Friday 27
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There will probably be images of Harold Washington at the juried Columbia College student art exhibition but they’re not likely to ruffle feathers the way David Nelson’s Mirth and Girth did at the School of the Art Institute. Founded in 1890, Columbia only had 125 students in 1962, when it began an aggressive urban recruiting policy for faculty and students. Today it boasts almost 6,000 students–35 percent of whom are minority. Its full-time faculty is 15.8 percent nonwhite. “It’s unlikely something like the Art Institute thing could happen here,” said a proud Columbia source, “because, well, we have so many black students that the artist of such a painting would be too aware of his or her own insensitivity to a very large, and very real, group of people.” Sponsored by the photography department, the exhibition runs through June 10. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 to 4. Tonight’s opening is at the school, 600 S. Michigan, from 5 to 7. It’s free. For more information, call 663-1600, ext. 110.
When an estimated half million gay-and-lesbian-rights supporters descended on Washington D.C. last October, most of the national media–Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post–ignored the event. But not ABC News. Anchor Peter Jennings named Cleve Jones the network’s “Person of the Week.” Jones was honored because he founded the Names Project/National AIDS Quilt (which will be at Navy Pier July 9-11). Jones also worked for the late Harvey Milk, organized the candlelight march after Milk’s assassination, and participated in the White Night Riots that followed. He worked as a legislative aide to California assembly speaker Leo McCarthy (now the state’s lieutenant governor), for state legislator Art Agnos (now mayor of San Francisco), and helped found the San Francisco AIDS Foundation–among other things. Jones, who hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1973 looking for a place to be safely and happily gay, is one of the most important voices in the national lesbian and gay movements. He’ll be the featured speaker at the Gay and Lesbian Press Association Convention awards banquet tonight at 7:30 at the Executive House Hotel, 71 E. Wacker. Tickets are $30. Call 327-7271 for more.
Tuesday 31
Whether you believe the Chicago Public Schools’ figures on dropouts (44.8 percent between 1981 and 1985), or the State Board of Education’s (11 percent), the problem is devastating. The Chicago Board of Education has free dropout retrieval and dropout prevention programs for students up to 21 years of age, but too few dropouts come back. At the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago’s kickoff brown-bag-lunch program, Jean W. Knoll, associate director of graduate programs at the School of New Learning at DePaul University, will give a free presentation on Returning to School. A discussion will follow. The program will be at the Y, 180 N. Wabash, third floor, and starts at 12:15 PM. For more information, call 372-6600.
