2021 Festival Recap: Stories From Home

Explore some highlights of the Festival’s locally-focused programming.

The Chicago Humanities Festival brought well-known figures like Alan Cumming, Kal Penn and Annie Leibovitz to the stage this fall, but we’ve always taken time to spotlight the city we call home. The 2021 festival presented programming that celebrated and contemplated our surroundings, with special attention paid to the challenges the city’s Black creators have faced and the rich culture they’ve fostered.

Former Chicago Tribune journalist Dawn Turner discussed her memoir, Three Girls from Bronzeville, which follows the author, her sister and her best friend as they take very different paths through life. “As my grandmother would say,’We found a way to take a bunch of scraps, and we stitched together a world’,” Turner said, describing the historically-Black neighborhood that the trio’s paths diverge from—former home to trumpeter Louis Armstrong and poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

At the Blanc Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Romi Crawford led an interactive celebration of the Wall of Respect, an iconic mural painted in Bronzeville that depicted Black innovators, including the aforementioned Pulitzer Prize-winner Brooks and essayist James Baldwin.

Before a performance at the nearby Harold Washington Cultural Center, drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven reflected on how Chicago shaped his music. “The musical culture here is so rich, and when I moved here 16 years ago my intent was to integrate into the city and absorb it,” McCraven said, describing his immersion in the city’s thriving jazz and improvised music scene.

Finally, visual artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal and Vocalo DJ Ayana Contreras came together to discuss a film they collaborated on, repurposing archival footage from the Chicago Film Archives depicting Black residents. Looking to the past, “to render the infinite" visualizes a potential future for Chicago that is driven by Black creativity. “When you have a city that is at the center of a certain Black culture production, or that was a kind of origin story, that can’t be just flattened,” o'neal said.