Deke Weaver - The Unreliable Bestiary

Deke Weaver is a writer, performer, and video artist—and his lifelong project is The Unreliable Bestiary. A series of performances, website, and set of books, The Unreliable Bestiary is an ark of stories about animals, our relationships with them, and the precarious worlds they inhabit. Weaver's audacious, ambitious goal for the project is to present a full-length performance for each letter of the alphabet, representing a particular endangered animal with an overlay of economy, environment, and history as context. To date, Weaver has created three startling pieces—"Monkey," "Elephant," and "Wolf"—and in a performance specially crafted for the Chicago Humanities Festival, he presents selections from all three of them. This performance was part of a special double-bill evening featuring Holly Hughes in the first half and Deke Weaver after an intermission, and concluding with a moderated question-and-answer session.

The annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series recognizes a significant gift from founding CHF board member and distinguished art dealer Richard Gray. This program is presented in partnership with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.

This program is also presented in partnership with Links Hall.