The world expositions were monumental, public spectacles originating in the industrial fairs of early-nineteenth-century France and culminating in the Expositions Universelles of Paris (1889 and…
Ned Wayburn was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 30 March 1874, and raised in Chicago. He studied at the Hart Conway Chicago School of Elocution while…
Modernist architecture and design represented a utopian vision of how the built environment could be adapted to the needs to modern industrial society. Industrialization had…
Modernism in the visual arts is a complex term and currently the subject of much academic debate. However, this project demanded that we set boundaries…
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
Cubism is an art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a key movement in the birth…
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Ruth Page was a Chicago-based dancer, choreographer, and director of ballet companies whose experimentalism, disregard for genre boundaries, and affinity for collaboration led her in…
Theodore Roszak was a visual artist of the machine age. Born in Poland but raised in Chicago, Roszak trained at the School of the Art…
Walt Disney, (b. 5 December 1901, d. 15 December 1966) born in Chicago and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, was a film producer and entrepreneur who built…
Born in Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry made history when her play A Raisin in the Sun premièred on Broadway in 1959 as the first…
Anthony Braxton, born 4 June 1945 in Chicago, Illinois, is an avant-garde jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer who performs and records primarily on saxophones. An active…
A passionate proponent of modernist arts and letters, publisher and author Margaret Caroline Anderson is best known as the intrepid co-editor (with Jane Heap, 1883–1964)…
Arthur Yvor Winters was an iconoclast who valued tradition; a poetic experimentalist who became increasingly committed to inherited poetic forms; a critic committed to rationality…
Franz Boas was a founder of the fields of modern anthropology and ethnography. He created the anthropology department at Boston’s Clark University and oversaw the…
Thorstein Veblen was an American economist, sociologist and social critic. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1884. After a six-year stint on his family’s…
The shimmy, also known as the shim-me-sha-wabble, is a jazz dance that features the upper body, especially the shoulders, shaking and quivering horizontally from side…
In the modern dance world, Sybil Shearer was by most accounts an idiosyncratic, singular, and somewhat esoteric figure whose career spanned the second half of…
Alongside Sergio Trujillo, Santiago Martínez Delgado is considered to be one of the most representative Colombian Art Deco artists. The blooming period of Martínez’s work…
Santi Isrowuthakul is an artist and activist who participated in the Artists’ Front of Thailand (AFT) (1974–1976). Born in Bangkok, Santi graduated with a master’s…
The Federal Dance Project (FDP) was formed in January 1936, as part of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although it was originally a component…
Malka Heifetz-Tussman was a twentieth-century American Yiddish poet. She was born in 1896 in the region of Volyn in Ukraine (then part of the Russian…
Die Blaue Vier [The Blue Four] was founded in Weimar in March 1924 at the initiative of Galka E. Scheyer, who became the American representative…
References to dances of the East have appeared in Western sources at least since the beginning of the Christian era, yet what has become known…