February Evening Program

Cosponsored by the Caxton Club and the Chicago Art Deco Society

A central aspect of the culture and lifestyle of the 1920s and ’30s was the creation and consumption of food. You could exist in an Art Deco world where everything from the soup to the nuts was inflected with this style. As a pervasive style, Deco shaped a total environment and food and drink were an integral part of this. The lavishly illustrated lecture will feature many aspects of these manifestations.

Dr. Teri J. Edelstein, curator and museum consultant, is principal of Teri J. Edelstein Associates, Museum Strategies. She served as Deputy Director of The Art Institute of Chicago and previously as director of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She has taught at several universities. Her numerous publications include many articles and exhibition catalogues as well as the books Perspectives on Berthe Morisot and Art for All: British Posters for Transport. She contributed a major essay to Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America. Most recently, she curated Everyone’s Art Gallery: Posters of the London Underground for The Art Institute of Chicago.

Please register if you’d like to see this program, even if you can’t attend at 6:30 on February 7. After the program, all registrants will receive an email offering an opportunity to request a link to a recording of the complete program.

February Midday Program

Saddle up as we ride along with a couple of Berkeley grads who became two of the most prolific and successful writers of popular fiction during the first half of the twentieth century.

They flooded bookshelves, produced plays, filled the radio and television airwaves with dramatic scripts, and gave Hollywood stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and others the lines that helped make them famous.

Randal Brandt has the treasure map that will lead us to a trove of fun and fascinating nuggets from Berkeley’s Faust and Perkins papers. Frederick Schiller Faust (1915) pounded the keyboard under the pen name Max Brand. He also challenged Kenneth Perkins (1914) to trade an academic career for writing. Each would go on to create stories that helped to shape the myths of America’s West. And more.

Randy Brandt serves as Head of the Cataloging Unit at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Before that, he held cataloging positions at the Water Resources Center Archive, the California Indian Library Collections project at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the California Maps Project. He also curates the Bancroft’s California Detective Fiction Collection.

Let’s go west! Join the wagon train by making your reservation today!

Zoom presentation is free and open to all. Zoom begins at 12:00PM CT/1:00 PM ET. Preregistration required via website.

Live attendance and buy your own lunch

Zoom presentation is free and open to all. View Zoom program at 12:00PM CT on 8th floor, Steel Room, Union League Club. Optional buy your own lunch immediately following in the Wigwam. (Click here for lunch menu)

Reservations required by 12:00PM CT February 8. Seating is limited to 24.

February Evening Program

You’re invited to an in-person book launch for Divine Days, originally published in 1992 and recently reissued by the Seminary Co-op Offsets imprint of Northwestern University Press. 

A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright, for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side.

This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.

Zachary Price is an assistant professor of performance studies in the Department of Drama and a core faculty member in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. An interdisciplinary theorist and performance practitioner, he is the author of Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (The Ohio State University Press, 2022) and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. His research and pedagogy focus on African American drama and Black cultural expression across an array of performance modalities. Price holds a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, MFA from The New School, and a BA from Northwestern University. He is the grandson of Leon and Marianne Forrest.

Kenneth W. Warren is the University of Chicago Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor. He is the author of What Was African American Literature?, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Warren holds a PhD from Stanford University.

Social hour 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM with light hors d’oeuvres. Bar accepts cash or credit cards. Presentation and book signing to follow.

This program is free but you MUST preregister via website by February 13.

Registering for the program will allow you the opportunity to purchase copies of Divine Days for $22.00 for pickup at ULCC on the night of the program or $27.00 if shipped to your address.

Potter & Potter is thrilled to bring to auction the remarkable, singular, eclectic collection of Ricky Jay, the lauded actor, celebrated sleight-of-hand magician, and noted author, who curated his own extensive collection of magic, circus, and showbiz ephemera–a one-of-a-kind wunderkammer. From the literature of cheating, gambling, and conmen, to vibrant vintage circus and sideshow posters, flamboyant text-filled broadsides spanning the last four centuries, and memorabilia of magic shows of yesteryear, this, the first of three auctions promises to be a true celebration of curious characters and the rare relics that tell their stories.

To view the auction catalog, click here. A hardbound catalog is available for $55. Click here to order.

Preview reception with wine and light appetizers is free of charge. Potter & Potter Auctions, 5001 West Belmont Avenue, Chicago (at the corner of Belmont and Lavergne Avenues). Street parking is available.