Chicago Humanities Fall Festival faces the decline of the humanities with lineup including Margaret Atwood, Kate McKinnon

Chicago Tribune

4 hours ago

The Chicago Humanities Festival began in 1989.
As the longtime nonprofit arts and culture organization announces its signature fall schedule this week, let us pause a moment and consider what a difference 36 years makes. That year, 1989 — not insignificant in the history of free expression in the United States — was the thick of the late 20th century 'culture wars.' Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center were entrenched. Robert Mapplethorpe (who died that March) and other transgressive artists provoked front-page outrage. Jesse Helms argued for 'family values' even as he sought to deny AIDS funding. The Supreme Court decided whether it was OK to burn American flags. The Moral Majority disbanded that year, but not before setting a table that led to budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts.
You probably don't remember this part, those days long since obscured by much uglier times, but, in the end, only $45,000 of the NEA's $171 million proposed budget was cut.
Three and a half decades later, the Chicago Humanities Festival faces a country in which universities, nevermind bureaucrats, want to demolish humanities curricula, and where many cultural institutions face a bleak future of almost zero public funding and the White House itself has made clear its intentions to eliminate the NEA altogether.
How does an organization with 'humanities' right there in its name respond?
By scheduling weeks of talks, readings and performances in the heart of some of the most impacted local communities.
The day ends at Rockefeller Chapel with Nick Offerman, actor and Minooka native, on woodworking — but expect the never-politically-shy Offerman to weigh in on what ails us.
On Sept. 21, the festival hosts a 'Pilsen/Little Village Day' throughout two of the Chicago neighborhoods most impacted by ICE raids. That day includes a chat with chef Rick Bayless and Jesse Valenciana, the Chicago-raised chef and journalist whose work focuses on Mexican cuisine. Also that afternoon, Cheech Marin (of Cheech & Chong) on Chicano art (and his California museum of art); and a conversation about Teen Angels magazine, the beloved (now defunct) zine often credited with spreading the culture of lowriders, tattoos and Latino aesthetics.
On Oct. 13, the Morton Arboretum, to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day, hosts Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi member and famed botanist whose 'Braiding Sweetgrass,' a book of meditations on the environment, became an unlikely blockbuster.
As for old-school activism: On Oct. 4, tucked into a lengthy day of events on the Bronzeville campus of Illinois Institute of Technology, there's Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble playing a composition for the famed intellectual and activist Angela Davis, followed by a chat with Davis.
'People can frame this (festival) however they want, I guess,' said Phillip Bahar, executive director of the Humanities Festival, 'but I don't think of what we do as go-march-in-the-street activism but closer to 'Here are a bunch of ideas relevant in our society and might be personally relevant within your family or community…' And so some of those events become political by chance. But we do focus on topics specific to the moment, and we do care about a diversity of ideas and those who shape ideas — left, right, female, male, any combination you can think. If we're trying to do a festival in Chicago that shows what the world is now, we have to reflect and show different sides.'
Not that any of this means a lack of marquee names.
Kate McKinnon returns to the festival; as does controversial statistician Nate Silver (both Oct. 4). Salman Rushdie — on a creative streak since recovering from his stabbing in 2022 — appears at the Athenaeum Center on Nov. 13. Margaret Atwood — whose speculative fiction gets less speculative by the day — appears Nov. 8. Roxane Gay talks about the 10th anniversary of her contemporary classic 'Bad Feminist' on Oct. 18; same day, Stephen Dubner talks about the 20th anniversary of 'Freakonomics.'
As for local flavor, among other events, there's a conversation on architecture and society with the Floating Museum art collective (Oct. 4); walking tours of Bronzeville (Oct. 4) with Sherman 'Dilla' Thomas; the Lyric Opera performing 'Medea' (Oct. 18); and an afternoon festival in North Lawndale (Oct. 12) devoted to the design of sukkah, the temporary pavilions and structures created for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
For decades, the festival's fall schedule was a beast, held largely across downtown venues and far too vast to expect anyone to catch even a modest number of offerings. Now it's a touch smaller. These days, Bahar said, their events — 80 to 100 a year — are divided almost equally between fall and spring schedules. He also noted that the kind of philanthropic funding that cultural organizations like his once relied on has been shifting away from the arts. Plus, after the pandemic, audiences just don't leave home as often.
'Now we feel like the right size,' he said.
Staying relevant could be the easy part. There was a time, not long ago, when Harvard's Jill Lepore on the U.S. Constitution (Nov. 5) and Stephanie Burt on Taylor Swift (Oct. 18) and Padma Lakshmi on the food of American immigrant communities (Nov. 11) would be mostly about what it sounded like they are about. On Oct. 15, Cory Doctorow and Kara Swisher talk about the decline of almost everything.
The air, in 2025, is too charged to take events like that at face value anymore.
'Novelist Gary Shteyngart (Oct. 18) just wrote a book about a family that's trying to stay together while everything around them is coming apart,' Bahar said. 'And look, I mean, I have no idea — no idea whatsoever — where he possibly got that idea from!'