitely a lot of funding on that side, and I don’t know how to feel about it, because that’s not what I do science for—to develop weapons or things like that.

“It’s almost like a Pandora’s box,” Cavazos continues, “but, as a scientist then, what’s the option?”

The military has taken a special interest in quantum research as nations compete in a modern-day space race to develop the capability to hack into any data system in the world, the Wall Street Journal reports. For this reason, many positions in the quantum industry require security clearance and are only open to U.S. citizens, Cavazos says.

PsiQuantum received funding for its planned Chicago research facility from DARPA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense whose main purpose is to develop “high-risk” technologies for military use, according to the agency’s website. DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has provided at least $140 million to the project. DARPA did not respond to a request for an interview from the Reader.

South Chicago residents have expressed concerns that the U.S. government will use technology developed at the facility to further surveil its own residents.

IQMP spokesperson Caroline Brooks tells the Reader that the technology developed at the facility will be used in a variety of areas, including cryptography, but also health care, energy, agriculture, transportation, “and more.”

from leaking underground storage tanks, or LUSTs. A company called King Pirros operated a gas station on the northwest corner of the site at 79th and South Shore Drive from 1923 until 1951. In 1997, the company dug up five underground tanks, three of which were confirmed to be leaking oil and gasoline into the surrounding soil, according to Illinois EPA archives.

Upon review, Illinois EPA project manager Michael Piggush was not satisfied with King Pirros’s work investigating and remediating contamination from the tanks, so the LUST incident remains open but inactive. Due to changes in environmental law, the developers do not have to perform any further cleanup work around underground storage tanks unless the State Fire Marshal determines they pose a threat to human health or the environment. The state has yet to do so, and developers have submitted the neces-

sary paperwork declaring the tanks’ presence on the site.

The developers said the tanks “no longer pose an environmental risk” in an FAQ page on the project’s website. In a statement, a Related Midwest spokesperson confirmed the tanks are no longer on the site and said any environmental risk “was evaluated and will be managed” through the remediation plan.

The surrounding areas will be addressed with the man-made barrier and a liquid designed to treat leaks and oil spills, according to the remediation plan.

The Illinois EPA’s approval of the remediation plan was contingent on developers agreeing to submit more detailed plans to address contamination in other parts of the 440-acre site before they break ground in those areas in future phases of development, public records show. This is just one of a series of conditions the developers FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 17

NEWS & POLITICS

The present-day South Works property MIGUEL LIMÓN must meet to be issued new NFR letters by the Illinois EPA once the remediation work is complete.

The developers must also monitor the slurry wall for at least 30 years to ensure it’s functioning, address a soil sample deemed hazardous and corrosive, remediate groundwater near a well that showed elevated levels of vinyl chloride, and develop systems to reduce the risk of vapor inhalation if needed.

Holcomb said she was glad to see rigorous testing conducted at the site and is happy with some aspects of the plan. Still, she worries that developers are prioritizing saving time and money over community health.

At 64, Holcomb joked that she “will be dead before I get cancer” if developers don’t take proper precautions to contain hazardous materials at the site. Mostly, she worries about local kids and young people, just starting out in the world.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

After three decades in the neighborhood, lifelong South Shore resident Kashawna Brantley finally feels like she has an apartment she can call her home.

Artworks made by her and her friends cover the walls as her cats saunter through a sun-filled living room.

Brantley has only ever lived in the shadow of the shuttered South Works plant. The closest full-service grocery store is three bus rides away. In February 2025, the last pharmacy within walking distance, a Walgreens, closed down, Block

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Club Chicago reported. This was the second South Shore Walgreens to shutter its doors in a four-month period.

“Having grown up being displaced pretty much constantly throughout my childhood, we never stayed anywhere more than a few years,” she said. “I’ve been [in this apartment] since 2019. This is the longest I’ve stayed in one place in my entire life; [the] first time I’ve been able to put things on the walls. We should be able to maintain that.” The incoming quantum computing campus, she said, represents an “existential threat” to her community.

“It’s really scary to be upended when you finally find some stability for yourself.”

About 75 percent of South Shore residents are renters, the majority of whom are low-income and “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend over 30 percent of their income on housing costs, according to data from CMAP and the DePaul Institute for Housing Studies. Property taxes in the area are likely to continue rising as parts of the neighborhood see upward pressure from the Obama Presidential Center to the north and speculative real estate investment from the quantum computing campus to the south, Walker said.

A coalition of nonprofits and community groups, including ETHOS, Alliance of the Southeast, Friends of the Parks, and the Southeast Environmental Task Force, is calling for environmental safeguards, protections for local homeowners and renters, and commitments to hire local residents for permanent jobs created at the quantum computing campus. The Coalition for a South Works

CBA has organized since 2013 for a legally binding CBA with developers seeking to build on the South Works site, Block Club Chicago reported.

While the coalition has gained the support of at least a few hundred residents, neither the site’s developer nor future tenants have signed on, and neither Pritzker nor Mayor Brandon Johnson has publicly endorsed the effort.

Johnson did not respond directly to the Reader’s six requests for an interview about the megadevelopment. On the seventh request, his press secretary, Cassio Mendoza, provided an email statement emphasizing that the administration is dedicated to “creating meaningful, lasting, positive impact for South Chicago and the surrounding communities,” but did not answer where they would support halting the development or a CBA. A spokesperson for the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, speaking on behalf of the governor, also did not directly answer questions about a CBA, instead referring to the “Quality of Life” plan created by the South Chicago nonprofit Claretian Associates, which has served as a consultant for the developer. Together with United Way of Metro Chicago and LISC Chicago, Claretian is working to update a “Quality of Life” plan it created in 2017 to voice the community’s concerns and implement initiatives to “improve the future,” according to a letter of support for the development written by the nonprofit’s executive director. In developing the plan, they worked with a steering committee

and held focus groups and at least one community visioning session.

Brantley and Walker both say this “Quality of Life” plan is not enough because it has not required the developers or the site’s tenants to negotiate directly with community members, or make any promises to the community.

The develop ers of the quantum computing campus have no incentive to sign on to such an agreement because they already have the support of the local, state, and federal governments, Walker of Southside Together said. He believes that large developers working with private-sector businesses often don’t feel they need direct community support or engagement.

In December, members of Southside Together submitted a petition for a proposed referendum on the March ballot in three precincts across South Shore, South Chicago, and the Bush. The ballot question would’ve asked voters if they want to demand an end to the project in favor of using taxpayer dollars to clean up the site and develop “resident-focused, resident-controlled” developments like “grocery stores, truly accessible housing, and youth centers that create job opportunities for residents with community oversight.”

Ho w e v e r, t h r e e p e o p le — Jo s e p h Castillo, Migdalia Tevenal, and Seventh Ward Republican committeeperson David Lottich—challenged the ballot question’s legality. City election officials ultimately ruled that the referendum contained more than one question in violation of state law and tossed it from the ballot.

The referendum was nonbinding,

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meaning the government and the project’s developers wouldn’t have had to comply with the outcome. It was intended to survey voters in the area to get their opinions, Southside Together organizer Sanya Bhartiya said in a statement released after the petition failed.

This is only the third time since 1980 that a nonbinding referendum has been challenged in this way, according to a late January press release from Southside Together. The group denounced the decision to remove the question from the ballot and claimed that many residents they spoke with who live closest to the site had not heard of the development and lacked “democratic access to determine the fate of their own neighborhood.”

The group also announced plans to invite Johnson to a public meeting on Saturday, March 7, to discuss “community pushback against the facility and what residents want to see in their neighborhood.” The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity spokesperson declined to comment to the Reader on the movement to stop the development.

The developers held public community meetings from August through December 2024 and another in March 2025. Holcomb said this offered an opportunity to learn more about how the plans have evolved, but that it was hard to tell if developers would be responsive to community needs. She and other CBA coalition members have been trying to engage the project’s stakeholders more

directly with little success thus far.

Beyond concerns about displacement and pollution, the project has thus far promised 150 permanent positions, many of which require advanced degrees, Brantley said.

This only accounts for jobs provided by the main tenant, PsiQuantum, and there will be “hundreds more permanent jobs” provided “in the longer term” once the campus is up and running, Johnson’s press secretary, Mendoza, said in his statement.

In a statement, a development spokesperson said leadership hopes to build interest in and educational opportunities for local students in quantum computing so they might fill these positions in the future. The campus is working with City Colleges of Chicago and eight elementary and high schools to expand access to specialized STEM programming.

The development will also create a few hundred construction jobs, half of which must be given to Chicago residents per city ordinance, though these jobs carry the risk of exposure to soil pollutants, Holcomb said. In late January, Elizabeth Jensen, director of corporate communications for Quantum Shore Chicago’s general contractor, Clayco, a large Chicago-based design-build and construction firm, said it was “too soon to report measurable progress” as to whether they were currently meeting the 50 percent requirement. A Related Midwest spokesperson said in a statement that “nearly half” of the workers

NEWS & POLITICS

clearing the site and getting it ready for environmental remediation were from the nearby 7th and 10th Wards.

When it comes to access to the lakeshore, plans for the site include a walking path to the lake, as well as an eight-foot security fence around PsiQuantum’s buildings, according to Chicago Plan Commission documents.

Chicago Park District spokesperson Irene Tostado said in a statement that Quantum Shore Chicago developers will maintain and, ultimately, improve access to nearby parks like Steelworkers Park, but Friends of the Parks executive director Brian Gladstein said access can be more complicated than just building a path. The presence of security cameras may lead some residents to avoid the park altogether, after months of deadly and violent federal immigration enforcement activities that have relied on surveillance technology.

“This is an area where there is a lot of mistrust and a lot of fear,” Gladstein said, referencing federal immigration agents’ middle-of-the-night invasion of a South Shore apartment building on the same day the quantum computing campus development broke ground. “People need to feel their community is safe and not being watched.”

“It feels like we’re being experimented on,” she said. “Seeing all these interviews from people who live near these data centers . . . it is a miserable experience.

There is water pollution, air pollution,

sound pollution. There’s rolling blackouts.”

The developers of data centers and quantum computing projects set up shop in vulnerable areas, like disinvested communities or predominantly Black or immigrant communities, because they feel they can, Walker said.

The quantum computing campus is benefiting from the “economic windfall” created by U.S. Steel, which valued profits over people and left the community economically destabilized and polluted with heavy metals, he said. Real estate in South Chicago is cheap, elected officials want the development, and residents are, once again, desperate for work.

But the buck has to stop somewhere.

“They can’t go to Wilmette and do this.

They can’t go to Lake Forest and do this.

But they can come to South Chicago because we’re vulnerable. So, how do we make ourselves a hard target and not a target of opportunity?”

Southside Together is building a base of community opposition to the quantum computing campus while fighting the “long-term fight” of advocating for policy reform that prevents harmful, exploitative developments from happening in the first place, Walker said.

“People in these conditions have to start realizing that these developments are not in their interest,” he said. “And the outcome of these developments ultimately are a detriment, not a benefit.”

From the shows you must see, to happenings at City Hall, to the people who make our city great, get it all and more from your favorite Reader writers.

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ARTS & CULTURE

To stay connected with Maggie Queeney and follow her work, visit her website and join her monthly Art & Craft newsletter at maggiequeeney.com.

Poetry as a continuum of connection

As the Poetry Foundation sunsets its adult education programming, poet and educator Maggie Queeney reflects on a decade of building its poetry community.

BY JASMINE BARNES

W

Maggie Queeney MOYO ABIONA/COURTESY POETRY FOUNDATION

hen Maggie Queeney began teaching a routine poetry workshop at a Chicago senior center, she had no idea one of her selected poems would facilitate a participant’s long-awaited catharsis.

Partway through the workshop, a man nearing the end of his life found in the intricate verses of a villanelle a space to reckon with what previously felt elusive: the emotional impact of growing up without a father.

“One of the most magical moments that can happen is when somebody connects with a poem that gives language to a feeling or an experience that they’ve never been able to give language to,” Queeney says. “I was just the conduit, but to be able to be a part of that was really humbling.”

For Queeney, moments like these have occurred many times over the last decade of her life as the Poetry Foundation’s library adult programs manager. She has designed and facilitated hundreds of workshops, reaching students across Chicago and globally.

In November 2025, the Poetry Founda-

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tion announced it would discontinue the library’s adult education programming at the end of 2025 and sunset its overall public programming in 2026 to refocus on literary arts grantmaking. The decision came as a surprise to many, including Queeney, whose position was dissolved as a result.

With the adult education programs serving around 120 workshop participants per month and running a waitlist, the demand for these communal learning spaces was undeniable.

Soon after Queeney joined the Poetry Foundation as a library assistant in 2013, she pitched the idea for a monthly workshop. While the Poetry Foundation had a monthly literary book club, Queeney had a vision to develop more robust, craftfocused public workshops. Starting in 2014, these Forms and Features workshops invited groups to analyze poems through their forms, like the sonnet, and features, such as sound devices and metaphors.

Having worked as an instructor for six years in multiple university settings, Queeney wanted to offer her educational experience to the broader Chicago

community. Slowly, she began to partner with organizations and institutions in the Chicagoland area. Workshops were held not only in the Poetry Foundation’s building but at various sites ranging from art galleries to medical centers, meeting the unique needs of each institution.

W h e n t h e COV I D -19 p a n d e m i c prevented in-person group gatherings, she quickly pivoted to offering online programming. For the past five years, two unique workshops, a book club, and teaching artist programs have been provided monthly in-person and online, expanding access to individuals from around the world.

“I view . . . the program as a space to hold and metabolize a lot of the difficulty in the outside world,” Queeney says.

“Being able to create and then hold and enter these spaces has made all of the political difficulty easier to hold.”

As a poet herself, Queeney believes “a poem is always a vehicle for connection.” She sees poetry as a space where everyone involved can explore the more difficult aspects of life. While moments of catharsis, like the one she witnessed in

that senior center years ago, are moving and special, Queeney believes in the ritual of simply making time for a communal, poetic encounter. Her measure of success is not the number of students who’ve attended these workshop spaces but the fact that they showed up at all.

“The work is really connecting to and through poems,” Queeney says.

In December, at a final community event at the Poetry Foundation, past students and staff members celebrated the legacy of Queeney and the programs she stewarded. More than a dozen students joined in person and virtually to share poems they created as a result of Queeney’s instruction and encouragement.

Many reflected on how the programs served as a space that not only expanded their poetic practice but also provided healing amid the world’s chaos.

Some past students, like Paige Savarese, the founder of Brighton Park Poets, have translated the ethos of Forms and Features into their own poetry communities and workshop spaces. Queeney sees Savarese’s work as a testament that “these types of programs and conversations and connections and communities can and do exist outside of institutions.” While she’s protective of the work of building community through poetry, she doesn’t feel proprietary over it.

When Queeney looks to the future, it’s strange to imagine a new era after committing a fourth of her life to the Poetry Foundation’s adult education programming. Still, she considers her personal work, or vocation, as an educator and poet largely unchanged. She dreams of developing an initiative where neighborhoodbased teaching artists could provide poetic care to their communities and hopes to see more site-specific poetry programming funded and supported throughout Chicago. This April, she plans to offer the Art & Craft workshop series in alignment with National Poetry Month.

As more free and accessible creative community spaces shutter in light of mass defunding of the arts, the sunsetting of these longstanding programs marks the end of an era at the Poetry Foundation.

Still, Queeney believes “poetics is always relational.” Despite the most isolating and sparse conditions, she believes the poetic process is never in vain. It always facilitates deeper connections.

“This work doesn’t have a beginning, and it doesn’t have an end.” v themail@chicagoreader.com

SOUTHEAST SPOTLIGHT 83 Years: From Fermi’s Pile to Quantum Campus

By Billy Ndizeye

Chicago’s south side has reinvented itself before; knowing this history can change its future.

On December 2, 1942, 49 scientists gathered beneath Champaign into a global hub for quantum information These technical hurdles mean that the timelines are the west stands of Stagg Field at the University of science and research. sobering. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has cautioned Chicago. Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist who had With a renewed $125 million in Department of that widespread quantum computing remains 15 to 30 fled fascism four years earlier, directed his team to Energy funding over five years for the Q-NEXT years away. And the market reflects this uncertainty; slowly withdraw the cadmium-coated control rods from research center, Illinois now leads the nation with four with many startups unlikely to survive to profitability, a what he called “a crude pile of black bricks and wooden of the ten federal quantum computing centers. This wave of industrial consolidation is coming. timbers.” At 3:53 PM, their instruments clicked faster. growing ecosystem, anchored by the country’s longest Despite this harsh possibility, investment continues.

The neutron count rose. And for 28 minutes, humanity quantum network, has earned a nickname reflecting its Early signals are real: Google’s work with Boehringer held in its hands the first self-sustaining nuclear chain deep roots: the Quantum Prairie.

Ingelheim points toward quantum simulation of drugreaction. metabolizing enzymes at a level of precision Eighty-three years later, on September 30, that classical methods struggle to reach, 2025, another group gathered on Chicago’s and JPMorgan Chase and IBM are probing south side—this time at the former U.S. Steel quantum approaches to option pricing and South Works site, where blast furnaces once risk analysis. turned iron ore into the bones of American The question is not whether quantum industry. Governor J.B. Pritzker, Mayor computing will matter. It is when, and for Brandon Johnson, and executives from whom, and whether we can cross two bridges: California-based PsiQuantum broke ground first, from frontier capability to real-world on what will become America’s first utilityusefulness; and second, from usefulness scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. The to shared local prosperity in the specific rusted ghosts of steelmaking will give way to geography of its arrival. This campus is not cryogenic plants cooling photonic chips to being dropped onto a blank industrial slate near absolute zero. but into the living fabric of South Chicago For eighty years, Chicago’s legacy has and the East Side. These are neighborhoods been its ability to scale discovery into industry. anchored by multi-generational Black and Quantum is simply the next version of that Latino families who weathered long cycles of tradition—a new kind of infrastructure rising industrial rise and fall, and who have too often from the same soil that once produced the watched citywide growth translate into distant Graphite from Chicago Pile-1, the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor (Dec. 2, nation’s steel. headlines rather than local stability.

1942). Rincon Educativo, ‘What happened in Chicago Pile-1?’

Chicago’s claim to quantum computing If this project is to succeed as human rests on foundations laid long before the technology Since its announcement, the Illinois Quantum and infrastructure, it must show, in jobs, contracts, training had a name. When Fermi’s team achieved criticality Microelectronics Park (IQMP) has been envisioned as pathways, and community decision-making, that the in 1942, they established Chicago as a place where a place where companies will build, workers assemble, value created here can circulate here, not someday, not theoretical physics becomes applied reality, and where and investment transforms into employment. Occupying abstractly, but on the same blocks where the waiting the federal government, research universities, and 128 acres of the former U.S. Steel South Works site, has already lasted generations. private industry converge on problems too large for any the park represents a $500 million investment from Eighty-three years ago, Fermi and his team proved one sector to solve alone.

Governor Pritzker to revitalize the Southeast Side and that the energy locked in the atom could be released This collaborative model soon required a massive generate thousands of jobs. and controlled. What they did not know was what that physical footprint. On July 1, 1946, the wartime laboratory control would mean: weapons that ended a war and that built Chicago Pile-1 was rechristened Argonne The park’s success is already being signaled by its threatened civilization, power plants that lit cities and National Laboratory, the first national laboratory in the growing list of tenants: left behind waste we still cannot safely store, medical United States. By the 1950s, the University of Illinois • PsiQuantum: Building America’s first million-qubit- isotopes that diagnose and treat disease. was building the ILLIAC I, a machine that proved that scale computer in a 300,000-square-foot facility.

The quantum computers coming to Chicago’s South Illinois could build computing power on a scale that • IBM: Partnering with local universities to establish Side carry similar ambiguity. They may accelerate drug rivaled anything in the private sector. the National Quantum Algorithm Center. discovery, optimize supply chains, break encryption, More than groundbreaking research, it was a • Pasqal: Establishing its U.S. headquarters with a or enable simulations of molecular behavior that fundamental evolution in the region’s industrial logic. $65 million investment to create 50 new jobs. unlock new materials and medicines. They may also It was the specific environment that allowed Argonne • Infleqtion and Diraq: Advancing utility-scale neutral concentrate wealth in the hands of those already scientist Paul Benioff to propose, in the early 1980s, the atom computing and benchmarking initiatives. positioned to claim it, turning a public project into a first theoretical model of a quantum computer: a Turing private advantage. machine governed by quantum mechanics rather than But as we look towards the park’s scheduled opening in Chicago’s south side has reinvented itself before. classical physics. The idea was revolutionary, but the 2027, let’s take a moment to discern the actual distance From slaughtering hogs to trading their future, from soil it grew from was familiar. between today’s ambition and tomorrow’s reality. forging steel to financing its replacement. Where A shift away from the theoretical began in 2017, Quantum computing in 2025 remains in what nuclear energetic discoveries were made, soon to be when the University of Chicago, Argonne National researchers call the NISQ era (Noisy Intermediate- the city of quantum computing.

Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Scale Quantum). In layman’s terms, we have built the A few questions remain: and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign engines, but they are still “noisy,” meaning they are Will we build the human Read the series formalized their collaboration under the Chicago prone to tiny errors from heat or vibration that can ruin infrastructure with the Quantum Exchange. The Exchange now includes a calculation. To reach “fault tolerance” or the ability same seriousness, so the Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin- to correct these errors, these systems need to move benefits become ordinary, Madison, and Purdue University, supporting more than from physical qubits to logical qubits that can reliably not exclusive? What happens 210 researchers and 50 corporate and international compute. Current estimates suggest we might need when big projects arrive, but partners; the goal is to make the Midwest corridor hundreds or thousands of physical qubits to create one seizing the holistic, collective from Madison, Wisconsin through Chicago to Urbana- reliable logical qubit. opportunity doesn’t?

This content is sponsored by the Southeast Chicago Chamber of Commerce FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature

by Adam Morgan >> Atria/One Signal Publishers, hardcover, 288 pp., $29

America’s war on books

In A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, Adam Morgan explores the country’s history of book censorship through the 1920s case against queer literary figure Margaret C. Anderson.

BY KATIE PROUT

D

Margaret C. Anderson, 1918 COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS uring the 2024–2025 school year, there were 6,870 instances of book bans across 87 public school districts and 23 states in the U.S. In 2025, “a new vector of book banning pressure has appeared—the federal government,” noted PEN America, which has been tracking bans nationwide since 2021. In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that public school parents can pull their kids out of classrooms and opt out of homework rather than have them learn, via LGBTQ+-friendly picture books, that queer families and children exist. And in early 2025, President Trump issued executive orders later used as justification for the July removal of almost six hundred books from Department of Defense Education Activity military base schools, continued the PEN report, “restricting discussion of transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion and barring schools from ‘promoting un-American ideas.’”

This moral panic—“a misleading campaign to ‘protect children’ alongside

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advocacy for ‘parental rights,’” as PEN describes it—is not new, even if the executive orders are. As Adam Morgan writes in his debut book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, the first book ban in U.S. history took place almost four hundred years ago, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan for its criticism of colonial violence against Indigenous people. The majority of book bans over the last four years target themes of race and racism, sexual violence, or sexuality and gender identity: It is the last that is the focus of the 1920s book ban court case at the heart of A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls.

In his book, Morgan explores the life and times of the bohemian, charismatic Margaret C. Anderson, who—along with her copublisher and romantic partner, Jane Heap—was tried in 1921 on felony obscenity charges for serializing James Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review.

The fear that young people, particularly young, white girls, would be corrupted

if the literature they read acknowledged the existence of sex, queer people, and/ or pleasure, was deemed by the federal government to be a national issue.

The drive behind that fear, of course, is an obsessive—perhaps even erotic—desire for control over the minds, bodies, and reproductive power of the country’s young.

The Comstock Act, under which Anderson and Heap were tried, was an antiobscenity law written to make disseminating birth control or information about birth control via the U.S. postal service a federal offense. Subscribers of The Little Review received their copies in the mail; in a push to gain new subscribers, Anderson sent free copies to addresses around New York City. One issue contained an excerpt of Ulysses in which a young woman named Gerty notices Leopold, the story’s protagonist, watching her on the beach. Discovering she enjoys his gaze, Gerty exposes more of her legs and underwear to Leopold so that he can masturbate to completion while fireworks burst in the sky over their heads. Unfortunately, this issue was sent

to the home of a wealthy young white woman, who complained to her lawyer father.

“By asserting her sensuality,” writes Morgan, of the moral panic sparked by this passage, “[Gerty] represented one of the most terrifying archetypes of the ‘new woman’ in America—the sexually active daughter.” The men who prosecuted Anderson and Heap, as well as the parents they represented, “believed that reading scenes like this could send their sons and daughters into out-of-wedlock pregnancies—not to mention expose their families to the sexually transmitted diseases they believed immigrants were bringing into cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.” Then, as now, racist fears of immigrants, miscegenation, and reckoning with white America’s ongoing treatment of people of color motivated many book bans, and were laundered by the country’s most “respectable” papers.

A week before the trial began, Morgan writes, the New York Times quoted Dr. Royal S. Copeland of the New York Health

ARTS & CULTURE

The Little Review

COURTESY KENNETH SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY

Department when they wrote in a headline that “it was ‘Neither Safe nor Decent’ to Let Vermin-Infested Aliens Land.”

“A danger to the minds of young girls” is Anderson’s own recollection of the court verdict against her. Anderson was a lifelong lesbian and very beautiful. As Morgan notes throughout the book, the men in her orbit repeatedly responded to her beauty with gifts and favors—donations to The Little Review, working for free—even if some of them also turned sneering when she rejected them and they learned of her lesbian lovers. Despite her queerness, Anderson’s traditionally femme looks and whiteness saved her, perhaps, from enduring jail time as well as a fine. One of the judges, Anderson later recalls, refused to allow the offending Ulysses passage to be read in her presence, despite the fact that she edited it for publication: “I’m sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing,” the judge said, looking at her with “a protective paternity” and “tenderness and suffering.”

Morgan smartly lets Anderson, a whiptongued writer, publisher, and cultural critic, tell much of her own story in the words she left behind, although he is careful to fact-check her high-colored recollections and interweave the voices of many others into his book. Indeed, his book—like another favorite Chicago trial story, Hal Higdon’s Leopold and Loeb—is a treasure trove of primary documents.

Beyond the trial, Morgan constructs decades of bohemian, queer, literary culture through dozens of modernist writers, anarchists, and lawyers: At times, I could’ve used more intertextual callbacks reminding me of who they were. His use of a dramatis personae, or a list defining the main characters that appears in the front of the book, is understandable but not quite successful, though I appreciated the guide.

Like Anderson, Morgan is an erstwhile Chicagoan who founded a literary magazine—The Chicago Review of Books—after moving from a small town to the city

with the dream of becoming a writer.

(Morgan is also a former contributor to the Reader.) He notes the similar origin stories of himself and his protagonist in the book’s introduction. Perhaps this kinship, or the weight of spotlighting queer women overlooked in literary history, softens his approach to replicating her on the page: I think he could stand to allow her to be more unlikeable.

Anderson wasn’t afraid to be interesting, and the beginning of the book is where I felt least interested and engaged as a reader. She printed letters critical of her editorial choices directly in the Review, along with her own spikey, lively responses. Analysis of her power, in terms of race and traditional femme beauty, comes later in the book than I’d like, though when it comes, Morgan is incisive and clear.

The book, however, is a feat of research, and the writing is at its best when Morgan allows himself to slide lightly into a dishy, literary, gossipy narrative voice. Pleasurably, the rest of the book is increasingly written in that register, and after pushing through the beginning, I found myself turning pages with relish.

This is where his affection for his subject became a strength, like talking with a friend about a mutual you dearly love and look up to, who also has some wild opinions and occasionally gets on your last nerve.

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What is a literary salon, like the kind Anderson and her circle of powerhouse queer women led in Chicago, New York, and Paris, if not a kiki? Morgan rightly credits Anderson for her role in bringing Ulysses, a novel “that would shake the foundations of literature and demolish the cultural status quo on both sides of the Atlantic,” to the world. There is so much power in queer voices, queer writers and editors, queer works of art. Otherwise, the federal government, in Anderson’s time and our own, wouldn’t be so fixated on trying to silence us. v kprout@chicagoreader.com

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| CHICAGO READER 25

THEATER

Chicago theaters are betting on the future As new venues take shape, community engagement is key to the blueprints.

T

BY KERRY REID he theaters-to-apartments pipeline in Chicago has claimed several long-running venues in recent years, including Briar Street Theatre (longtime home of the Blue Man Group), the Royal George (which debuted in 1984 and primarily served as a rental facility), and Stage 773 on Belmont (which opened as the Theatre Building in 1977 and has been home to countless companies and productions in the decades since). All three sites are slated for residential or mixed-use development. Victory Gardens Theater in the landmark Biograph also continues to stand mostly empty except for occasional short-term rentals, more than three years after the board dismissed the last artistic director. The closing of Links Hall in 2025 dealt a blow to the dance and performance communities.

But despite those losses (and the general uncertainty for arts funding and the economy overall), Chicago theater is in the midst of a building boom. I checked in with several companies that are moving ahead with plans to build new homes.

Some, like Steep Theatre, just broke ground recently. Steep’s new home at 1044 W. Berwyn will convert a former Christian Science Reading Room into a 70-seat black box with an expansive lobby and room for community engagement. Others are still on the drafting board or under construction, while at least one—Collaboraction— is ready to cut the ribbon this month.

In talking to the artists and administrators, one common desire emerged: These are spaces designed with the goal of creating community connection as well as theatrical possibilities. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for theaters to talk about expanding to encompass smaller second stages for new and experimental work. But as community engagement efforts expand, theater venues are taking into account more public space as part of their blueprints to encourage patrons to linger—or even hang out when a show isn’t happening—and provide room for community events. The years ahead will show if these gambles will pay off, but for now, these Chicago companies appear to be going with “fortune favors the bold” as their mantra.

NORTHLIGHT RETURNS HOME

The oldest continuously operating theater covered here, Northlight, began in Evanston in 1974 as an outgrowth of the Northwestern master’s thesis of Gregory Kandel, in which he came up with a plan for a new Equity theater. Kandel, together with Chicago legends Mike Nussbaum and Frank Galati, formed what

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Rendering of the exterior of Northlight’s new Evanston home ECKENHOFF SAUNDERS was then called the Evanston Theatre Company in the decommissioned Kingsley Elementary School. Over the years, the company changed its name (to North Light Repertory, and then to its current moniker) and location, moving first to the now-demolished Coronet Theater in Evanston and eventually ending up at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie in 1994.

Anyone who has spent time with Northlight’s artistic director, BJ Jones, knows that getting back to Evanston has been a longtime goal for him. Together with executive director Timothy Evans, the board, and a whole lot of donors, that dream has come true. The company’s new home on Church Street, built on the site of a former Thai restaurant, puts them back where, in Jones’s view, they’ve always belonged.

Evans notes that they’ve raised $29.6 million of the estimated $32.2 million costs for the property and building, with the hope that they can raise the rest and be mortgage-free when they move in.

“Both Tim and I have lived in Evanston and raised our families in Evanston over almost 40 years. My kids went to school there. Tim’s kids went to school there. My grandchildren go to school here,” Jones says. “This is an opportunity to give back in the most powerful way I know how, through my work. But there are also a lot of artists in Evanston—directors, designers, playwrights. And Northwestern’s here.”

The new venue (designed by architects Eckenhoff Saunders, with construction

by Bulley & Andrews) will seat 285 when it opens in fall 2026. (Jones promises that the seats will be more comfortable than those in the North Shore auditorium.) There will be a bar and lobby on the ground floor and other gathering areas on the first and second floor, including a large rehearsal room that can double as an event space. As a tenant at North Shore Center, Northlight didn’t have full access to those ancillary spaces (or to the concession revenues). The fact that it’s close to public transit and in the heart of Evanston also means that it’s more accessible than the North Shore Center.

“From the beginning, we wanted—and we’ve told the city that we wanted—to be sort of the public square for downtown Evanston,” says Evans. Ahead of the theater’s planned opening in fall 2026, Northlight has been amping up community outreach programs in Evanston.

“There’s seven thousand people who live within a four-block radius of the [new] theater,” notes Evans. “We’ve always had a very robust community engagement program. We’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits in Evanston, a lot of schools in Evanston. But recently we decided that we would go to every ward and have an event in every ward over the next four or five months and just get the word out about Northlight coming back. We’re doing

dinners in restaurants within each ward that have 50, 60, 70 people coming to them.

It’s very grassroots, but Evanston’s a very grassroots place.”

TIMELINE COUNTS DOWN TO OPENING

On a cold December day, TimeLine Theatre’s artistic director, PJ Powers, and director of new home development, Elizabeth Auman, join me outside the active construction site of their new venue in Uptown. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. The company purchased the property in 2018, but then COVID hit.

When I talked to Auman in 2021 about the project, she told me, “We did a couple major design flips during the last year and a half, and one was adding a community education and engagement room, and the other was really greatly expanding some of the backstage production areas.”

TimeLine has been itinerant since leaving its longtime home in the former Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ (now Chabad East Lakeview).

Their current production, Eureka Day, is presented in partnership with Broadway in Chicago at the Broadway Playhouse.

As Powers takes me around the boards and bags of cement, he points out that the capacious front lobby space features large windows looking out on North Broadway. “All of this space here is a public cafe and bar, a hangout space that

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THEATER

Rendering of TimeLine Theatre’s new home in Uptown HGA

will be open during the day when people just want to find a place to connect and recharge,” Powers says. The design of the new theater is by HGA, with construction

by Bulley & Andrews.

A grand staircase will lead people up to the actual 250-seat flex-use theater (now with catwalks!) and the large second-floor lobby, which features expanded space for the dramaturgical displays that have long been a hallmark of TimeLine (the company’s mission focuses on “stories inspired by history that connect with today’s social and political issues”), as well as space for exhibits highlighting the company’s own “timeline” since its 1997 founding. Powers notes that the long vintage downstairs bar comes from the former Fizz bar on North Lincoln. Appropriate for a company with an eye on the past, Powers also points out that associate artistic director Nick Bowling (“our resident antiques aficionado”) has been sourcing more vintage furniture for the lobby spaces, including 76 lighting fixtures.

An education and community room provides expanded space for TimeLine’s Living History partnership with Chicago Public Schools. And true to Auman’s word back in 2021, the amenities and workspaces for artists are greatly expanded, incorporating the one-hundred-year-old warehouse originally on the site. The new space, coming in at $46 million (more

than double the original price, but aided by $10 million in city TIF funds), will open with Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in the spring.

COLLABORACTION AND THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

Collaboraction opens its doors at its new home in Humboldt Park’s Kimball Arts Center this month with Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till, adapted by G. Riley (Gary) Mills and Willie Round from the actual transcripts of the trial of Till’s murderers. (A filmed version done in 2022 in partnership with Marion Brooks of NBC 5 won the company a local Emmy Award.)

Like a lot of other Chicago companies, Collaboraction (founded in 1996) started out by emphasizing ensemble-led works by mostly contemporary writers. But the company began shifting to work with a social justice focus in 2012 under artistic director Anthony Moseley, and now uses their proprietary KEDA methodology— Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action—as the basis for their programming.

On a tour of their new studio space at Kimball Arts (what the company calls the House of Belonging), Moseley and CEO/executive director Darlene Jackson (also known as DJ Lady D, the queen of Chicago house) come back to the community-centered function of the new space several times.

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THEATER

Collaboraction’s new venue opens in Humboldt Park this month. RYAN BRANDOFF The company had been itinerant, moving from Wicker Park’s Flatiron Building to Kennedy-King College and building a big focus on digital work during the pandemic. Moseley notes that they had looked at more than 50 spaces before settling on Kimball Arts. (In 2024, Moseley told me they’d almost landed in Bridgeport.) He also notes on our tour that he and his wife, Chicago theater artist Sandra Delgado, and their daughter lived up the street on Kimball for several years.

Moseley points out that there are similarities between Flatiron and their new space, which also contains offices and studios for many artists, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits, including Kartemquin Films.

Jackson, who had been on Collaboraction’s board, came into her new role even though, as she tells me, “About seven months into the project, we were churning through money. It was looking a little bleak.” A $3 million capital campaign helped secure the funding to completely gut and build out the space, which was formerly a pet services business. (Moseley says the actual construction costs came in at about $1 million, but the additional funding is for expanding programming, staffing, and reserves.)

In addition to the 99-seat flex-use studio theater, there’s also a 50-seat cabaret.

High-end digital upgrades throughout expand the possibilities for film screenings and other community events.

As for connecting with their Humboldt Park neighbors: Moseley makes a point of telling me that they will be offering, to his knowledge, the only bilingual Spanish-language improv classes in the midwest with Chicago comedian Mike Oquendo. And Jackson says, “We also have a program called You Belong Here, which supports hyperlocal artists. So it’s really dedicated and committed to organizations that maybe don’t have a space of their own—artists that maybe have things in development. And we offer them

support—production support, technical support, marketing support—to make something come to life here.”

URBANTHEATER COMPANY GROWS ITS HUMBOLDT PARK ROOTS

Humboldt Park has been home to UrbanTheater Company (UTC) for its entire 20-year history, and for most of that time, they’ve performed in the Batey Urbano space at 2620 W. Division. That venue, as UTC’s website notes, was founded in 2002 as “a space for critical expression through spoken word, poetry, dancing, music, painting, and writing.”

In 2021, UTC was planning a move into the Nancy Y. Franco Maldonado Paseo Boricua Arts Building just down the street. But when that fell through, the company began looking at other options.

Now they’ve acquired a building at 2452 W. Division on Paseo Boricua (also known as Barrio Boriken) so they can expand and enhance what they’re already doing in the community.

Cofounder and executive director Ivan Vega notes that the space in the Paseo Boricua Arts Building, which would have given them a first-floor 99-seat theater, would also have required them to make structural improvements (HVAC, lighting systems) without actually owning the space in the end. (They were looking at a 15-year lease.) By contrast, the planned new space gives them full control and stability moving forward. But they’re also retaining their foothold in Batey Urbano to keep serving Humboldt Park neighbors through providing space for classes, performances, and community events.

Ve g a s a y s , “ T h e p u r p o s e o f UrbanTheater being where we’re at is that we have easy access to the local businesses, to the schools that are here, to the organizations that have been around. That ecosystem that has been

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THEATER built is really integral in the fabric of who UrbanTheater is.” (As artistic director Miranda González noted in a Reader op-ed several years ago, “When you grow up in and around your audiences, people hold you and your organization accountable in ways that a mainstream theater has never experienced.”)

For Vega, González, and managing director Tony Bruno, that commitment has inspired them to take the leap into ownership, even though their capital campaign has jumped from $3 million to what Vega estimates will end up being $5 million in costs. The new space will have that 99-seat theater (the current space at Batey is flexible, but far less capacious), plus a rehearsal room that can also serve as a dance studio and community space. The basement will house educational activities.

“So that way we can really activate and bring the schools and the students out to the theater,” says Vega.

UTC is partnering with architecture students Alexa Selvaggio and Elizabeth Tabisz on conceptual renderings as a first step. The two students worked with architecture professor Bridget Benge of Studio Artempo and the Chicago Studio, a program in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s architecture school. Vega estimates it will take three to five years to finish the new theater.

Vega says, “Purchasing this property is an act of resistance. It’s an act of fighting gentrification in our community. It’s being able to fully invest in the community that we’ve served and want to continue to serve. We want to continue to tell [our stories]. To really be a space for immigrants—for everyone—to also feel safe, to be inclusive, to come together, is more important now than ever.”

DEFINITION REDEFINES COMMUNITY

For Definition Theatre, being rooted on the south side is of paramount importance. And though their plans for their up-from-the-ground community arts space in Woodlawn at 6400 S. Cottage Grove (on a piece of land once owned by Lorraine Hansberry’s family, no less) have been delayed because of the death this past summer of longtime theater architect John Morris, artistic director Tyrone Phillips tells me that the vision they collaborated on with Morris will continue forward with their new architect. (Phillips declined to give the name, as the contract had not been finalized as of press time.)

What’s continuing for Definition, as with UTC, are the partnerships the company has already made with other artists and community organizations.

They currently perform at the former Revival space on 55th Street in Hyde Park, where they’ve offered their Innovator small business incubator, created in partnership with community development lab 37 Oaks and investment firm Promise Holdings LLC. Phillips notes

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Concept for UrbanTheater (top); Definition’s planned exterior ALEXA SELVAGGIO; COURTESY DEFINITION THEATRE the entrepreneur-focused Innovator program has “70 alums already, and it just started in the pandemic.” In the new space, he says, “We’ll actually have an area of our lobby that is a pop-up shop that the entrepreneurs will be able to rotate through. And depending on what play we’re doing, the right product could be paired with it.”

Like UTC, Phillips says Definition would like to still hang onto their current space as a satellite that could be used for classes and other community functions. And like most other cultural organizations in the area, the company is also eager to see what the effect of the Obama Presidential Center will be. Michael Strautmanis, who is on Definition’s board of directors, also serves as the Obama Foundation’s chief corporate affairs officer. “We are definitely in tune with the plans and hope to be one of those community organizations that do benefit from having a pillar like that when it comes to support, when it comes to funding, when it comes to awareness,” says Phillips.

CHICAGO DANZTHEATRE ENSEMBLE ADDS ARTIST SPACES

Sometimes it doesn’t take a new building to expand a company’s vision. Ellyzabeth Adler, executive director for Edgewater’s Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble (CDE), used some recent grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Driehaus Foundation to expand their footprint within Ebenezer Lutheran Church and to continue their growing partnerships with visual artists, whose work has been featured prominently over the past few years in CDE shows.

Specifically, Adler points out that they’ve been able to provide five visual artists with subsidized studio rentals, while also expanding their Body Passages developmental program, which provides artists with 40 hours of rehearsal space and subsidized performances, marketing, and mentorships. Adler says, “In talking to visual artists, especially up on the north side, there’s a lot of spaces along, like, say, Ravenswood, which is where we’re near, but

they’re asking for [rent] that artists can’t afford. It’s the same thing with performing artists and the cost of rental space. And so this seemed just like a win-win situation.”

Adler adds that she told potential funders from the start, “‘You can support us and help us to pay our staff to help do this better.

Or not, but then we’ll still do this. We just won’t have the funding support behind it.’

I firmly believed that doing the subsidized rentals and everything that we’re doing was just needed for the city.”

Whatever the size of these new theaters, the emphasis on service and connection came through in all the conversations I had. Jones, who has been a part of the community longer than any of the other people I talked to, notes that both he and Northlight “came from a storefront culture. And the level of intimacy that our theater has had and will have, it reflects that because that’s what audiences fell in love with. That’s what created the Chicago theater movement.” v kreid@chicagoreader.com

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FILM

The 400 Theater >> 6746 N. Sheridan, opening date TBA

The next iteration of the 400 Theater

The New 400 Theaters closed in 2023, leaving the far north side without a cinema. This year, new ownership will reopen the historic Rogers Park institution.

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The theater in 1972 and the theater today ST-20003178-0001, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLLECTION, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM; KIRK WILLIAMSON

I

n the last 20 years, movie theaters have disappeared from cities all over the world, and Chicago is no exception. Massive, intricately designed theaters that served as informal community centers have either been torn down, chopped up and repurposed, or left to fester and rot, particularly on the city’s south and west sides. While smaller art houses have filled the niche and historical preservation has kept institutions like the Music Box Theatre and the Davis Theater alive, many Chicagoans are limited to soulless theaters owned by multinational corporations—if they have easy access to moviegoing at all.

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Nearly all of Chicago’s movie theaters are on the north side. Even still, there has not been a fully operational movie theater within Chicago city limits north of Lawrence Avenue since August 18, 2023.

When the New 400 Theaters in Rogers Park announced its closing, the far north side lost its only cinema. For two and a half years, Chicagoans passing 6746 North Sheridan were greeted with an empty lobby, leftover posters for that summer’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, and the theater’s massive marquee advertising that the building was for lease.

Since it first opened 114 years ago as the Regent vaudeville house, the theater

has changed hands several times, operating as a movie theater under the names the 400, the 400 Twin, the Village North, the Visionary, and, finally, the New 400.

After a colorful history of managers and operators, (including the infamous Ron Rooding, who was issued a restraining order by Warner Brothers in 1989 for an attempted skydiving stunt advertising Batman, a film the then 400 Twin wasn’t even showing), Tony Fox of Evanston’s ADF Capital, the building’s owner and last operator, shuttered the theater in 2023. Like many independent operators, Fox cited a post-COVID lack of profit, telling Block Club at the time that after

reopening, “We did half the business we used to before COVID.” The shuttered theater has since drawn a frequent refrain of “What’s happening with the 400?” among Rogers Park residents. An indispensable far-north-side hub disappeared, leaving a hole in Chicago’s moviegoing community.

At the beginning of December, Jordan Stancil, a former foreign service officer and university professor who operates three theaters in his home state of Michigan, announced that he was taking over the lease on the theater, which would reopen as the 400 Theater. This seemingly out-ofthe-blue announcement was actually the

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FILM end of a very long search by Fox—with the help of the Lord Companies, who manage the property—for an operator for the shuttered theater. After the 2023 closure, Alderperson Maria Hadden of the 49th Ward was insistent that the development remain a movie theater.

“It was an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Hadden says. “The community made it really clear that Rogers Park people wanted a theater.” The nearest option otherwise is the AMC Evanston 12. Those who want to support a local business and go to the movies could go down to the Music Box in the Southport Corridor, but the legendary theater’s two screens make for limited programming. (The Music Box is currently addressing that problem with the construction of a third screening room.) Stancil—whose family had stewarded the independent Rialto Theater in Grayling, Michigan, since 1915—had the vision and experience most aligned with what Fox and Hadden saw as the theater’s needs.

“I didn’t think I would be in the movie theater industry as an adult,” Stancil says. While teaching at the University of Ottawa in the 2010s, he returned to the U.S. in order to assist his father in caring for his ailing mother and running the Rialto. “Keeping this single-screen theater moving . . . caused me to look a little more closely into what would happen if [we] tried to save this movie theater.”

Finding that he “actually could do this,” he took over the theater from his father despite a “tremendous learning curve.”

After the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Stancil felt called to help reopen some of the numerous theaters that didn’t make it through COVID and give them back to their communities. In 2023, he reopened Alpena’s Sanctuary Cinema for owners Jeff and Tina Konczak and then purchased a former AMC in Big Rapids this past summer.

When planning his final offer for the 400, Stancil did what he felt was his “due diligence,” walking around Rogers Park and asking people on the street if they’d been to the historic theater. Stancil’s man-on-the-street tactic confirmed that Rogers Park residents loved it. “Everybody said, ‘Yeah, open it, it’s part of our community.’” Stancil says, “That was all I needed to know.”

The 400’s four screens allow for a broad spectrum of programming under one roof, including family fare (at least that which is still released in theaters), art house and foreign language films, and even tentpoles. This does, however, depend on some wonky booking agreements. For example, Disney requires that theaters must essentially choose between being able to show their films’ first-runs or having access to Disney’s extensive repertory library.

Of course, this includes not only films released by Disney, but also those from its seemingly infinite subsidiaries. As a result, theaters that might want to show

Fantasia (1940) as part of a series celebrating animation would have to miss out on being able to open The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) and vice versa. Theater programmers and operators are consistently faced with the question of how to navigate the demands of distributors. Plus, as major studios morph into content mills, programmers are compelled to make tough decisions—and the same goes for Stancil and his team.

Some local theaters, like Facets, use this to their advantage, specializing in second-run and repertory films. According to Karen Cardarelli, executive director of Facets, “The secret sauce is leaning into the genre lovers. . . . Those people want to see a film [and] want a social experience.”

The Chicago film community is obviously accustomed to the idea of film as a social practice, as evidenced by the massive crowds at offbeat programs like the Music Box of Horrors marathon and the Siskel Film Center’s Settle In series. (Only at the Film Center can behemoth films like 2015’s Park Lanes, with an eight-hour runtime, pack a house.) If that trend continues, as long as the 400 listens to its audience— whether that’s families, Loyola students looking for a night out, or far-north-side cinephiles—they won’t have a problem with attendance.

Luckily, responsiveness to the community’s needs drives Stancil’s opening strategy. He is adamant that the theater’s reopening is “an ongoing process.” He notes that, as soon as possible, he wants “to start interacting with the community and creating that space.” While he has not set an opening date for the 400, he is raring to go. Stancil stresses the fact that “people really care . . . about the neighborhood, which will be a big part of this.”

Accountability to the community is

KIRK WILLIAMSON

tive director, also thinks that programming that reflects and cherishes the many cultures of the theater’s community is invaluable. The Film Center “has seen several communities . . . hit hard by the events of the last two or three years,” Long says. “We’ve seen our space become a shared refuge for people to come together.”

Stancil may be a newcomer to Chicago, but he hopes that the 400 can be a space for community gatherings. Alongside programming culturally specific to Rogers Park, he hopes to collaborate with community organizations to continue the theater’s engagement with social issues. Hadden hopes “to see some unique programming that serves us, but also brings in people from other parts of the city,” with an emphasis on community advocacy groups.

Some may wring their hands at the prospect of relaunching a movie theater in an era where streamers seemingly run the table, but Chicago’s programmers aren’t worried. Not only is the theatrical exhibition industry in a completely different place than it was in 2022, but LeMaster observes that “there is a hunger for the analog experience.” That experience of unmediated immersion in a film can only be had in the theater. The massive box office success of 2025 films like Sinners and One Battle After Another, and family films like the newest Lilo and Stitch and, yes, even A Minecraft Movie, attest to the vitality of the in-person theatrical experience. Rich Moskal, board cochair at Facets, echoes this.

“Everybody’s seeing an uptick in attendance,” says Moskal, “and the way that people want to consume films is refreshed.”

Cardarelli points out that, according to the National Audience Survey, 61 percent of recent filmgoers are under the age of 45.

In a time of increasing austerity, ticket

“Everybody said, ‘Yeah, open it, it’s part of our community.’ That was all I needed to know.”

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a tenet of the 400’s compatriots in the Chicago film exhibition community.

Christy LeMaster, associate director of programming at the Film Center, remarks that the question of “how cinemas respond to their neighborhood” is vital to the sustainability of independent theaters.

LeMaster continues, “The pathways [that] cinemas have to take suggestions . . . and respond in each location” are a means of activating moviegoing, tailoring programming to a community’s needs.

Stancil believes that “movie theaters can be all things to all people. . . . One thing about Rogers Park is there are so many different languages spoken,” which indicates an audience primed for a whole spate of international films. Stancil says that the 400’s programming “will not be from us, out, but from the community to us.”

Emily Long, the Film Center’s execu-

prices can also be an obstacle to many, but Stancil, aware of rising costs, plans on running the 400 so that it is affordable: “Open all the time, and . . . there whenever you want.” For him, “The real value of having a theater is the people using it and having the experience of living in a neighborhood that has a theater.”

When the 400 opens, it joins a network of theaters that come together to support Chicago’s vast film world. Moskal says, “Chicago’s cinema culture has always existed, fueled by the fact that Chicago is a film center,” between training programs at Chicagoland universities and the evergrowing number of film and TV projects shot here. Meanwhile, the aforementioned theaters, as well as venues like the Davis and the newly opened Uprising Theater and Cafe in Avondale, host filmmakers and scholars from around the world to complement their programming. Additionally, a great number of theaters from Hyde Park to Lincoln Square participate in Chicago’s more than 40 (per Cardarelli) annual film festivals.

The 400 will differ from some of its cohort by operating as a for-profit theater.

By doing so, the theater will bypass the intricacies of the nonprofit model, such as a board and the 501(c)(3) tax code. For Stancil, that’s a business decision more than a cultural one. He believes that audiences buying reasonably priced tickets will make up all the funding he needs.

“It’s a small ‘d’ democratic thing to be a small business,” says Stancil. “If you want to go to the movies, that’s how you vote with your dollars.” With that in mind, Stancil is experimenting with not just the format that has worked for him in Michigan, but also the way theaters like the 400 were run for many years. It’s fitting, then, that the theater has reverted to being called the 400 Theater, a reflection of an earlier iteration, offering inexpensive tickets to a wide swath of films.

W h i l e t h e q u e s t i o n o f “ W h a t’s happening with the 400?” has a general answer now that Stancil is the operator, it’s vital that Chicago’s moviegoers support the theater when its doors open. Stancil is planning on selling gift cards alongside advance tickets once he announces a date, and Hadden’s office is looking to facilitate the community partnerships central to the shared vision for the reopened theater. By sheer virtue of reopening this historic space, Long expects that “the 400 team will come to find the same welcome embrace that [the Film Center] has found” in Chicago.

While Rogers Park residents and the entire Chicago film community eagerly await this moviegoing institution, Stancil reiterates that he means it when he says that the theater’s reopening is a collaborative process. “I’m gonna be there, listening to people in the lobby, responding to what the people want,” he says. “Then, we’re going to evolve together.” v themail@chicagoreader.com

FILM MOVIEGOER

Fuck ICE

Physical and emotional violence on film

BY KAT SACHS Still from Slums of Beverly Hills (1998)

F

uck ICE. Fuck ICE, fuck ICE, fuck ICE, fuck ICE. I had to get that out of the way first, because like any American with a pulse—and a heart—my mind has recently been on the news coming out of Minneapolis, which has seemed to get worse with every passing hour. Because many of those hours are, for me, spent either watching movies at home or at the theater, a feeling of dread often settles upon me as I check my phone afterward—who knows what fresh hell we’ve descended into?

A few of the movies I watched outside my home this past week centered on violence. Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), which I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse, is a revisionist western starring Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe, and Leonardo DiCaprio about a shooting tournament led by Hackman’s renegade mayor. Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957), part of the Music Box Theatre’s Barbara Stanwyck matinee series, is about the showdown-cumromance between a retired gunslinger and Stanwyck’s ruthless landowner. Though both films contain violence, they also have characters who are reformed and regret their violent pasts, but who must engage with them for the sake of their own lives and those they love.

Such narratives are integral to the great American myth, which suggests that while violence is part of our past, it was never our preference. It’s understandably an enticing premise for a filmmaker, especially one like Fuller; he was a journalist—a career he started in earnest at just 17 years old—and a soldier during World War II, and much of his best work centers on the violence inherent to both. (You need not even be a cinephile to take something from his 2002 memoir A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, in which he goes into breathless detail about those experiences—I highly recommend.) There’s the best of both worlds: the cinematic depiction of said violence and the narrative catharsis of denouncing it.

Yet while so much great (and even not-so-great) cinema embraces this juxtaposition, somehow there’s a signifi-

SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

cant population of people who either pay no heed or think they’re the hero, despite those they emulate often embracing their status as antiheroes, with no valor to be gained from their actions. Perhaps this is the juncture at which hate simply wins out over a desire to be like those conciliatory figures; when the bravest thing to do would be to quit, they instead carry on, past the point of no return.

Perhaps as emotionally violent were two coming-of-age films I saw (one too literally so): Jess Franco’s Lorna the Exorcist (1974), also at the Alamo, and Tamara Jenkins’s Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) at Doc Films at the University of Chicago, on 35 millimeter. The former is not for the weak of heart, but I found it entrancing; undoubtedly an influence on David Lynch, it centers on a family whose 18-year-old daughter was promised to the father’s witchy mistress before she was even born, as payment for his soon-to-be success.

It’s like if Lynch and Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a movie that contains lots of lesbian sex, plus costuming by the late Paco Rabanne. The film’s an absolute fever dream of beauty and despair.

Slums of Beverly Hills, on the other hand, is a comic masterpiece in which a young Natasha Lyonne stars as a teenager whose oddball family frequently relocates among cheap dingbat apartments in the fancy Los Angeles neighborhood.

It’s a weird-girl manifesto, complete with discovering vibrators, losing one’s virginity to a pot dealer, and the forever anxiety-inducing potential of leaky period blood, which, all in all, seems a lot more wholesome than most other things we’re dealing with right now.

Until next time, moviegoers. v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

themail@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 2026

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MUSIC

Angel Tapes helps emerging musicians take wing

Jon-Carlo Manzo’s Fire Talk imprint embodies the values of the underground by investing in artists long before they’re sure bets.

BY LEOR GALIL

W

music we were making,” hen Lise Ivanova says. “I liked his Ivanova enthusiasm.” She also moved to liked that Manzo explicChicago from Los itly said that he wanted Angeles in 2023, she to help emerging artists wanted to try something grow—and that he had she’d failed to do out west: an established indie label start a noise-rock band. supporting him.

She intended the group’s Ira Glass’s debut EP, sound to draw from postCompound Turbulence hardcore, screamo, and Flexing for the Heat, came free jazz, and when she out on Angel Tapes in July made a flyer seeking band2024. At the time, the label’s roster consisted mates, she listed among entirely of Chicago acts. her influences notorious In January 2024, Manzo noise-rock label Amphetamine Reptile, the first had reissued an EP by folk Hole album, Alice Cooper, project Sleeper’s Bell, and Unwound, and every Steve four months later he’d dropped the debut EP Albini project. from wacky indie-rock Drummer Landon Keroua c found one stylists Feller. of Ivanova’s flyers on A n g e l Ta p e s h a s Milwaukee Avenue and since expanded beyond answered her call. Once Chicago with the likes they’d found the rest of of shoegaze-leaning Los their band, they named Angeles band Jawdropped it Ira Glass. Everybody and lo-fi Brooklyn rockers involved had come up Retail Dr ugs. But his in a DIY scene, so when two newest Angel Tapes they finished their first signees are both local: lo-fi demo and decided art-rock trio Starcharm, to release it that July, who dropped their debut they simply uploaded it single in September, and to Bandcamp. But as Ira dream-pop duo ImmateGlass plotted their 2024 rialize, who released their debut EP, Ivanova wanted Clockwise from upper left: Angel Tapes artists Immaterialize, Ira Glass, Sleeper’s Bell, and Starcharm debut album on January more help getting the PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY KIRK WILLIAMSON; ANGEL LOGO BY ANGEL TAPES; PHOTOS BY MALIK ROSS, DERRICK ALEXANDER, AND ATHENA MERRY AND 23. Manzo remains dediband’s music out to the COURTESY THE ARTIST cated to his hometown world. She found it from scene and devoted to a fledgling local label called Angel Tapes.

Angel Tapes in fall 2023, when she saw Chicago four-piece Cruel. The following nurturing emerging acts. All four of these “The music market is oversaturated the label’s logo—a crude outline of an month, Angel Tapes put out the Cruel groups joined Ira Glass at Schubas on with so much stuff, and a lot of it is self- angel with a halo—spray-painted along EP Common Rituals, which opens with January 30 for an Angel Tapes label showreleased,” Ivanova says. “There’s five Fullerton. Angel Tapes is the brainchild “Gutter.” case as part of the Tomorrow Never Knows hundred bands in every city, and all of of Jon-Carlo Manzo, a workhorse of ChicaIvanova messaged the Angel Tapes festival. these band Instagram accounts have a go’s indie music industry. At the time, he Instagram account, hoping to get the label “I get so much enjoyment from seeing thousand followers. They all have two was juggling two jobs: At Pitch Perfect PR, interested in working with Ira Glass. She these bands get excited about things and hundred monthly listeners, and everyone he worked as a tour publicist, and at New let Manzo know that her band liked Cruel. watching them grow,” Manzo says. These is posting ‘Please come out to our show!’ York City–based label Fire Talk, he did Manzo met Ivanova, Kerouac, and Ira days, he explains, he’s strengthened in his ticket giveaways. Everyone is having to digital marketing and A&R (artists and Glass saxophonist Jill Roth at the Whirl- commitment to unknown artists because promote and sell themselves and their repertoire). Angel Tapes is an imprint of away Lounge in Logan Square. he sees even fewer fellow industry folks personalities in this terrible way, and it’s Fire Talk.

“Even though Jon-Carlo do esn’t who share it. “It’s harder for an emerging just really tough to be out there with no Manzo launched Angel Tapes in have much of a personal background in act to get signed. Labels aren’t really develSeptember 2023 by releasing “Gutter,” post-hardcore or screamo, he seemed oping artists in the way they once were,” backing.”

Ivanova learned about the existence of a nervy, cacophonous single by punky to have a genuine interest in the kind of he says. “It’s become a stage where we’re

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MUSIC all swooping in and trying to grab something—poaching artists that other labels have developed. Which is not my jam.”

Manzo’s approach with Angel Tapes gets

about the music industry when he got to college, but he had taste and enjoyed seeking out indie music. He’d grown up outside Joliet, and he learned about Fire

since. He moved back to the Chicago area in early 2021, after his mom was diagnosed with cancer. He graduated from NYU that spring, then went looking for

says. “We followed each other on Instagram and kept in touch. He would come to shows sometimes, so we were friends through shows.” When she started making

”It’s not a profitable venture quite yet, so if the heart’s not there—we’re not all connected—it doesn’t really make sense for me to do it.”

—Angel Tapes founder Jon-Carlo Manzo

at the heart of why independent record labels exist—to champion music the mainstream wouldn’t dare touch. Chicago has a long and storied history of indie labels, and when Manzo discusses his inspirations, he mentions two of them: Drag City and Orindal. Indies have always taken chances, but today their business model seems radical in new ways.

Breaking even while spending money and effort on unknown music requires novel kinds of ingenuity now: The decaying media environment, dominated by a few social media outlets, means that even established operations struggle to attract attention. Meanwhile, major labels acquiesce to Spotify and other streamers as they push AI-generated music into our feeds and hope we’re listening so mindlessly that we don’t care.

Fire Talk founder Trevor Peterson says Angel Tapes does the kind of work that made him want to start a label in the first place. “What it provides for us is a way to give back, in a little bit of a way,” he explains. “It’s still a business transaction between us and these small artists, but I hope we’re providing value to them— putting more new music out into the world that gets a little bit of support. ’Cause it’s just too easy nowadays to make a track and put it on the Internet.”

P

eterson says Manzo first reached out in 2019 asking about internships at Fire Talk. Manzo was a student at New York University at the time, and he booked shows through the school’s program board. He didn’t know much

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Talk after taking an interest in Chicago artists. “[Fire Talk] had Dehd and Deeper, and I love both those bands,” Manzo says. “I barely even knew what a record label was at that point.”

What Manzo didn’t know, he made up for with dedication. Peterson saw that firsthand after the COVID pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020. “That was a defining moment for our relationship,” Peterson says. “His commitment to working in music—I can’t speak to his mindset, [but] the whole world was shutting down, and he stuck around and helped us move our office. He could’ve easily fled back to Chicago immediately, but he hung out in New York for a little while and helped us navigate what we were doing as everything was collapsing.”

Manzo has worked for Fire Talk ever

work that would keep him close to home— and his experience with Fire Talk came in handy. “Trevor helped me get that job at Pitch Perfect,” Manzo says.

Once Manzo had his boots on the ground in Chicago, he developed a more intimate connection with the city’s indierock scenes. Sleeper’s Bell front woman

Instagram posts about working on a Sleeper’s Bell album, Manzo reached out.

At that point in 2023, Manzo had been talking with Peterson about different ways he could support new indie bands, particularly those from Chicago. This got Peterson thinking about Fire Talk’s earliest days, when the label sometimes used cassettes for low-stakes releases. From 2021 till 2023, Fire Talk also maintained a digital singles imprint called Open Tab—A&R staffer Ruby Hoffman had launched and overseen it, with Manzo pitching in occasionally, but it wound down after Hoffman left to work at Fat Possum.

Open Tab ended at just the right time for Manzo to level up at Fire Talk. “Jon-Carlo was like, ‘You know what? I would love to use this opportunity to learn more about A&R and being in the trenches with artists, specifically on putting out music,’” Peterson says. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you start an imprint? I’ll support it, and we can do it together.’ That’s how it started, and he’s really taken the lead on it.”

Blaine Teppema remembers meeting him after her band played the Hideout in 2022.

“He said he liked our set and that he was working in the music scene,” Teppema

The Sleeper’s Bell album wouldn’t come out till 2025, but in January 2024, Angel Tapes reissued their 2021 EP, Umarell, as the label’s second release. Teppema

MUSIC

T

he history of Immaterialize goes back about a decade, to when Alana Schachtel and Erik Fure started jamming together as students at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Eventually they both moved to Chicago and established solo careers (Schachtel makes dreamy pop music as Lipsticism, and Fure makes ambient dance tracks as DJ Immaterial), but their slow-simmering collaboration never ended. Schachtel says they finally started recording as Immaterialize in 2023. “I think a reason we weren’t recording was because [of] some perfectionism on both of our ends,” she says. “We were able to drop that and record at home.”

They called the record Perfect.

When it came time to shop the album to labels, Schachtel sent it to Manzo at Fire Talk—she didn’t yet know Angel Tapes existed. She liked a lot of the Fire Talk catalog, including a 2022 Open Tab single

by Chanel Beads, aka Shane Lavers, who’s friends with Immaterialize. When Manzo replied, he pitched Schachtel and Fure on signing with Angel Tapes instead of with its parent label.

Perfect speaks to Manzo’s tastes; Immaterialize make indie rock that strays from straightforward formulas, mixing trip-hop percussion and ambient textures into dreamy soundscapes. “There’s some exciting, interesting indie rock on Angel Tapes,” Schachtel says. “[It’s] similar to what interested us in Fire Talk and Open Tab—feeling like it would be a good home for the record.”

Manzo likes to put good music into the world. But he’s also looking out for artists who click with his priorities and values. “It’s not a profitable venture quite yet, so if the heart’s not there—we’re not all connected—it doesn’t really make sense for me to do it, or to invest my time on it,” he says. “The vibe check is quite important, actually.” v

Of the people, by the people, for the people – Abraham Lincoln PhotoS: Teresa Crawford for WTTW

says the original version of the EP wasn’t long enough to make sense for a cassette release, so Sleeper’s Bell added some previously unissued music. The expanded EP includes sparse closing track “Corner,” which attracted some of the band’s first press coverage—thanks in part to Manzo’s PR savvy.

“That’s something that I feel like Jon-Carlo is heavy on,” Teppema says. “I think he knows that it makes people who make music feel validated and good about their music. That was really fun to wake up and see a write-up in Clash—that’s just a feeling I’ll never forget.”

“My background is press, so press milestones still feel really cool to me,” Manzo says. “Ira Glass getting their first Pitchfork review, Retail Drugs getting a Quietus review—those both felt really massive and huge. Even Jawdropped getting a little look from a Rolling Stone playlist felt really cool. So those press milestones still go a long way.”

Manzo went full-time in A&R at Fire Talk in September 2024. “Trevor was doing everything by himself for, like, the better half of a year, but it was just too much for him. So there was room for me to come back in a full-time capacity,” Manzo says. “It felt more aligned with what I want to be doing in the long term, so that felt like kind of a no-brainer.” Angel Tapes had its biggest year yet in 2025, and Manzo says this is partly because Fire Talk was relatively quiet. This let him direct more energy into signing bands and releasing music with Angel Tapes.

The label’s first release of the year was the debut Sleeper’s Bell album, Clover.

Teppema says Angel Tapes has helped her band do a lot more than just get press.

“We met Ethan [Toenjes], our drummer, who’s one of our best friends now, through [Angel Tapes],” Teppema says. “He plays in Feller, and that’s another Angel Tapes band. [It’s] a community, and it extends, and it’s a special thing.”

Explore on 2.16.26

wttw.com/firsthand

lgalil@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 2026

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MUSIC CITY OF WIN

Welcome to Sim City

South-side native DJ Simmy works every lane to build up her career and her community.

BY JOSHUA EFERIGHE DJ Simmy at Expat in December for Brrr: An Iced Out Winter Party THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Joshua Eferighe that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.

E

“

ver since I wa s yo ung, I wanted to do everything,” says DJ Simmy. “I would tell my momma I want to be every profession.”

Fast-forward to today, and Simmy’s creativity and hustle have carried the south-side native all kinds of places. She’s rocked the Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash, she’s served as a resident DJ for the Chicago Sky, and she’s DJed for the

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likes of Playboi Carti and Westside Gunn.

She’s mixed on SiriusXM and London’s Foundation.FM, and she’s been tapped for events—promotions, parties, mixers, shows—by brands such as Burberry, Red Bull, Coach, and Jordan.

Her reach also extends beyond the decks. She’s a producer, and last year she worked on a track for Marino Infantry, a Baltimore collective founded by fashion designer and rapper A$AP Ant. She’s made transitional music for video streaming service Zeus, and she’s placed beats on movies and TV shows, including the AMC drama 61st Street (in the Carla G. song “Out of Water”). Last year, Simmy was named one of the city’s 77 Best Dressed by the Chicago Fashion Coalition.

Simmy seems to be everywhere, all the

time, doing everything. When you’re out with friends, you’re in Sim City.

“I feel like what gets me far is knowing music a lot of people don’t,” Simmy says, “or playing music that a lot of people wouldn’t.”

If you’ve been to a Simmy set—she’s frequently at Expat or Never Have I Ever, among other spots—you’ve likely seen her mix eras or genres in her distinctively inventive way. She likes to mix old-school with new-school, and she might blend Soulja Boy’s “Soulja Girl” with Sexyy Red’s “Get It Sexyy” or combine the vocals from Chief Keef’s “Bitch Where” with the instrumental from Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That.”

Simmy’s musical palette was shaped in church. Her father directed choirs, her

mother was a big music head, and Simmy herself started piano at six, playing through her teens.

“I had to go. My parents weren’t playing that,” Simmy says. “So that’s how I learned music for real. My dad and my mom love neosoul, like Jill Scott, Musiq Soulchild, and Amel Larrieux—like, the oldies. My mom liked a lot of house. She listened to a lot of Boolumaster, so we had a lot of ghetto house and -tech in the house.”

Simmy enrolled at Illinois State University to study business, then switched to marketing. In her sophomore year, she started making beats with a friend who worked with her in a university cafeteria.

“I had one session. He gave me the program [FL Studio 12], and I learned it on my own. I always just kind of knew how

MUSIC to work shit,” she says.

By her senior year, in 2018, Simmy had several semesters of beats under her belt.

Her roommate was interning at an entertainment company run by Joe Palma that booked DJs and bands at weddings and parties, and she convinced Simmy to try DJing. She also made sure Simmy met Palma, who became a mentor.

“As soon as she introduced us, he trusted me. We’d do gigs together— weddings, house parties—and that’s how you learn,” Simmy says. The live fo o ta ge she incor p orate d into her social media promos soon made her a go-to DJ on campus.

“I really put in work. I was a dog from day one,” Simmy says. “I’m not even trying to toot my own horn, but I had nights at the clubs where it would be a line out the door.”

Simmy returned to Chicago with her marketing degree and a ton of DJing experience, and to get her brand out, she used both. She handled it all: coldemailing ar tists, brands, and gatekeepers; soaking up online interviews to help pick keywords for her campaign; acting as her own graphic designer, booking agent, and promoter.

“From the jump, when I first got here, I knew that I was going to be on a run forever because of the amount of gigs I was getting off the bat,” Simmy says.

“Babes Only was the first collective I found

in Chicago. I hit up Evie [aka Babes Only founder EvieTheCool], we had a conversation, and she booked me.”

Chicago-based concert and festival production company Spkrbx Presents saw Simmy’s persistence firsthand. Spkrbx has helped put on the Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash since its inception in 2018, and in 2019, Simmy learned that the company would add a small stage to the fest.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna call them every week until they put me on this Summer Smash

“Everybody’s DJing now, so it’s like, yeah, what make you different?

Bring people into your world.” lineup.’ I called them every week from January to April. One day, they were like, ‘Simmy, I got a spot for you.’ I was just a pest, and now I work with them a lot, so it’s like—that groundwork.”

That groundwork has opened doors for Simmy outside music. In February 2025, she collaborated with Stussy’s Diner in Bridgeport, creating a suite of menu items—heart-shaped red velvet pancakes, a patty melt with waffle fries, funnel cake

topped with ice cream. WGN News aired an Around Town segment about it.

“I was on the treadmill, and I literally remember the idea coming to me,” Simmy says. “I was like, ‘You should do a menu.’ I remember seeing Saweetie’s McDonald’s menu, and then I heard Angel Reese was working on one. So I was like, ‘What if I, instead of just having a commercial, had my own menu?’ I scheduled a meeting and walked in with PowerPoint ideas. The same day, they said, ‘We’re gonna do this.’”

Being booked and busy has been great for Simmy’s career, but it’s also led her to reevaluate her priorities.

“I’m not gonna lie. I’m coming out of a big burnout,” she says. “I actually hired an assistant in September, so she’s been helping me now. I’m starting to get used to trusting her, but you still have to do the work. My sisters are very helpful. Sometimes I bother them about a graphic or a video or something, both of them. They know how to do videos; they know how to edit, they know how to take pictures.”

This year, Simmy plans to take her time and build her community as well as her brand. In fact, she’s already started: In November 2025, she and her photographer, Elexis Vasquez, put together an event called the Pull Up Food Drive to help those in need.

“It was around the time the SNAP benefits were cut, and we were just seeing so

many people talk about it online,” Simmy says. “We talked about it, and we was like, ‘Let’s do something.’ And we literally locked in and we did it. So we’re gonna try to do it once a year.”

Of course, she doesn’t want to lose her momentum as a DJ—she just needs to be careful with how much she takes on. “I want to go on my own tour,” she says. “I just want to be a better DJ. I want to get to a point where I could scratch and people be like, ‘Damn, she really cold,’ like I could do it in my sleep. That’s like a big goal for me. And I just want to continue building out my city. Sim City is my community.

Because everybody’s DJing now, so it’s like, yeah, what make you different? Bring people into your world.”

In the short term, Simmy is planning a full-day songwriting workshop presented

by Top Pop Productions and hosted by creative studio The.BlkRoom. On Saturday, May 30, she’ll bring together artists across genres to collaborate, make connections, and share insights about the industry.

Submissions close May 1, 2026. v Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate community-driven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond themail@chicagoreader.com

2 5 / 2 6 M A I N S TA G E

Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual Sunday, March 15 / 2:00PM “the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers...”

— The New York Times Photo by Kyle Flubacker.

harristheaterchicago.org | 312.334.77777 FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 41

MUSIC

The Frequency Festival connects a far-flung constellation of sounds

The 2026 program, which includes the local debut of Norwegian alternate-tuning wizard Fredrik Rasten, draws a line through one-bit electronics, Scottish balladry, musically hybrid fictional history, and more.

BY BILL MEYER

S

ince its inception in 2013, the Frequency Series has been hosted by north-side performance space Constellation, usually on Sunday nights.

Founded and programmed by former Reader staff critic Peter Margasak, the series devotes the bulk of its programming to new classical music, but it also purports to illuminate links between new classical, free improvisation, noise, and other boundary-pushing disciplines—with the goal of bringing their audiences together.

Margasak left the Reader in 2018 and now

lives in Berlin, where he works as a freelance writer and contributes to the curation of Jazzfest Berlin. In February 2016, he presented the first Frequency Festival, a weeklong event that demonstrated the scope and ambition of the Frequency Series in ways no single concert could. The festival’s tenth edition (COVID canceled the 2021 event) runs from Tuesday, February 24, through Sunday, March 1, at Constellation and at Bond Chapel on the University of Chicago campus.

This year’s program illustrates the

series’ persistence of vision. Five of the six nights include musicians who’ve played at previous versions of the Frequency Festival, but no one is presenting old favorites. The focus is on new and sometimes unrepeatable material. Many of the performers come from Chicago’s classical and experimental music communities, and they keep getting invited back because they’re committed to developing and transforming their work. But Margasak also booked two artists from abroad who’ve never performed here before: Norwegian

guitarist Fredrik Rasten (whose practice encompasses specialized tuning, long-form composition, and folk music) is making his U.S. debut, and multinational free-jazz quartet ‫[ أحمد‬Ahmed] were to play their first midwestern concert before canceling their entire stateside tour on Monday, February 2. New York–based guitarist, pianist, and vocalist David Grubbs, a former Chicagoan whose work has involved several collaborations with poets and experimental musicians, has stepped into the breach.

• Tristan Perich’s Open Symmetry played by Doug Perkins, Ian Antonio, and Xin Yi Chong • Jennifer Torrence plays Kari Watson and Kelley Sheehan Tue 2/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25.91, 18+

New York–based composer Tristan Perich works with the simplest electronics possible, but his music has evolved into something epic. Since the mid-2000s, his chosen instrument has been one-bit electronics, either alone or in combination with other instruments. His earliest release, 2010’s 1-Bit Symphony, creates a remarkably involved sequence of synthetic tones that issue from a microchip embedded in a transparent CD jewel case that’s also outfitted with a battery, a basic but complete electronic circuit, and a headphone jack. More recently, Perich has routed his programmed one-bit electronics through large numbers of speakers, which he pairs with the sounds of conventional instruments. His newest album, November’s Infinity Gradient (Erased Tapes), features 100 speakers and one church organ, the latter played by James McVinnie. The music has some of the rhythmic insistence of early minimalism, but as the programmed tones and the organ swap gestures, the music lifts off with a vertiginous swirl. For this Frequency Festival concert, Doug Perkins, Ian Antonio, and Xin Yi Chong will play the 2019 piece Open Symmetry, which Perich composed for three vibraphones and 20 speakers. Its repeating metallophones sound like stripped-down late-1970s Steve Reich, but the strands of flickering, synthetic melody that thread through their intricate pulsating patterns—as well as the fluid transitions between circuits and players—produce a lighter, more joyful feel.

From left: Xin Yi Chong, Ian Antonio, and Doug Perkins will perform Tristan Perich’s Open Symmetry. PERKINS BY JOE MAZZA; OTHERS COURTESY THE ARTISTS

Oslo-based percussionist Jennifer Torrence matches a command of plink-tocrash dynamics with an ability to egolessly manifest whatever a composition requires. Accompanied for part of her program by the video work of Chicago-based Brazilian artist Lua Borges, Torrence will play two pieces by Northwestern University professor and electronic musician Kelley Sheehan and a third created for her

by Chicago intermedia artist Kari Watson.

• David Grubbs • Rage Thormbones

Wed 2/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 25.91, 18+

If David Grubbs were to mount a retrospective of his work as a multiinstrumentalist, composer, improviser, poet, singer, and author, he could fill the entire Frequency Festival schedule by himself. On the musical portion of his CV

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Jennifer Torrence COURTESY THE ARTIST

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MUSIC alone, you’ll find his 1980s Louisville punk band Squirrel Bait; his groups Bastro and Gastr del Sol, which unfolded into myriad song forms and compositional strategies (he formed the latter after moving to Chicago for grad school in 1990); and his subsequent collaborations with the likes of Tony Conrad, Susan Howe, Mats Gustafsson, Taku Unami, Loren Connors, Wendy Eisenberg, and Kramer. Grubbs’s solo records tend to focus deeply on a particular aspect of his work, and his 2025 solo instrumental album, Whistle From Above (Drag City), grew out of the many hours he spent playing guitar at home during the pandemic. (Six of its eight tracks feature guitar.) “Scapegrace” and “The Snake on Its Tail” are terse and melodic, with cleantoned, incisive picking; by contrast, the distorted buzz and disruptive glitches on “Synchro Fade Pluck Stutter Slip” could pass for the sound design of the extradimensional scenes in the third season of Twin Peaks. For this concert, Grubbs expects to play pieces from Whistle From Above; tunes by Squanderers, his guitar-dominated trio with Eisenberg and Kramer; unreleased music from a recent collaboration with guitarist Jules Reidy and Mouse on Mars founder Jan St. Werner; and new solo material.

David Grubbs DON STAHL

Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki are transatlantic trombone duo Rage Thormbones.

They’d each slipped the bonds of conventional classical performance by the time they founded the group in 2014, but they go further than just extended techniques. They use additional instrumentation and electroacoustic processes to manipulate low-frequency sound as a sculptural material. Their newest LP, December’s Tilth Soil (Marginal Frequency), situates the listener both inside and outside their horns, which capture as well as project sound. “Buoy,” for example, incorporates material recorded by microphones placed inside their instruments as they floated in a Norwegian harbor—it sounds like garbled radio transmissions and murky aquatic racket. Rage Thormbones often collaborate with other experimentalists, such as Kevin Drumm, with whom they played a memorably noisy concert at the 2019 Frequency Festival, but for this show it’s just the two of them.

• Olivia Block • ~Nois play Alex Mincek

Thu 2/26, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25.91, 18+

Rage Thormbones COURTESY THE ARTIST

Olivia Block OSCAR VILLANUEVA DORANTES

Since moving to Chicago almost 30 years ago, sound artist and musician Olivia Block has followed a discontinuous path, punctuating a series of intense investigations into particular concerns with abrupt jumps into something different. Her preoccupations have often involved combinations of materials and methods: She’s layered natural and composed sounds, employed film-informed zooms to deconstruct orchestral music, and staged a hybrid live performance and sound installation in Rockefeller Chapel. Her most recent stylistic shift took place in 2024, when she released The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle), a cycle of songs inspired by wildlife in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains and made poignant by her high, fragile, electronically filtered voice. For this concert, Block will present a new song cycle about the beginnings of the Earth’s atmosphere. She’ll accompany herself on piano and with a sampler, which she’s loaded with manipulated instrumental sounds recorded and then slowed down using reel-to-reel tape.

Given that the members of this local saxophone quartet chose the name ~Nois, you might expect, well, a lot of noise. But though the ensemble can raise a ruckus when the score demands, their approach is generally refined and precise. Because ~Nois formed in 2016, like the Frequency Festival they’re coming up on double digits. Their lineup has changed over time—it’s currently Julian Velasco on soprano, Natalia Warthen on alto, Jordan Lulloff on tenor, and János Csontos on baritone—but they’ve stayed steadfast in their mission to cultivate new music for saxophones. The group will present the world premiere of The Perpetual, Poly-Iterative, Multivalent, Transmodal, Vibe Maximizer, a concert-length work by Alex Mincek. Mincek is a saxophonist himself as well as a member of renowned group Wet Ink; his compositions often strive to make apparently incompatible sounds and methods work together.

• Ensemble dal Niente

Fri 2/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $31.09, 18+

Ensemble dal Niente has been part of the Frequency Series since the beginning, and most years it’s played on the Frequency Festival’s closing night. The ensemble, now in its 20th season, draws on a complement of 26 musicians to realize 20th- and 21st-century compositions, mounting productions that might be as small as a single soloist or as large as an opera or multimedia event. The music on Ensemble dal Niente’s new album, Portrait RE / Flux / Pacific Time (New Focus), includes a continually self-disrupting chamber piece by trombonist and computer-music pioneer George Lewis, which seems to imagine itself anew every few bars, and another by Igor Santos that transitions between broad expanses of frictive drum textures and exchanges among waterfowl-voiced reeds. The five pieces on their festival program survey the ensemble’s history. The first, Helmut Lachenmann’s Dal Niente (Intérieur III), scrutinizes extended techniques for solo clarinet; it’s also the group’s namesake. José Julio Díaz Infante’s “Sin Palabras” is a dynamic, ever-changing piece for small group and vocalist. Ayanna

~Nois NICK ZOULEK

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MUSIC Woods’s “Bloom Balloon” is a contemplative piece for solo vibraphone, and Chaya Czernowin’s Manoalchadia is a trio for bass flute and two voices that superimposes two very different love songs. The finale, Rain Under the Sea, is a new composition by Lei Lang, whose works often reference natural phenomena; it’s scored for two vocalists and a sevenpiece ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, harp, and percussion.

• Fredrik Rasten

Sat 2/28, 6 PM, Bond Chapel, 1025 E. 58th, free with registration at events.humanitix.com/fredrikrasten-solo, all ages

Norwegian guitarist Fredrik Rasten is an adept of just intonation, an alternate tuning system based on whole-number ratios that yields a rich spectrum of overtones. As a collaborator, he’s worked with Belgian guitarist Ruben Machtelinckx, Australian percussionist and guitarist Oren Ambarchi, French spinet player Léo Dupleix, and Berlin-based collective Harmonic Space Orchestra. In each situation, he finds a way to make the quiet glow of his strings relevant and evident within a larger whole. On his own, he’s developed a series of projects involving multiple guitars, sometimes for an ensemble and other times for just a couple musicians playing up to three instruments apiece. These projects use the careful juxtaposition of tones to unlock beating acoustic effects as well as wordless vocals to enhance certain harmonies. For this concert, Rasten’s first in the U.S., he’ll go it alone. He’ll play a composition from his Murmurations series, in which he magnetically activates the strings of several acoustic guitars with EBows to summon swarms of slowly changing sound.

Ensemble dal Niente ALEXANDER PERRELLI

• Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten

Sat 2/28, 8 PM, Bond Chapel, 1025 E. 58th, free with registration at events.humanitix.com/fredrikraste-and-alasdair-roberts-duo, all ages

Alasdair Roberts hasn’t played in Chicago since 2013, but he’s no stranger to the city.

Local label Drag City began releasing the Scottish singer-guitarist’s records in the 1990s (when he led the Will Oldham–besotted combo Appendix Out) and has stuck with him throughout his multifaceted solo career. Roberts sings in a clear, beguilingly fragile croon, which he balances against the sturdy intricacy of his acoustic guitar playing.

He has matured into a peerless performer of traditional Scottish ballads, gravitating toward centuries-old tales of human vulnerability and calamity that still ring true today.

His original songs traverse similar territory, and he has a knack for using rich, antique language that makes his lyrics sound as timeless as anything from an ancient ballad.

Roberts keeps finding new settings for his material, and in 2021 he released the album The Old Fabled River with Norwegian experimental folk group Völvur—also his first collaboration with fellow guitarist Fredrik Rasten, who was part of the group. When the two men play as a duo, Rasten’s harmonies heighten the otherworldly mystery at the heart of Roberts’s songs.

Alasdair Roberts (left) and Fredrik Rasten LUKE FOWLER

• TAK Ensemble play Weston Olencki • Zachary Good plays Lake Heritage (with Ian McEdwards) Sun 3/1, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25.91, 18+

Since its founding in 2013, the New York–based TAK Ensemble has commissioned hundreds of new works from composers operating within and outside classical music.

Past collaborators have included improvising bassist Brandon López, jazz and classical polymath Tyshawn Sorey, and Chicago design studio Sonnenzimmer. TAK consists of flutist Laura Cocks, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, vocalist Charlotte Mundy, violinist Marina Kifferstein, and percussionist Ellery Trafford, and this unconventional instrumentation equips the ensemble to realize distinctive ideas and sound worlds. (Austin Wulliman from Spektral Quartet fills in for Kifferstein here.) Weston Olencki’s When the Great Fires Were Lit on the Other Side of the Ocean, which TAK will perform to close the Frequency Festival, summons just such an environment. A concert-length work of alternate 19th-century history, it combines hallucinatory dirge, folk song, and amplifier buzz to evoke the mystical qualities of a phenomenon newly harnessed at the time: electricity.

TAK Ensemble TITILAYO AYANGADE

Zachary Good RICARDO ADAME

Opening the final concert of the 2026 Frequency Festival is Lake Heritage, a piece by local composer and clarinetist Zachary Good. It employs a sequence of 60 small-interval clarinet multiphonics; a multiphonic, in this case, is a complicated tone consisting of two or more simultaneous pitches, created by unconventional voicings and/or fingerings applied to what’s usually a monophonic instrument. Good (a member of Ensemble dal Niente, Eighth Blackbird, and Honestly Same) recorded the piece by overdubbing four clarinets, and the acoustic beats generated by the close proximity of multiple horns (and multiple multiphonics) give its elongated, floating phrases a woozy, psychedelic feel. This performance will employ two B-flat clarinets, played by Good and Ian McEdwards. v themail@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 2026

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MUSIC CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Sold, deep listening DJ

“Partying is not really something I do anymore, and dancing is a lot harder at 40. My emphasis now is listening.”

AS TOLD TO MICCO CAPORALE

SANJANA ELINA

Glenna Fitch, who DJs as Sold, has had a love affair with electronic music since childhood. While attending college at Kent State, they’d regularly trek more than an hour to Cleveland to experience the danceoriented nightlife Kent lacked. In 2008, they cofounded a local dance party called Hot Knees so they could stop making the trips. Slowly, an affection for dancing grew into a passion for DJing. Three years later, Fitch moved to Denver, where they immersed themselves in the Rocky Mountain rave scene, and in 2013, they came to

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Chicago. To get booked here, Fitch not only had to abandon their laptop in favor of turntables or CDJs but also had to solidify their DJ persona.

Fitch’s decision to spin vinyl as Sold secured a lifelong commitment to DJing.

Eventually, they became a Gramaphone Records employee and Smart Bar resident and savored every chance to encounter the dance floor. But during the pandemic, something shifted. After lockdown, they retired from Smart Bar and started declining dance-oriented DJ gigs to focus

on creating opportunities for mindful listening to electronic music. Today, the 40-year-old Garfield Park resident runs an imprint with their spouse called Lizard Label and hosts a monthly radio show called Just a Dilettante on Particle FM. They also organize deep listening events for the Listening Lounge, co-organize Gramaphone’s monthly DJ night at Schubas, and support emerging artists through a DJ mentorship program called Walking & Falling launched by Sam Kern (“Sassmouth”) and Elly Schook (“Kiddo”).

T

he first music I ever bought was Ace of Base’s The Sign, around second grade. I was obsessed. Then the summer before ninth grade, I discovered electronic music. Ace of Base is electronic music, obviously, but it’s more pop aligned than what I was getting into, like Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Air, and stuff.

I grew up in Ohio and went to Kent State. In the dorms, there was a program called MyTunes. If you had a shared network, this program would let you connect to the iTunes of anyone else on it and download from their library. MyTunes and Soulseek were responsible for the majority of my college music library.

Going to parties in college was really fun. I would replicate that by downloading what I’d heard when I got home. Electroclash was really popular at the time—bands like Adult. and the Faint and DJs like Miss Kittin & the Hacker. My friends and I really liked the movie Party Monster [2003], which had a lot of electroclash sounds in it.

That was something that guided my taste at the time.

I always loved dancing. Growing up, I would dance alone in my room.

I wanted to express myself that way publicly, but I feared doing it until I met my college best friend, Ryan, and our friend Katie. There weren’t great places to do that nearby.

Ryan was from Cleveland, so they knew spots there. We’d drive over an hour and get there at, like, ten.

People wouldn’t be drunk until, like, midnight, and people generally won’t dance until they’re drunk, so we’d always stand around for two hours.

Finally, we made this pact to always be the first people dancing. We called ourselves “the Icebreakers.”

Driving an hour just to go out was tiring, so in 2008, me and Ryan asked this now defunct bar called the Green Room if we could do something. They didn’t have anything happening on Thursdays.

We asked a friend what to call the party, and he said, “How about Hot Knees?” We’re like, “Let’s think of something better.” And then we never did. [Laughs.]

Having a weekly dance night that we could walk to was transformative. In the beginning, maybe 30 people attended weekly. Six months in, we had 150 people weekly. When it ended, we were attracting over three hundred people. We weren’t doing it to be cool or whatever. Maybe it morphed into that because it was attracting so many people, but that was never the point. The point wasn’t even to DJ. It was to dance.

Then seven or eight months in, I remember this clear moment. There were over a hundred people that night,

MUSIC but there was this lull. It was summertime and super hot, so everyone was outside talking and smoking and stuff.

I remember putting on a song—some bloghouse track—and suddenly all these people streamed inside. Just this huge influx of people. Realizing I had that kind of influence and could get everyone sharing a positive feeling—that was so cool and affirming.

Hot Knees lasted about two years.

Unfortunately, the Green Room closed.

We moved to a bar called the Robin Hood [Inn]. Interestingly, in the late 90s, early 2000s, the Robin Hood had been a home for the Ohio drum ’n’ bass scene. I think it was trying to regain some of that cache, but Hot Knees never caught on there. After about a year at Robin Hood, we called it quits.

Ryan and I continued to DJ together at various places as the Hot Knees DJs, but we never recaptured that magic. After a while, I felt like I’d hit a ceiling on what I could do as a DJ in Ohio.

My then boyfriend was like, “Do you want to move to Denver?” So I moved to Denver.

The timing of our move was very fortunate. I started raving and caught the tail end of a golden age in Denver raving. It was 2011, and the Denver and Boulder area had a smattering of popular outdoor raves. This one collective had a beautiful festival called Communikey and a rave called Gemini.

To this day, Gemini was probably the best rave I’ve ever been to. There were other fantastic ones, like Pitch a Tent, Full Moon, and Lunar Lodge. Those experiences are like a dragon I’ll be chasing for the rest of my life.

Anywhere from one hundred to three hundred people would show up for these bare-bones parties. There were no decorations, no fancy lighting or anything—just generators, stacks of speakers, and a little covered tent for the DJ. You were underneath the stars—maybe in a clearing in the woods or mountains or something.

The parties really capitalized on the natural beauty of the environment.

My taste really shifted during that time. Like any mid-20-year-old, I was so self-assured about my taste. Then I met a bunch of, like, 21-year-olds who completely eviscerated me with their music knowledge. It was very humbling but necessary. I met so many different kinds of people who taught me that my job is to be a listener and a learner above all else. That’s a lifelong process.

I took a break from DJing to educate myself. I watched movies about raving, read Wikipedia, spent a ton of time on YouTube. Being humbled made me a better DJ—not saying I’m a good DJ, but I’m better for it. Then I started DJing again.

In Denver my DJ name was Tina Pizza.

In 2013, I decided to move to Chicago to be closer to my parents. I’d always loved partying here, and it’s home to so many

influential people and music genres. I didn’t start DJing here until 2014, because I had to make friends and meet people first. Eventually, I felt ready for bigger venues, but I wasn’t being taken seriously as Tina Pizza, so I started DJing as Sold.

I was still a laptop DJ, though. I had three promoters in a row tell me they would never book a laptop DJ. I had to play either turntables or CDJs. My friend was willing to sell me a couple cheap, crappy turntables for $100. CDJs cost something astronomical—like $600 to $700 each.

Once you get CDJs, it’s cheaper in the long run, because you just have to buy digital music versus records. But because I could get two turntables for $100 and a mixer was $100, I was like, “I’m gonna play records . . . and maybe I can get a job

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“When people want a DJ, they typically want dance music.

Other electronic music is too niche. I have to throw my own events a lot.” at Gramaphone.”

When I got my job at Gramaphone in 2015, everything started to congeal. I met and started being associated with the members of Hugo Ball. Initially, I was only doing promo for them, like hanging posters, posting on social media, and coming to their events. Then I started DJing for them, and I became a Smart Bar resident in 2016.

At the time, Hugo Ball had three members: Severin Delabar, Justin Aulis Long, and Eris Drew, who’s still one of my best friends. She introduced me to Pauline Oliveros, who, for all intents and purposes, founded the deep listening movement.

That really shifted things for me.

When I started DJing, I just wanted to party and dance. Partying is not really something I do anymore, and dancing is a lot harder at 40. My emphasis now is listening. That’s why I stepped back from Smart Bar in 2022. I wanted that residency to go to someone coming up in the scene, and I wanted to focus on downtempo, ambient, and experimental DJing.

It’s hard, though. When people want a DJ, they typically want dance music. Other electronic music is too niche. I have to throw my own events a lot.

In 2023, my spouse and I decided to start Lizard Label. The music is all over the map, but we’re only releasing stuff by homies. The happiest a lizard can be is laying on a rock getting warmed by the sun. We want the listener to be the lizard, the artist to be the sun, and Lizard Label to be the rock. Feel the warmth of sound created by these artists we love. Be held by that moment. v

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MUSIC

Duke Tumatoe >> Tumatoe will trade sets with Nicholas Alexander till 4 AM. Fri 2/6 and Sat 2/7, 10:30 PM, Kingston Mines, 2548 N. Halsted, $20, 21+

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Duke Tumatoe puts serious work into his irreverent blues

He’s played in REO Speedwagon and worked with John Fogerty, but after 60 years he’s still making most of his fans one gig at a time.

BY STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

S

ometimes the Secret Hi st o r y o f Chic a g o Music covers artists who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Duke Tumatoe has made some funny music, and he also has wild yarns to tell . . . eventually.

“Man, you don’t make your living for 60-plus years riding around playing guitar for a living and not have some stories—most of which can’t come out until after I’m dead,” he tells me. “I did some stuff.”

The stuff that Tumatoe did doesn’t all have to wait for posterity, thankfully. He got in on the ground floor of REO Speedwagon, collaborated with rock ’n’ roll legend John Fogerty, and blazed his own froggy path.

Tumatoe was born William “Bill” Severen Fiorio in 1947 at Jackson Park Hospital on the south side of Chicago. His immigrant father hailed from San Bonifacio, Italy, and the family had settled in Beverly. By age ten, Tumatoe had started drum lessons, and as a teen he regularly took in the blues at the Maxwell Street Market.

“I first saw Muddy Waters when I was 13,” Tumatoe writes on his website. “I can’t believe I took that for granted.”

Those formative experiences changed his musical direction, and he soon picked up the guitar—he remembers borrowing one from a girl at his school.

After high school, Tumatoe toured with a Florida-based cover band, but he left in 1965 to attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Once there, he helped launch the group Lothar & the Handpeople, who started as a house band

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STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

for the local chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. Bassist Jack Davis and another fraternity brother, Bill Geist (later a CBS correspondent), named the band after a comic-strip character—Lothar, the sidekick of Mandrake the Magician.

“The drummer, Frank Eitler, was a graphic artist and did a very cool drumhead logo,” Tumatoe says. “In the summer of ’65, he went home to one of the Chicago suburbs and played somewhere with that drumhead. Apparently, someone saw it and took it as the name for their band. I wasn’t aware of the second Lothar until

years later.”

That someone was probably Tom Flye, who’d been classmates with Davis at Lyons Township High School. Eitler had actually made the Lothar drumhead before the UIUC band formed in fall ’65, and he was using it the summer before when one of his other groups played a Phi Gamma Delta rush party in the Chicago suburbs. Also at the party? Davis and Flye.

Flye became the drummer for the psychedelic Denver band with the same name (usually styled “Hand People”), who released two LPs through Capitol Records in the late 60s. They called their theremin “Lothar,” but it’s likely that most of the

group never knew the origin of the name.

Lead singer Lee Neher got drafted in 1966, and the UIUC Lothar carried on until 1967. They never formally released any music, but a rehearsal tape survives where they play favorites of the day such as “My Generation” and “On the Road Again.” (Thanks to Chris Young of Downstate Sounds for the research help.)

B

y the late 60s, Tumatoe was part of a new group. “I was playing with Jim Hill in a soul band named ‘King Edward & the Gaypoppers’ (yeah, that was the name), and Bob Crownover was playing guitar with REO Speedwagon,” he says. “And we just traded bands.” Tumatoe

MUSIC joined the future hitmakers in 1969, briefly becoming part of a lineup that included founding members Neal Doughty (keyboards) and Alan Gratzer (drums).

They’d started playing covers at frat houses and campus bars around UIUC in 1967.

REO Speedwagon has a complicated origin story—they incorporated parts of several bands, losing and adding members. “I was the third guy to play guitar with them,” Tumatoe says, “but I was the one who got them moving in the right direction as far as playing together as a band.” Tumatoe says this incarnation recorded at Golden Voice Studios in South Pekin, Illinois, but the tapes are lost.

REO initially played a soulful sound

Tumatoe came back with the irreverent ditty “Lord Help Our Colts.”

“I, of course, wrote the song in a form that I thought if necessary, I could easily update, which turned out to be a real good thing,” Tumatoe explains on his website.

More than 800 times in the first three decades alone, he estimates, he changed the verses of the satirical song to recap each week’s game on the air.

Tumatoe occasionally ticked off players, coaches, and fans when he took a dig, and he says he narrowly avoided physical altercations a few times. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a football fan. I enjoy these games. I watch them all,” Tumatoe says. “But the premise of all these guys getting millions

“It’s a great job when you consider that the way you start the night is with people applauding when they hear your name.” inspired by the likes of Otis Redding and the Doors, but by 1969 they’d shifted toward more straight-ahea d ro ck.

Tumatoe preferred a bluesier style, and he left within a few months.

Before the year was out, Tumatoe formed a group with keyboardist Jim Hill (his bandmate from the Gaypoppers) called Duke Tumatoe & the All-Star Frogs. The original lineup also included keyboardist Donnie Perrino, drummer Johnny Phillips, bassist Erik Krogh, singer James Klingelhoffer, harmonica player Kent Lecouris (who also went by Louis or “Doc”), and percussionist Aaron Woods.

The Frogs recorded their first LP, Red Pepper Hot!, at Silver Dollar Studio in Urbana and released it in 1976 on their own Trouserworm Tunes label. By then, the band had undergone some personnel changes: It included Hill, Lecouris, bassist Pat “LV” Hammond, and drummer Gary Brewer. The title track is a fun, jazzy number, and “Blues With a Feeling” has a pop-fusion feel that’s almost like Steely Dan. “Captain Jinx & Salty Sam” shows off Hill’s soulful Booker T–style organ moves, and “You Can’t Fool Me” displays Tumatoe’s smooth, bluesy pipes.

The second Frogs album, Naughty Child, came out in 1980 on beloved Ann Arbor label Blind Pig, then just a few years old, and also featured Hammond, Hill, and percussionist Robin Steele. “Love to Play the Blues” in particular shows off the B.B. King influence on Tumatoe’s guitar playing.

The last All-Star Frogs release, Back to Chicago, dropped in 1982, again on their own imprint. By this time, Tumatoe had moved to Indianapolis to be with his wife and her family. (They’ve now been together 44 years.) He dissolved the band in 1983.

After his move, Tumatoe befriended Tom Griswold of The Bob & Tom Show, a comedy talk show based at WFBQ radio in Indianapolis. In 1985, Griswold suggested that Tumatoe write a tune about the Indianapolis Colts, who at that point were freshly relocated from Baltimore.

and millions of dollars to play a kids’ game is in and of itself not serious. . . . These guys are bitching about it when you criticize their performance? I didn’t really criticize their performance. I just made it rhyme.”

I

n 1986, Tumatoe released a solo album (back on Blind Pig) called Dukes Up. Then he formed a group called Duke Tumatoe & the Power Trio. They got a big break in 1987, when John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival was traveling through the midwest, looking for regional music he couldn’t hear any other way.

Somewhere near Mishawaka, Indiana, he heard a radio plug for a show by a band whose name caught his ear.

Fo g e r t y i n i t i a l l y t h o u g h t D u ke Tumatoe & the Power Trio were a young novelty band, maybe covering Top 40 tunes, but when he asked around, he learned that Tumatoe had been playing for a while. He went to the concert and immediately fell in love with the veteran bar band’s charming, informal, crowdpleasing style. He decided he wanted to help them with a live album. “What I was thinking of getting on record was exactly what I’d been watching,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “Finally, I just went backstage one night and said, ‘I’d like to produce you guys.’”

According to Fogerty’s account, when he guessed that he wouldn’t be able to start for three or four months, somebody in the band spit out his beer. Tumatoe himself was skeptical, assuming that Fogerty’s enthusiasm was the kind of latenight notion that would evaporate before anything happened. “But in October of ’87, a friend of John’s came up to us while we were playing a show in Elkhart,” Tumatoe told the Tribune. “He said that John had talked to Warner Bros. and we’d start recording our album in December.”

The band’s house-rocking 1989 LP, I Like My Job!, was recorded at gigs in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Mishawaka. The Power Trio at that point consisted of drummer

Rick Bole, guitarist Gus Starr, and bassist Larry Barber, and you can hear Tumatoe working the crowd with his quick-witted banter and well-honed tales. As much as it’s a “party record,” one of the tunes, a cover of Detroit Junior’s “If I Hadn’t Been High,” addresses substance abuse.

After work on the album began, both Tumatoe and Fogerty coincidentally quit drinking. “I’ve had everybody’s standard problems over the years. I drank too much, did dope—all the crap everybody does on the scene,” Tumatoe told the Tribune. “But I got to the point in my life where I wanted to be on top of it. I started playing because I simply liked playing, and all this other stuff was bad habits I’d fallen into.”

Tumatoe opened several shows for Fogerty during that period. He’s also shared bills with roadhouse rockers such as the Fabulous Thunderbirds and George Thorogood as well as with his blues inspirations, among them Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King.

The Power Trio would turn out to be Tumatoe’s longest-running project, but they managed only that one Warner Brothers release: Dr. Duke (’92) and Wild Animals (’94) both came out on imprints connected to the band. In 1999 they signed to the Connecticut-based J-Bird Records, run by former EMI executive Jay Barbieri.

J-Bird released A Ejukatid Man in 1999 and Pompous & Overrated—Recorded Live! in 2001. The Duke (and the Power Trio)

returned to Blind Pig for 2006’s You’ve Got the Problem!

These days, Tumatoe is no longer gigging at his peak of 200 shows per year, but he’s still out on the road with a band, often supplemented by a horn section. In 2025, he released the solo album Have You Seen My Keys?, which includes covers (Ray Sharpe’s 1959 tune “Linda Lu”) and goofball originals (“Can’t Find My Shoes”). And he’ll play at Kingston Mines on Friday, February 6, and Saturday, February 7.

More than 35 years ago, Tumatoe told the Tribune that he felt he’d come full circle already. “I’ve gone through all the crap and come back to where I’m really excited just playing music and entertaining people,” he said. “It’s a great job when you consider that the way you start the night is with people applauding when they hear your name. How could you beat that? I’ll do it another 20 years if the world will let me.”

He made that wish come true and then some. Here’s hoping for 20 more years for this hardworking, irreverent road dog. v The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/ secret-history-of-chicago-music. themail@chicagoreader.com

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| CHICAGO READER 49

READERRADAR

Events actually worth leaving your house for We do our best to be accurate, but please check venue websites for updates and more information, as event details may have changed since press time.

Latter

Sat 2/7 at Lincoln Hall

VANESSA VALADEZ

MUSIC Mai Sugimoto THU 2/5, THU 2/12, THU 2/19, THU 2/26: Sugimoto plays with a different lineup each week.

Ever since live music reemerged from COVID lockdown, alto saxophone and flutist Mai Sugimoto has become ubiquitous on Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scenes. But calling her a rising star doesn’t reflect just how long and hard she’s worked to get here. A Chicagoan since 2007, she’s worked steadily as a side person, band member, and professor at Moraine Valley Community College. She first gained attention in the 2010s as a member of the collaborative Hanami Quartet with Jason Stein, Charles Rumback, and Andrew Trim and as a steady participant in projects with Tatsu Aoki.

She’s led her own quartet since the late teens and more recently a trio (usually with bassist

50

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

Joshua Abrams and drummer Isaiah Spencer), and both groups showcase the probing intelligence and dynamic swing of her original compositions.

Sugimoto has also become a member of Abrams’s Natural Information Society Community Ensemble, played total improv with the collective BYSH, and explored the intersection of jazz, folklore, and experimental music with Miminari, a new trio with Taiko drummer Kioto Aoki and electronic musician Haruhi Kobayashi.

But my favorite way to hear Sugimoto is in the many recurrent and ad hoc improvisational combos where she’s played with the likes of fellow reedist Fred Jackson Jr., guitarist LeRoy Bach, trombonist Jeb Bishop, oboist Robbie Lynn Hunsinger, and percussionist Tim Daisy.

She brings to these settings a readiness to push beyond her jazz-rooted vocabulary and help realize the concepts of others. Every Thursday in February she’ll perform two sets at the Hungry Brain, usually in a duo and then leading a band.

Some sets will present ongoing relationships, including the trio and her incendiary partnership

with Jackson. Others will present new ideas, such as the two-bass quartet on February 5 and the all-star saxophone quartet on February 19.

(Thu 2/5: duo with Jim Baker; quartet with Ed Wilkerson Jr., Katie Ernst, and Jason Roebke.

Thu 2/12: duo with LeRoy Bach; Mai Sugimoto Quartet with Fred Jackson Jr., Ethan Philion, and Isaiah Spencer. Thu 2/19: Mai Sugimoto Saxophone Quartet with Keefe Jackson, Dave Rempis, and Jon Irabagon (both sets). Thu 2/26: Mai Sugimoto Trio with Joshua Abrams and Isaiah Spencer, Mai Sugimoto Trio joined by Ben LaMar Gay. All dates Hungry Brain, 9 PM, 21+) BILL MEYER

Latter SAT 2/7: Crippling Alcoholism, Ganser, Missouri Executive Order 44, and Blood Nymph open.

Chicago duo Latter play posthardcore the way an avalanche crosses the street. On their selfreleased July EP, the unrelentingly heavy What Lives Inside of Me, Latter play with self-

consuming force—their acerbic guitars and the pugnacious, shredded shrieks of front woman Meredith Haines make them sound like they’ve pushed themselves far beyond their breaking point. But Latter’s story so far is one of renewal.

Haines toiled in Philly’s punk scene before moving to Chicago just before the pandemic.

She pursued a master’s in sound arts and industries at Northwestern University, where she drifted away from rock and began using the name Mair to make pulsating sound art indebted to power electronics. But she never quite shook her desire to make more straightforward guitarbased music, and she used a “musicians wanted” Instagram post to find her Latter bandmate, drummer Jon Alvarado of Beach Bunny. Latter’s first album, 2024’s My Body Is My Sickness, expanded on Mair’s themes of chronic illness and physical vulnerability, but the band found a bigger audience—probably because their vitriolic noise comes equipped with easy-to-grasp hooks. On Valentine’s Day 2025, Haines shared a clip from a Worldrenownfailure live video of Latter playing “I Don’t Owe You” on social

media. Haines wrote the song in response to a Venmo request from an ex for breaking up with him, and the raw, grungy performance earned the band tens of thousands of new followers.

Latter’s Lincoln Hall show, where they’re headlining a stacked lineup, is billed as an anti– Valentine’s Day gathering, but I prefer to see it as a celebration of their breakthrough. (Lincoln Hall, 8 PM, 18+) LEOR GALIL

Gum.mp3 FRI 2/13: m.e.h. and CtrlZora open.

Visual artist and producer Gum.mp3 started DJing live in 2020, so he’s experienced enough to understand the transformative potential of working the decks. “People think your medium is the music; in some ways, it is,” he recently told Impulse magazine. “But it’s also the audience.

You must be very serious and intentional when working with people’s souls.” Last year, the North Carolina native teamed up with New York City producer Swami Sound for State of Emergency, which puts the history of Black dance music through a spin cycle with water so hot that techno, house, and the subgenres they spawned all bleed together. Gum has a soft spot for garage drums, and he often gooses the record with blustery looped beats that drop in like energy boosts in a video game. State of Emergency feels like it belongs to everyone in the room, just as Gum wants for his nights of DJing—and that doesn’t mean only him and Swami Sound. They also recruited five vocalists for the album, including Chicago neosoul singer M.e.h., who’s one of the openers on this Chop Shop show. Gum’s new solo full-length, Wagenmuzik 2, comes out a week or so earlier, just as this newspaper hits the streets. (Chop Shop, 8:30 PM, 18+) LEOR GALIL

Rio Kosta TUE 2/17: Opener to be announced.

When you imagine yourself on a beach vacation, what images come to mind? Catching rays in the Caribbean? Sailing the Mediterranean? Dancing till dawn at an al fresco shoreline club? If your answer is “all of the above—and then some,” Rio Kosta’s grooving, exploratory psychedelic pop might be the perfect soundtrack to your fantasies. The Los Angeles duo consists of veteran session musicians Mike Del Rio and Kosta Galanopoulos, who met in 2019 during a festival sound check (they were performing separately with other projects) and began collaborating the following year. As Rio Kosta, they blend their musical interests, cultural heritages, and life journeys. Born in Queens, Del Rio takes inspiration from his roots—Spanish, Italian, Puerto Rican—and his urban upbringing.

Galanopoulos, who’s of Greek descent, was raised in Florida and spent time in the Bahamas and New York before moving to LA, where he’s highly in demand—in a 2025 interview with UK webzine the Line of Best Fit, Del Rio says his bandmate has “played on easily 1000 records.”

They joke that they’re like the Odd Couple—neat and messy, early and late, dog person and cat person—except when it comes to music, where their combined decades of experience and natural chemistry take over.

Kosta Rio’s 2025 album, Unicorn, unites their diverse approaches in 13 shimmering tracks that can whisk you away from your reality. Opener “Mountain Top” is a soulful bop with funky rhythms and a soulful chorus; “Follow the River” is a sleek dub jam; and the title track is a dreamily retro soul-pop ditty that includes the duo’s fresh-sounding first recordings. Dusky single “Ancients” pairs its nostalgic soundscapes with hazy lyrics about finding a love from a past life in this one. (Schubas, 8 PM, 18+) JAMIE LUDWIG

Barren Heir

FUTUREWORLDCITIZEN

SAT 2/24: Sarin and Nequient open.

When Barren Heir formed in 2016, it was already something of a second coming. Guitarist David Kirsch and bassist-vocalist Eddie Limperis had started experimental metal group Wasted Fortune as teenagers, and though they’d kept the project going well into adulthood, they’d consistently struggled to find a long-term vocalist. After several lineup changes, Limperis stepped up to the mike himself, and Barren Heir were born. A few months later, the group released their debut album, Tired Turns, weaving their early postmetal influences into a sludgy riff monster animated by angst and sheer delight in power.

Barren Heir were largely quiet in the years that followed, but in 2023 they came roaring back with new drummer Adam Thorsness (also of thrash quintet Bovice) and the powerful LP Died Down. Their latest full-length, Far From, which dropped in November, confirms Barren Heir as a band of great musical brawn and relatively few words. On opener “Meddling Body,” Limperis howls out of thunderclouds of sound like a drowning man struggling to keep his head above raging waves—and his eloquent expression of terror extends through the ebbs, flows, and sometimes conflicting undercurrents of the song’s rhythms. True to its title, “Purgatory River” suggests a distant possibility of redemption in Kirsch’s clean guitar lines, but then its bittersweet outro leads straight into the heavy, chugging “Medicine.” Dreamy lyrical instrumental “Abcesstral” lulls and relieves, then introduces a high-wire tension that explodes

Rio Kosta

Tue 2/17 at Schubas

COURTESY TBA AGENCY

Elucid

Thu 2/5 at Subterranean

Elucid & DJ Haram

ALEXANDER RICHTER

THU 2/5: Tomorrow Kings open.

New York rapper and producer Elucid (born Chaz Hall) began the century slanging self-released mixtapes, and on the strength of his compelling vocals, stunning collaborations, and heavy beats, he’s since become one of independent music’s elite. Elucid’s discography is as impressive as it is intense. Whether he’s working as a solo artist, working with Billy Woods in distinguished rap duo Armand Hammer, or partnering with the likes of Moor Mother, Beans from Antipop Consortium, Earl Sweatshirt, and Rob Sonic, he’s a potent force in progressive hip-hop.

His third full-length, the psychedelic rap album Revelator, topped many critics’ 2024 year-end lists. Its beats range from interesting to downright nutty, and Elucid superbly tackles themes of resistance, family dynamics, and crumbling societies. “Huspuppies” pairs a Bollywood-inspired melody with industrial drums and a refrain about fried fish and lemonade on Fridays. It’s a short, powerful track that points toward the necessity of finding community in perilous times.

Elucid is currently on tour with DJ Haram (aka Zubeyda Muzeyyen), a frequent collaborator who produced the wonderfully noisy and melodic beat on Revelator closer “Zigzagzig.” In July, Haram released her solo debut, Beside Myself, and she recently announced a new project for later this year, so you have plenty of reasons to go check her out. An opening set from powerhouse Chicago group Tomorrow Kings—who released their first album in more than a decade in November—makes this night of thought-provoking, pulverizing hip-hop an extra-special treat. (Subterranean, 8 PM, 17+) CRISTALLE BOWEN FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 51

Music Frozen Dancing featuring Los Thuthanaka, Lip Critic, Good Flying Birds, Snuffed, Body Shop Sat 2/21, 1 PM, Western and Cortez (outside the Empty Bottle), free, all ages

Time Thieves

Thu 2/26 at the Empty Bottle

Masters of Hawaiian Music: George Kahumoku Jr., Led Kaapana, and Sonny Lim Sat 2/21, 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, Szold Hall, all ages Hiroko Yamamura, Kyle Geiger, Loren b2b Tyson Dias Sat 2/21, 10 PM, Smart Bar

((( O ))) Sun 2/22, 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 21+

Frequency Festival night one: Tristan Perich, Jennifer Torrence Tue 2/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Frequency Festival night two: ‫[ محأد‬Ahmed], Rage Thormbones Wed 2/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Frequency Festival night three: Olivia Block, ~Nois Thu 2/26, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Frequency Festival night four: Ensemble dal Niente Fri 2/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Syleena Johnson Fri 2/27, 7:30 PM, Sat 2/28, 6 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, all ages

Margo Price, Logan Ledger Sat 2/28, 7:30 PM, Metro, all ages Frequency Festival night five: Fredrik Rasten, Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten Sat 2/28, 6 PM and 8 PM, Bond Chapel, free, all ages PATRICK HOUDEK

into the slow, battleship-weight “Way In.” Another instrumental, “Fed Through the Sky,” is packed with grinding rhythms, keening riffs, and dynamic guitar interplay that sways and bends like trees in a storm. Far From crashes out on a high note with the artful violence of “Inside a Burning Vehicle,” which more than delivers on its promise of mechanical disaster and existential dread. Barren Heir celebrate the album’s release at the Hideout with an all-local bill that includes the mysterious Sarin (who self-describes as “midwest scum”) and the raw, crusty Nequient.

(Hideout, 8:30 PM, 21+) MONICA KENDRICK

Time Thieves THU 2/26: Josh Caterer Trio, Al Scorch, and Earl Gary open.

Few recent local records have titles more timely than Time Thieves’ If You Survive. The October release is the second EP in 2025 from the Chicago power-pop four-piece, following May’s Come Home. Both records traffic in a sound fit for 90s alt-rock radio: bright, pristine melodies, punky hooks, and inviting vocal harmonies. Most of Come Home sounds as sunny as a spring day, even when the lyrics confront loss and other struggles, but If You Survive turns toward darker themes and heavier sounds (which Come Home hinted at on “Forever Drifting”). According to guitarist and singer Jonathan Pool, the change of tone in Time Thieves’ recordings happened before Operation Midway Blitz hit Chicago— such was the effect that 2025 had already had on the band. “By the time we were gearing up to put the [second] EP out, the ICE crackdowns in Chicago were at their most intense,” he says.

“Even the title alone felt overly provocative.”

That said, Time Thieves envision a future where things turn out better on the other side. “[If You Survive is] a ‘Come find us when you make it here’ rather than a ‘Good luck buddy, you’re gonna need it’ type of message,” Pool explains.

Time Thieves have kicked off 2026 by compiling both EPs on a full-length vinyl LP, which showcases the band’s duality.

“Remember I Forget” (on Come Home) is a sweet little pop nugget packed with peppy melodies and crunchy guitar licks, while the pensive “Anymore” (from If You Survive) sets its dispirited view of the world to a propulsive beat that suggests life will somehow go on.

That’s sort of the point: This too shall pass, and in the meantime, Time Thieves can help you find moments of joy in the hellscape. (Empty Bottle, 9 PM, 21+) JAMIE LUDWIG

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MORE Purelink, Pan•American Thu 2/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 21+ Blessed Madonna, Harry Cross Fri 2/6, 10 PM, Smart Bar, 21+ Cactus Blossoms, Angela Autumn Fri 2/6, 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, Maurer Hall, all ages Jadalareign, Mark Grusane, Ctrlzora Sat 2/7, 10 PM, Smart Bar, 21+ Opeth, Katatonia Wed 2/11, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Summer Salt, Boyscott, Wabie Thu 2/12, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Motion City Soundtrack, Say Anything, Sincere Engineer Fri 2/13, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre, all ages

Nobu Woods Sat 2/28, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

Destroyer Sat 2/14, 8 PM, Old Town School of

Frequency Festival night six: TAK Ensemble, Zachary Good & Ian McEdwards Sun 3/1, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

Black Belt Eagle Scout & Mato Wayuhi, Aliana

Dropkick Murphies, Aggrolites, Haywire Tue 3/3, 7 PM, Salt Shed, 17+

Lola Kirke, Storey Littleton, Calder the Folk Music, Szold Hall, all ages

Sun 2/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 21+

YFN Lucci, BunnaB, YK Niece Sun 2/15, 7:30, Salt Shed, all ages

Black Heart Procession, Doom Flower Wed 2/18, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 21+

EARLY WARNINGS Peaches, Cortisa Star Sat 3/7, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

Is Real Thu 2/19, 7 PM, W.C. Social Club, West

Lamb of God, Kublai Khan TX, Fit for an Autopsy, Sanguisugabogg Wed 3/25, 5:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, all ages

Margaux Fri 2/20, 9 PM, Hideout, 21+

A Frames, Whippets, Heet Deth Sat 4/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 21+

Exhorder, Ringworm, Phobia, Slowhole, Hell Chicago, all ages

Effigies, Bollweevils, Evictions Sat 2/21, 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+

Los Thuthanaka (DJ set), Conjunto Primitivo (DJ set) Sat 2/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 21+

Letón Pé Wed 4/15, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 21+ Sunn O))) Thu 4/16, 8 PM, Salt Shed, 17+

Wailers Fri 4/24, 7 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, Maurer Hall, all ages Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman, Brennan Wedl Mon 4/27, 7:30 PM, the Auditorium, all ages

Gum.mp3

Depresión Sonora, Blood Club, Dark Chisme, Trust Sat 5/2, 8 PM, Park West, all ages

Fri 2/13 at Chop Shop

Afghan Wigs, Mercury Rev Sat 5/9, 8 PM, Metro, 18+

Mekons Sat 5/30, 4 and 7:30 PM, Hideout, 21+

Amyl & the Sniffers, Party Dozen Sun 6/14, 7 PM, Salt Shed (fairgrounds), all ages “Weird Al” Yankovic, Puddles Pity Party Sat 6/27, 8 PM, United Center, all ages Armand Hammer Sat 10/10, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

VISUAL ART “The Language We Create” THROUGH SAT 2/14

Group show featuring the 11 current artists in residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

(Epiphany Center for the Arts, free, all ages)

“The Uncivil Canvas: Art in the Age of Discord” THROUGH SAT 2/14

CHRIS ROBINSON

Thirty-four artists respond to systemic injustices with creative expressions of civil disobedience.

(Woman Made Gallery, free, all ages)

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| CHICAGO READER 53

“Lovers & Haters: The Reality of Duality” FRI 2/6–TUE 3/3

A group exhibition on the tension between love and hate—just in time for Valentine’s Day. (Pilsen Arts & Community House, free, all ages)

“Level Level” FRI 2/20–FRI 3/27

The latest works from Kate Spencer Stewart, a painter who works in a strict square format and revels in paint as an architectural language.

(Soccer Club Cub, free, all ages)

“When the Div Came Home”

“Imagination Doctors” Through Sat 3/21 at Gallery 400

FRI 2/20–SAT 4/4

A showcase of Soheila Kayoud’s lush embroideries depicting demons from Persian mythology. (Andrew Rafacz, free, all ages)

COURTESY PROS ARTS STUDIO

and machines, and while abstract and minimalist, it vibrates with a sumptuous intensity. In their exhibition statement, the curators describe the psycho-spiritual questions he raised about the body in art as deeply impactful. “Traces of Devotion” follows the figure across a spectrum, not only in how it’s rendered but also how that creates meaning. The varied works explore the profundity of the body as vessel, metaphor, tool, mirror, and more. (Julius Caesar, free, all ages)

“Capo Testa” THROUGH 2/28

New figurative paintings and sculptures by abstract artist Lui Shtini, drawing on Mediterranean pagan carnival traditions. (Corbett vs.

Dempsey, free, all ages)

MICCO CAPORALE

“Traces of Devotion” THROUGH SAT 2/28

What’s the difference between a body and a person? What does it mean to have a soul? In “Traces of Devotion,” the latest group show at Julius Caesar, six artists share figure drawings that capture something esoteric about the body. Whether literal or abstract, they’re “tracings” of corporeality that betray either the artist’s devotion to flesh, something of embodiment’s spiritual undercurrents, or a medium between the two.

Part of curators MJ Lounsberry and Ro Miller’s impetus for the exhibition grew from studying under Frank Piatek at SAIC. Piatek, who died in January, distinguished himself by making ethereal, biomorphic paintings. His work often draws connections between bodies, symbols,

“Hay Cultura en Nuestra Comunidad: Ray Patlán in Chicago 1968–1975” THROUGH SUN 3/1

An exhibition focusing on the formative years of Ray Patlán, a prominent part of both the Chicano art and community mural movements.

(National Museum of Mexican Art, free, all ages)

“Imagination Doctors” THROUGH SAT 3/21

At a Catholic school in Pilsen, a motley crew of clowns, puppeteers, and performance artists launched arts programming and education that

forever changed Chicago’s creative community.

In 1978, the Pros Arts Studio started at Procopius Elementary. Its name nodded as much to the school as the idea that anyone could be an artist; the group’s ultimate goal was making art and art education more accessible.

Over the next 40 years, the Studio went through many phases, including becoming a nonprofit. In that time, it served communities across Chicago, its suburbs, and northern Indiana, and experimented with strategies that met people exactly where they were: streets, parks, community centers, and more. Everything was free. Among their successes were launching the first Día de Los Muertos Parade in Pilsen and creating a public access show, “Hotline 21,” that gave students a platform to discuss social issues.

UIC’s Gallery 400 is celebrating Pros Arts Studio’s legacy with “Imagination Doctors.” The show features archival works and ephemera, focusing on students and participants as much as the studio’s founders: Lionel Bottari, Douglas Grew, Rosalie Mancera, Elvia Rodriguez Ochoa, and Jean Parisi. “Imagination Doctors” also includes commissions by contemporary Chicago artists whose careers were shaped by the studio’s legacy. Some were Pros Arts students while others have embodied a similar spirit of silliness, collaboration, accessibility, and selfdetermination in their own practices. “Imagination Doctors” is a richly layered visual history of one Chicago-born approach to artmaking that continues evolving. (Gallery 400, free, all ages)

MICCO CAPORALE

ideas of the body, but also about employing simple aesthetic strategies to reorient viewers’ relationships to the subject.

Document has long championed both photographers, even hosting DeSana’s first solo exhibition in Chicago in 2023. Before dying of AIDS-related complications in 1990, DeSana had been a member of the East Village punk scene. He’s remembered for bare-bones photos electrified by gel lights, dynamic poses, and familiar objects used in strange ways. One of his most recognized images shows a nude figure illuminated in pink light crawling across astroturf on all fours, wearing traffic cones, its head tucked as though it never existed at all. Sepuya is a contemporary photographer who’s known for sparse but elegant staging. He sometimes cuts up and rearranges his images, putting him somewhere between collagist and Dr. Frankenstein. He’s been repeatedly censored on Instagram and has built a name in the indie publishing world of zines and special interest publications like Sensitive Content. Both artists have an unmistakable curiosity about and reverence for the figure, and they demonstrate commitment to underground art through their approaches. Together, their work is a revelation on devotion, refinement, and simplicity. (Document, free) MICCO CAPORALE

Leah Ke Yi Zheng: “Change, I Ching” THROUGH SUN 4/12

Sixty-four paintings based on the hexagrams of the I Ching, linking ancient eastern ideas with modern western notions of fluidity and transformation. (Renaissance Society, free, all ages)

“Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years After the Gold King Mine Spill” THROUGH SUN 6/14

Artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya’s work documents the myriad ways an abandoned Colorado mine’s rupture impacted the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities.

(Block Museum, Evanston, free, all ages)

PERFORMANCE Mary Jane THROUGH SUN 2/22

JIMMY DESANA, CIGARETTE, 1979

Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya THROUGH SAT 3/21

“The Language We Create”

Through Sat 2/14 at Epiphany Center for the Arts CARINA VARGAS-NUÑEZ, CEIBA IN CAIMANERA PT. 1, 2024

54

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

Christmas came extra early this year—at least for queer photography appreciators. In its latest show, Document pairs the uncanny figure photos of late No Wave photographer Jimmy DeSana with the intimate body portraiture of rising titan Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The result is an intergenerational dialogue, not only about queer

Northlight Theatre plans to open its new space in Evanston (see story in this issue) later this year, but in the meantime, they’re returning to a playwright they’ve had good luck with in the past: Amy Herzog. Northlight presented the well-received Chicago premiere of Herzog’s 4000 Miles back in 2013. Now associate artistic director Georgette Verdin (named as “best local stage director ready for next big steps” in the Reader’s 2022 Best of Chicago issue) stages the Chicago premiere of Herzog’s 2024 play about a mother caring for a chronically ill child.

By showing how Mary Jane (played at Northlight

by Lucy Carapetyan) grows a family of affinity with women from all walks of life while caring for her son, Herzog offers a much-needed-thesedays portrait of empathy and everyday heroism.

In addition to Carapetyan, the cast includes Mary Beth Fisher, Dara Cameron, Kaylah Marie Crosby, and Elana Elyce. (Northlight Theatre) KERRY REID

Improv: The Play THROUGH THU 3/26

The classic trope of the actor’s nightmare, wherein an actor is onstage with no idea what play they’re in, forms the basis for this new long-form improv show at iO. Two guest actors bring in scenes from two plays that the cast of

improvisers don’t see, and from those initial scenes, they collectively spin out a fresh show every week. As I wrote about a November outing, the actors were “adept at picking up on recurring motifs and scenarios and building upon them, and the improvisers showed an admirable ear for the language and rhythms introduced in the scripted material. As with the best long-form improvisation, Improv: The Play also lets the audience in on the jokes and the process.” The goal for producer Cory Hardin and director James Dugan is to “bridge the divide between theater and improvisation.” It also lets actors who more commonly appear in scripted material show off their improv chops with a wildly talented group of improvisers. Win-win. (iO Theater) KERRY REID

Manifold doesn’t understand why her mother, Vernita, is dragging her out to the swamp in the middle of the night—until she sees the decapitated head of Clayton Rutherford, the richest man in east Texas. From this noir-like beginning, Calhoun spins out a sometimes comic story that encompasses reparations for past racial injustice and violence and secrets within the Manifold family. Ericka Ratcliff directs. (Definition Theatre) KERRY REID

Idol Worship: An Evening With Mink Stole and Peaches Christ WED 2/25

Miss Julie FRI 2/6–SUN 3/8

Strindberg-a-palooza continues with perhaps his best-known play. In Miss Julie, a young, spoiled aristocratic woman spars and flirts with Jean, a servant eager to climb the social ladder and to challenge the boss’s daughter. As is usually the case with Strindberg, attraction and repulsion play out in a high-stakes game that folds in gender, class, desire, and social repression. Harry G. Carlson’s translation is directed for Court Theatre by associate artistic director Gabrielle Randle-Bent, starring Mi Kang in the title role and Kelvin Roston Jr. as Jean (Rebecca Spence costars as Kristine, Jean’s fiancee). In a move that’s either ironic or puckish (or possibly both), Court has scheduled the press opening for this dark anti-romance for Valentine’s Day. (Court Theatre) KERRY REID

Hamnet

MANUEL HARLAN

TUE 2/10–SUN 3/8

You’ve seen the film by Chloé Zhao, now see the play. The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) returns to Chicago Shakespeare with the U.S. premiere of Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel and directed by Erica Whyman. Chakrabarti (who also wrote the lovely Hymn, which was reimagined for a local setting for Chicago Shakes last May) created this adaptation of O’Farrell’s historical fiction for RSC in 2023. Hamnet takes its story from the real life of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (also known as Anne) Hathaway, and the loss of their young son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 (probably of the plague). In O’Farrell (and Chakrabarti’s) telling, that great grief becomes the source for the Bard of Avon’s greatest work.

RSC’s cast includes Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Agnes and Rory Alexander as William. (Chicago Shakespeare Theater) KERRY REID

Nacera Belaza: La Nuée FRI 2/27–SUN 3/1

Using six dancers, choreographer Nacera Belaza shares a “meditation on collective ritual, communion, and ecstatic repetition” designed to evoke a sense of moving from darkness into light. Inspired by the dances of the Dakota people. (MCA Chicago, all ages)

The Dance of Death

SANDRO MILLER

THROUGH SUN 3/22

It’s a mini August Strindberg fest on Chicago stages this month, between Steppenwolf’s production of this 1900 drama and Court Theatre’s Miss Julie (see left). In The Dance of Death, Edgar, a tyrannical former military officer with an apparent heart condition, and Alice, a former actress, prepare to “celebrate” 25 years of not-sohappily-married life on the isolated fortress that serves as their home. (The title comes from Alice observing her husband doing a saber dance and musing that perhaps it will kill him—not that any of us can relate to wishing for the death of a tyrant, of course.) The arrival of Alice’s cousin, Kurt, who discovers his own reasons for disliking Edgar, sets off a complicated scheme of revenge.

This production uses a script adapted by celebrated Irish playwright Conor McPherson and is directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member Yasen Peyankov. It also marks the return of ensemble member Kathryn Erbe (known for her appearances in various incarnations of Law & Order and many other television and film projects) to the Steppenwolf stage after almost 30 years.

(Steppenwolf Theatre) KERRY REID

Rupture & Repair FRI 2/13–SAT 3/7

A play about conflict resolution may seem hopelessly naive right now. But in Tanuja Jagernauth’s piece for Free Street (cocreated by Marilyn Carteno, Kirsten Baity, and Marya Spont-Lemus, and directed by Jagernauth and Liz Haas), the questions raised—How can we learn to not fear conflict? What tools can we develop toward repair?—help us envision a world beyond our current strife and oppression. Created in concert with F.L.Y. Radical Therapy, whose mission is to offer “a therapeutic approach centering BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ and loving yourself through collective social liberation awareness,” Rupture & Repair isn’t about “doing conflict right,” but

The den mother of John Waters’s gang of Baltimore reprobates, Mink Stole (born Nancy Paine Stoll), has been in nearly all of Waters’s films, playing characters both disturbed (Taffy Davenport, Divine’s abused daughter in Female Trouble) and sweet (Corny Collins’s assistant in Hairspray). She also occasionally fronts Mink Stole and Her Wonderful Band (they released their only album, Do Re MiNK, in 2013). She’s been appearing with San Francisco-based drag legend and cult leader Peaches Christ (the stage persona for Joshua Grannell) for the latter’s Midnight Mass series of underground film screenings and discussions for several years. (In fact, Stole was Christ’s first guest in the series.) Now the duo comes to the Den with this celebration and discussion of their shared love of glorious bad taste and fringe culture. (Den Theatre, 7:15 PM, 13+) KERRY REID

Charges (The Supplicants) THU 2/26–SUN 3/29

Theatre Y presents the North American premiere of Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s 2013 play about the plight of refugees (the German title is Die Schutzbefohlenen). Jelinek’s original script drew upon Aeschylus’s The Suppliants—in which women fleeing forced marriages in Egypt arrive in Argos, Greece, seeking asylum—and made clear connections between the plight of the women in the ancient text and the status of refugees from Syria and elsewhere arriving on European shores. As Immigration Customs and Enforcement squads disappear our neighbors daily, codirectors Melissa Lorraine and Héctor Álvarez reimagine Jelinek’s story (translated by Gitta Honnegar) through a contemporary American perspective. As with all Theatre Y productions, admission is free. (Theatre Y) KERRY REID

Shake It Away: The Ann Miller Story

Tue 3/3 at Porchlight Music Theatre

instead asks audiences to think about conflict in their own lives in a different way. (Free Street) KERRY REID

Black Cypress Bayou FRI 2/13–SUN 3/15

As Definition Theatre raises funds to build a new theater and community center in Woodlawn (see story in this issue), the company’s residency in Hyde Park continues with the Chicago premiere of Kristen Adele Calhoun’s 2024 play about a Black family caught up in a recent violent death and the legacy of their ancestors. As the title implies, Calhoun’s story unfolds in a swampy world—specifically, an east Texas bayou, during the height of the COVID pandemic. LadyBird

HEATHER STUMPF

FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 55

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Winter Series Thu 2/26–Sun 3/1, Harris Theater

Trivisa

Winifred Haun & Dancers, First Draft 2026 Sat 2/28 7 PM and Sun 3/1 3:30 PM, Visceral

(2016)

Dance Center

EARLY WARNINGS Shake It Away: The Ann Miller Story Tue 3/3, 7:30 PM, Porchlight Music Theatre at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts White Rooster Thu 3/5–Sun 4/12, Lookingglass Theatre The Drowsy Chaperone Fri 3/6–Sun 4/19, Theo Lucy Darling Sat 3/7, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Buffy Revamped Mon 3/9–Sun 3/22, Studebaker Theater

Trinity Irish Dance Company SAT 2/28

Chicago’s homegrown Celtic dance heroes return to the Auditorium for a program that includes a world premiere by guest choreographers Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland of BodyVox from Portland, Oregon, who are celebrated for combining dance, theater, and film. There’s also the Chicago premiere of SÉseacht from MacArthur “genius” fellowship winner Michelle Dorrance. In 2020, Dorrance, in association with Melinda Sullivan of Dorrance Dance, created American Traffic, exploring the 19th-century roots and connections for African juba and tap dance and Irish step dancing.

As usual, the program will include a preshow performance by students from Trinity Irish Dance Academy, and live musical accompaniment is provided by the company’s house band, led by Killarney native Brenoshea. (Auditorium Theatre, 7:30 PM) KERRY REID

MORE Black and Highly Flavored: A Black Excellence Comedy Revue Thu 2/5–Fri 3/20, Second City Hedda Gabler Thu 2/5–Sun 3/8, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit Come Back, Little Sheba Fri 2/6–Sun 3/22, American Blues Theater The Outsiders Tue 2/10–Sun 2/22, Broadway in Chicago at Cadillac Palace Theatre Pivot Wed 2/11–Sat 3/21, Rivendell Theatre

Bernadette, The Musical Thu 2/12–Sun 3/15, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture The Lower Depths Thu 2/12–Sun 3/1, Gwydion Theatre at Chopin Theatre Kubrickian Fri 2/13–Sun 3/15, Factory Theater Morning, Noon, and Night Fri 2/13–Sat 3/28, Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit

Floe Thu 3/12–Fri 3/13, 7:30 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago Natya Dance Theatre 50th Anniversary Thu 3/19–Sat 3/21, Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago El último sueño de Frida y Diego Sat 3/21–Sat 4/4, Lyric Opera The Three Musketeers Thu 3/26–Sat 4/25, Idle Muse Theatre at Edge Off Broadway Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Sat 3/28–Sun 4/26, Goodman Theatre Windfall Thu 4/9–Sun 5/31, Steppenwolf Theatre Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Fri 4/24– Sun 4/26, Auditorium Theatre

FILM Documentary Club: I Am Not Your Negro screening and discussion SAT 2/7–SAT 2/21

Each month, the Chicago Public Library’s Community Cinema program selects a notable documentary to screen at different branches across the city. February’s pick is Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, a critically acclaimed doc based on an unfinished manuscript by James Baldwin, in which he reflects on the civil rights work of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The King, Harold Washington, Daley (Humboldt), Budlong Woods, Greater Grand Crossing, and Back of the Yards branches will each host a free screening of this essential film, followed by a librarian-facilitated group dialogue. (Various Chicago Public Library branches, free, age 13+ recommended) TARYN McFADDEN

Revolution of Their Time: 30 Years of Milkyway Image THROUGH FRI 3/6

Doc Films has a wealth of programming this quarter, but Yuzhou Chai’s spotlight on Hong Kong cinema stands out.

Milkyway Image is a film production company founded in 1996, just as Hong Kong was moved from British colonial rule to the People’s Republic of China. In exploring Milkyway’s legacy, Chai chose films spanning from 1997 to 2016; they’ve screened most Fridays since January 9 and run into early March. February titles include My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002), Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997), and Trivisa (2016), with the first two playing on 35 millimeter. (Doc Films , all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

Spectacular Optical Corporation 48 Hour MP4 Challenge SUN 2/8 SOC made the pages of the Reader in

September 2025, ahead of a festival at Solidarity

American Icons Thu 2/19–Sun 3/1, Joffrey Ballet at Lyric Opera House

Tyler Michael Balentine Presents … Sunday’s Best

Smoking Meat Fri 2/20–Sun 2/22, Project Bound Dance at Steppenwolf The Enormous Crocodile Through Sat 2/21, Roald Dahl Story Company and Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival at Studebaker Theater

SUNDAYS 2/8–3/1

Eureka Day Through Sun 2/22, TimeLine Theatre at Broadway Playhouse Birds of North America Through Sun 3/8, A Red Orchid Theatre Holiday Through Sun 3/1, Goodman Theatre Confederates Through Sun 3/8, Redtwist Theatre

Top Girls Thu 2/12–Sun 3/22, Raven Theatre Pot Girls Thu 2/12–Sun 3/1, Story Theatre at Raven Theatre

The Irish . . . and How They Got That Way Through Sun 3/15, Porchlight Music Theatre at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts

56

CHICAGO READER

| FEBRUARY 2026

Studios dedicated to horror-themed microbudget digital shorts. It’s no surprise that Jay Villalobos and company are back with another unique MP4 film project in the form of a timed short film festival. Registration is now closed, but here’s the premise: Filmmakers had exactly 48 hours from sign-up to create and submit a digital short, which will be screened at Mouse Arts and Letters Club. Attend as a spectator and support Chicago’s DIY digital creators. (Mouse Arts and Letters Club , all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

Documentary Club: I Am Not Your Negro screening and discussion Sat 2/7–Sat 2/21 at various Chicago Public Library branches

COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Celebrate Black History Month with four Sunday afternoon screenings at Facets. Balentine— known for his successful programming series at the Music Box Theatre—has curated a range of shorts blocks by local Black filmmakers, each accompanied by a postshow Q&A and reception. The programs include: Echoform, eight films by Amir George; short films from Kin Marie and Brenden Smith of Brain Studios; eight films by jellystone robinson; and Interior, five films by George Ellzey Jr., plus two works in progress.

All together, one can only expect that they’ll be reflective, immersive, and deeply Chicago.

(Facets, 2 PM , all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

New Generation Filmmakers Forum THU 2/19–SAT 2/21

Out of the more than 40 film festivals hosted in Chicago each year, this one has a reputation for being scrappy, accessible, and expansive.

In mid February, the Davis Theater will host the fourth iteration of this annual fest, which aims to platform emerging and unconventional local filmmakers. New Gen includes three days of screenings and filmmaker Q&As; there are no genre boundaries, and, for the first time, the festival will include features in addition to shorts.

(Davis Theater, all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

Cold Snap from SuperHorror-Rama!

you’ve probably already developed an expensive taste for the rare French herbal liqueur, whose secret recipe of 130 botanicals is closely guarded by the order of ascetic Carthusian monks that manufacture it. Therefore you probably won’t bat an eye at the ticket price ($344) for this annual seven-course tasting menu led by Sepia’s new executive chef, Kyle Cottle, and head bartender Keith Meicher. Dishes include Osetra caviar with cured fluke, dill, and yellow Chartreuse beurre blanc; and tarragon soufflé with green Chartreuse, milk ice cream, and candied fennel. The evening features all five expressions

of the liqueur, along with Chartreuse-adjacent spirits like Sweet Gwendoline gin and Agua Mágica mezcal. (Sepia, 6:30 PM , 21+) MIKE SULA

Chicago Black Restaurant Week SUN 2/8–SUN 2/22

For eleven years and running, Chicago Black Restaurant Week has celebrated local Blackowned culinary establishments. This year’s iteration, themed Our Food Tells Our Story,

Maya-Camille Broussard

FRI 2/20–SAT 2/21

Celebrate the dead of winter with back-toback late-night screenings of Iced (1989) and Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo (1995). SuperHorror-Rama! was founded in 2023 by John McDevitt and Barry Kaufman, who programmed films at Facets, then Sideshow Gelato, before finding a home at the Music Box (at which time Kaufman stepped away). McDevitt also runs the Super-Horror-Rama! social media channels, which, in their words, “offer an expanded experience that spotlights vintage promo art and newspaper/magazine clippings about the films as well as a multimedia experience of short stories, comics, radio shows, vintage commercials, episodes of anthology television, and more.” So follow them at @superhorrorrama, and don’t miss this offbeat cold-weather reprieve, presented in collaboration with Tony Recktenwald and Edward Witt of horror zine Full Bleed. Screening tickets include limited edition buttons, plus winter horror–themed trivia with prizes. (Music Box Theatre, 11:45 PM , all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

Black Harvest Film Festival Encore Sat 2/7– Sun 2/15, Siskel Film Center, all ages Crying at the Shed Thu 2/12–Sat 2/14, Salt Shed, all ages

Brothers From Another Planet Mon 2/16–Sat 2/28, Music Box Theatre, all ages Sweet Void Cinema presents . . . City Wide Fever (2025) Thu 2/19, 9 PM, Facets, all ages

Architecture & Design Film Festival: Chicago 2026 Thu 2/19–Sun 2/22, Siskel Film Center, Chicago Cultural Center, all ages

Subsurface: A Behind The Rock Exhibition Sat 2/21, 12 PM–7 PM, Public Works Gallery, all ages Short Film Fest & Discussion: “Home” Videos / Videos “Domésticos” Sat 2/21, 3 PM, Lozano Branch, Chicago Public Library , recommended age 13+

27th Chicago Irish Film Festival Thu 2/26–Sun 3/8, AMC New City and online, all ages African Cinema From Independence to Now lecture series Through Sun 5/17, Siskel Film Center, all ages

FOOD&DRINK The Chartreuse Affair: An Annual Sepia Celebration THU 2/5

If you read Reader staff writer Micco Caporale’s August 20 feature story about Chartreuse,

Monday Night Foodball MONDAYS 2/9–2/23

The Reader’s long-running guest chef pop-up series, curated by me, enters its fifth year this month at Thattu in Avondale. Get early tastes of what Chicago’s up-and coming young chefs can do before they become household names.

On deck this month: Greek food, super fast and super slow from Meze Table; pizza night with “Tripping” Billy Zureikat, the hardest working man in pop-ups; and wild-caught, deep-fried sea critters via Mount Greenwood, with Jennifer Moore of South Side Shrimp. Plus, happy hour bespoke cocktails, beer, and mocktails from bartender Melanie Rodriguez. (Thattu, 5 PM , all ages) MIKE SULA

Lunar New Year pop-up market with Quan Am and Volition Tea SUN 2/15

For Tết 2026, mother and daughter Ngọc-Chân and Grace Trần have joined under the name Quan Âm, for the Vietnamese bodhisattva of compassion, and are collaborating with Volition Tea’s Annie Xiang for a very meaty debut.

Though the Trần’s future pop-ups will be plantbased, on the menu this time, it’s bún thang, Hanoi-style rice noodle soup, an uncommon and labor-intensive celebratory bowl built on chicken, pork, and squid broth, and topped with julienned pork roll, shredded chicken, egg, and shrimp floss. Shrimp paste and floral cà cuống, aka water beetle essence, will be served on the side. Though the Trầns have used up their supply of the rare natural extract and will employ the manufactured version, this is a soup you don’t meet every day. (Haibayô, 10 AM, all ages) MIKE SULA

MORE February Fantastique 2026 Mondays 2/2–2/23, Alliance Française de Chicago, 6:30 PM, all ages

involves more than 35 businesses throughout Chicagoland. Restaurants will offer various specials, such as prix fixe menus or discounted dishes, providing the perfect opportunity to connect with Black History Month through food.

(Locations vary, all ages) TARYN McFADDEN

South Side + Friends guest chef series: Justice of the Pies

COURTESY JUSTICE OF THE PIES

WED 2/25

This new monthly collaborative dinner series headquartered in Bridgeport and hosted by chef Dominique Leach of Pullman’s Lexington Betty Smokehouse aims to spotlight underappreciated southside chefs and restaurants. “It can be hard to get people to pay attention to the south side, even though it’s where so many culture-shaping chefs are doing the work,” Leach says. “There is so much talent and heart here, and I wanted to create something that brings those voices together in one intimate space.” This second installment features Maya-Camille Broussard of Justice of the Pies; Avalon Park’s Queen of Tarts, operating out of a former midcentury modern dental office, is known as much for her savory as for her sweet pies, and she’s equally adept at groundbreakers as well as the classics. Next up in March: Kendra Anderson of Caviar Dream Co. (House of Gaz, 6 PM, all ages) MIKE SULA

THIS&THAT

Free gym access Sun 2/1–Sun 2/15, Chicago Park District Fitness Centers An Evening of Working-Class Writers: Exhibit B hosts MJ Dean, Grayson Thompson, Alex J. Cope, Zak Mucha, and Naila Buckner Fri 2/6, 7 PM, Tangible Books, free, all ages Love for Gaza Art Fest Sat 2/7, 10 AM-2 PM, Nabala Cafe, all ages Belden Sawyer Tenant Association Rent Party Mutual Aid Fundraiser Sat 2/7, 7-11 PM, Five Point Holistic Health Miniature making workshop Sun 2/8 & Wed 2/11, Francine’s, all ages Art After Dark for Black History Month Wed 2/11, 5:30 PM, Garfield Park Conservatory, all ages Increase the Peace Chicago’s Rapid Response Nonviolence Training Thu 2/12, 6-8 PM, location shared with RSVP Seed’s In My Pocket’s “Hay _____ en Casa” exhibition opening & open mic Fri 2/13, 6-10 PM, Chicago Art Department Education Station: Ancestral Seeds + Black Botanical Knowledge Sat 2/14 1-3 PM, Garfield Park Conservatory, all ages Plant sale Sat 2/14 & Sun 2/15, 10 AM-1 PM, Garfield Park Conservatory, all ages Winter Jazz Fair with concerts, panels, and vendors Fri 2/20, 11:30 AM–7:30 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, all ages Rogers Park Seed Library’s seed starting skillshare & library workday Sat 2/28, 1-4 PM, PO Box Collective, free FEBRUARY 2026

| CHICAGO READER 57

CLASSIFIEDS empl. at various sites in U.S. No [HEX:fb01]xed itinerary. Contact: Qual.

Applicants send resume to talent@bounteous. com and Ref. job title & Job #B0013 in subj. line.

JOBS AbbVie, Inc. in North Chicago, IL is seeking a Cloud Kubernetes Engineer to engineer, implement and support cloud services that underpin scientific and R&D related activities.

Provide consultation and support for cloud solutions with a focus on best practices and security. Telecommuting i s p e r m i t t e d f ro m anywhere in the U.S. Salary: $117,957 $178,500 per year.

Related degree and/or experience and/or skills required. Apply online at https://careers.abbvie. com/en or send resume to Job.opportunity. abbvie@abbvie. com. Refer to Req ID: REF49219K. AbbVie offers a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick), medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

This job is eligible to participate in our shortterm and long-term incentive programs.

BOUNTEOUS INC. (Chicago,IL) Qual. Eng. Mgr. Lead QA strategy; manage QE teams; automate & stdzd. testing (Jira, TestRail, Selenium, Jenkins, TestComplete); ptner. w/ Product, Engineering & DevOps across SDLC/ CI-CD. Req. master’s degree in Comp. Sci. or SE or for. eq. & 2 yrs of exp. as a Sr. QA Anal. or Qual. Eng Mgr. or Mgr. Testing. 2 yrs pro. exp. w/Jira, TestRail, UAT Testing, Jenkins, Con[HEX:fb02] uence, Selenium, & TestComplete Reqd.

Sal: $108,200 Med, Dental, LI, EAP, Disab., 401k. Occ. U.S. travel up to 20%, avail for

FreshCoast Capital, LLC d/b/a Greenprint Partners in Chicago, IL is seek’g a Landscape Designer to plan landscape creation & create dsgns for land areas. 25% dom trvl to client-sites. WFH avail. Slry: $45,531/ y r. S t a n d a r d c o . bnfits. Email resumes to: recruitment@ greenprintpartners.com.

Chicago Transit Authority is seeking a Senior Manager, Service Planning in Chicago, IL w/the following reqmnts: Master’s deg in Urban Planning or Transp Eng or rel field or foreign equivalent deg. 5 yrs rel exp w/ following responsibilities: Develops and implements proposals to improve operating economies and/ or service quality on the bus and rail networks.

Must live within the boundaries of the CTA service area at the time of employment or within 6 months of beginning employment at CTA. Up to 40% remote work allowed.

Salary Range: $127,930.48 $132,193.98.CTA Benefits: https:// w w w . transitchicago. com/hrbenefits/ Anyone interested in this position may apply transitchicago. com/careers using reference # 2500008A. LifeSpeed Behavioral Support Services, LLC req. Director of Adult

CATEGORY ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNA WAGNER FOR CHICAGO READER

Services at Forest Park, IL to: Eval, implmnt, & ovrse adlt bhvl prgmng acrs the org to meet evolvng clnt needs, plcs, & bst prctices & dvlp strtgc glls for adlt srvics.

Mntn & rvis prgrm plcs & prcdrs to ensr rgltry & licsre cmplnce. Req. 3 yrs. exp. $100008/yr.

Req. MS in apld bhvrl anlysis or a clsly rltd fld.

Bnfts incl: PTO/PTOFAR, Hlth/Liablty Insrnce, Wrkrs Comp, Milge Reimbrs. To apply email resumes to Anthony Russo at trusso@ uptolifespeed.com.

BLDG Projects, Inc. Architectural Designer, Chicago, IL. Responsible for coordinating project design, developing design concepts & solutions, preparing presentation and design drawings. Offered wage: $70,034/year.

Standard company benefits. To apply, please send resume to Katmerka Ramic at Katmerka@bldgproj. com or 4468 North Elston Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60630.

Reference #: 88590.

Principal Medical Writer, AbbVie Inc., Mettawa, IL, Hybrid (onsite 3 days a week/ 2 days WFH/ remote). Responsible for providing medical writing & ensuring high-quality document preparation.

Serve as medical writing lead for multiple compounds & projects within a therapeutic area.

Interpret & explain data generated from various s o u rc e s , i n c l u d i n g internal & external studies, regulatory submission documents, research documentation, charts, graphs, & tables, & verify that results are consistent with study data. Convert relevant data & information into a form that meets publication needs & jour nal/congress requirements. Interface with external experts (eg, physicians, other health care professionals) & staff from other functions (eg, Clinical, Statistics, Medical Affairs) to resolve conflicting comments &

ensure accurate & timely completion of scientific publications. Coordinate development of writing projects in adherence to publications policies & procedures. Must have a PhD in a biological science or a related field & 2 years of industry or academic technical writing experience writing publications.

Of the experience required, must have 2 years: (i) working in a cross functional team to develop scientific content; & (ii) assimilating & interpreting scientific content & translating for scientists, researchers & patients.

Wo r k e x p e r i e n c e may be gained concurrently. Salary Range: $130,564.71 $202,500.00 per year.

Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job. opportunity.abbvie@ abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF49200O. 3DECORATIVE PANEL SOLUTIONS, INC. D/B/A Encore Gallery seeks an Interior Designer. Mail resume to 1950 Lincoln Highway Saint Charles, IL, 60174.

Pureline Treatment Systems, LLC. seeks Mechanical Design Engineer (Bensenville, IL) to design mechanical prods. & systems by developing & testing specifications & methods. Must have bach. deg. in mechanical engineering or equiv. & 2 yrs. of exper. in: 1) equipment design, piping systems, & new prod. development w/in the chem. & manufacturing sectors; 2) SolidWorks, DraftSight, AutoCAD, UG NX, & CATIA, w/ a foundation in GD&T, DFM/DFA, & regulatory standards (ASME, ASTM); 3) leading cross-functional teams to deliver complex mechanical systems w h i l e s t re a m l i n i n g operations through costeffective design solns.; 4) driving projects from concept to commission; 5) integrating CAD

w/ ERP systems for budget planning & BOM mgmt., including item code creation, library maintenance, & financial tracking. Salary: $74,000 - 80,000/yr. Benefits include medical & dental insurance, life insurance, PTO, d i s a b i l i t y, incentive pay, & 401k.

To apply, send CV to adi.sullivan@pureline. com (Code: DE2025).

Senior Cloud Network Engineer, Chicago, IL, for Team TAG Services, LLC. Analyze, manage, and build cloud environments. Req’d: Bach. or higher degree (or foreign equiv.) in Computer Science, Networking Eng., Computer, Electrical or Electronics Eng., or a related field & 5 yrs’ exp. in administering large networks. Salary/ Benefits: $163,238/yr & a generous benefits pkg. that includes paid time off, health, dental, vision, & 401(k) savings plan w/ match.

May work remotely 1 day/wk. Resumes to Code MS-SCNE, J. Ximenes, TAG, 800 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607 (juliana. ximenescoutinhodias@ teamtag.com).

Siemens Industry, Inc. seeks a Software Developer in Chicago, IL to develop SaaS applications on the Building X cloud platform. Reqs: Bach deg or foreign equiv in Comp Sci & 8 yrs rel exp.

Alt. reqs: Mas deg & 6 yrs rel exp.

Salary: $159,459$184,926 Hybrid work permitted. To apply, go to: https:// jobs.siemens. c o m / en_US/external j o b s / JobDetail/491200 Senior Manager, Field To o l s , A b b Vi e U S LLC, Mettawa, Illinois.

Lead & coordinate the collaboration efforts needed from cross

functional teams to assist in deployment & maintenance of field sales reporting tools. Provide different and unique ideas to the table to address business issues & ways to enhance dashboard capabilities & new solutions. Responsible for delivering highquality results, including representing collective opinion of collaborative efforts to build new solutions.

Responsible for periodic refreshing, prioritization, & deployment of tool solutions for maintenance dashboards. Manage tools support resource priorities & work efforts, with collaboration from the FFE Field Tools Managers & business partners.

Must possess a Bachelor’s degree in Science, Business Administration, M a n a g e m e n t Information Systems, Statistics, Economics o r c l o s e l y re l a t e d field of study, & at least 5 years of work experience in Business Visualization, Analytics, or Sales Operations.

Of the work experience required, must have at least 4 years: (i) defining & interpreting d a s h b o a rd p ro j e c t needs for business stakeholders across a matrixed organization; (ii) managing projects in partnership with sales vertical partners & support team for what can be accomplished & is compliant in a field tool; (iii) managing s u p p o r t re s o u rc e s across multiple teams, developing, & delivering solutions to our partners; (iv) designing the training to pull through enhancements & project builds; (v) performing subject matter expert role related to franchise knowledge & visualization tool development; (vi) leading projects within a matrix organization; & (vii) performing technical database development, defining

data inconsistencies & analyzing a complex data landscape. Would accept a Masters in Science, Business Administration, M a n a g e m e n t Information Systems, Statistics, Economics or closely related field of study & 2 years of experience in (i) through (vii). Experience may be gained c o n c u r r e n t l y. A n y suitable combination of education, training, or experience is acceptable. Salary Range: $156,458 $202,500 per year.

Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job. opportunity.abbvie@ abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF49199B.

HOUSING Seven two-bedroom two bath and a one bed one bath below market-rate rental units available at Five Points Lakeview, 3605 N Ravenswood!

Five Points Lakeview is a new construction rental building that features 52 residential units, a rooftop patio, gym, bike storage, and outdoor parking is available. Trader Joes, Loba Cafe, and the CTA Brown Line are within blocks of the property!

The property is located within the Hamilton CPS School District.

Affordable rents range from $961.00 to $1,771.00 a month.

Must be income eligible.

Households must earn no more than the maximum income levels below: Unit 508, One Bedroom One Bath. 80% of Area Median Income: One person - $67,150; 2 persons -$76,750; Units 403 + 407,

Every job in Reader Classifieds is placed by a real employer who paid to post it.

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Two Bedrooms Two Baths, 70% of Area Median Income: 2 persons -$67,200; 3 persons - $75,600; 4 persons - $83,930 Units 303 + 307, Two Bedrooms Two Baths, 60% of Area Median Income: 2 persons -$57,600; 3 persons - $64,800; 4 persons - $71,940 Units 202 + 207, Two Bedrooms Two Baths, 50% of Area Median Income: 2 persons -$48,000; 3 persons - $54000; 4 persons - $59,950 Unit 203, Two Bedrooms Two Baths, 40% of Area Median Income: 2 persons -$38,400; 3 persons - $43,200; 4 persons - $47,960 Please contact the Five Points Lakeview for an application and more information at 773-308-6806 or info@ fivepointslakeview.com Applicants with vouchers or other third-party subsidies are welcome to apply. These units are subject to monitoring, compliance, and other restrictions by the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing. For more information visit https:// www.chicago.gov/city/ en/sites/affordablerequirements-ordinance/ home.html info@ fivepointslakeview.com

MARKETPLACE ‘Oooooh interesting’ Drinks to drink when you like to drink drinks but you don’t want to drink a drink drink. fivecornersbev.com

Visit the site

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Over 425K votes were cast to celebrate the people, places, and businesses that make this city so special! Find out what made the top of the list in this year’s Best of Chicago issue—out March 4.

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Featuring specially-created, hyperlocal editorial categories, including: police force for guarding an illegal federal fortress run by roving masked kidnappers homegrown archive documenting Chicago’s Palestinian diaspora

informal dining spot where you can order lepeshka after 11 PM on a Wednesday place for a fever dream

local perfumes inspired by house music nonhuman Chicago Sky fan

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Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967. © Yoko Ono. Photo by and © Clay Perry.

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