As The Arts Club of Chicago celebrates its Centennial, there will be a series of exciting special programs at The Club exploring six eras in its history, and a 100th anniversary video. From its founding in 1916, The Arts Club of Chicago has brought exhibitions, performances, and discussions from artists across the country and around the globe. The new video illustrates how The Club has presented the city with new images, sounds and ideas, continually remaining in the avant garde of arts and culture.

The Arts Club of Chicago has hosted artists whose interests have ranged widely and who have inspired Chicagoans to learn, collaborate and create – artists from Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec to Rauschenberg and Richard Hunt, from Gertrude Stein to Martha Graham. Throughout a culture continuum, we have stayed true to our guiding mission: To encourage, foster, promote, and sponsor activities and presentations which aim to increase public interest in the arts.
 
This summer, The Club recollects its history with a series of three public programs at past and present Arts Club locations. Conceived by public historian Paul Durica, each program revisits and re-enacts a major event from a different decade in the history of modernism in Chicago with actors who will dramatize the historical record. Visits to The Club by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Alexander Calder will come to life.
 
Frank Lloyd Wright Edifies at the Fine Arts Building
June 10, 2016
William Harris Lee & Co., 410 South Michigan Avenue, Suite 560
7:00 - 8:00 pm
The Arts Club returns to its first location – the fifth floor of the Fine Arts Building – to reopen one of its earliest exhibitions, originally shown in 1917: Japanese prints from the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright. Among prints by Harunobu and Hiroshige, the architect will deliver the lecture “The Print and the Renaissance,” followed by a reception and concert.
 
Le Corbusier Translated Live at the Wrigley Building
July 8, 2016
400-410 North Michigan Avenue
In 1935, the architect Le Corbusier arrived in Chicago to give two highly-anticipated lectures at The Arts Club and the Renaissance Society. To celebrate this moment, The Arts Club revisits its third location – the Wrigley Building – to restage Le Corbusier’s talk on the modern city, presented in French and English.
 
Alexander Calder Speaks his Letters at The Arts Club of Chicago
August 12, 2016
201 East Ontario Street
In 1941, former Arts Club president Rue Shaw commissioned Alexander Calder to create the mobile Red Petals, a prominent part of the club’s collection. For this program, Calder and Shaw return to The Arts Club to share the letters, telegrams, and sketches that resulted in this iconic sculpture.

 Learn more about the Centennial at www.artsclubchicago.org/artsclub100