March Highlights

Workshop of Orzio (?) Fontana, Birth Bowl, circa 1575, Polychrome tin-glazed earthenware

The Smart Museum of Art
“The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy”
Tuesday, March 9 through Sunday, Aug. 22
10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.
5550 S. Greenwood Ave. 702-0200. http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu. Free.
 
Drawn principally from the Smart Museum’s permanent collection, “The Uses of Renaissance Italy” considers the daily life of strikingly diverse objects. Colorfully decorated earthenware, ornately cast bronze and masterfully painted wood panels from Renaissance Italy still catch the attention of modern museum visitors many years after they were made. While each artifact was created with a keen eye and an artist’s hand, many factors, beyond beauty, influenced its form and decoration. By focusing on original sites of display—the church, the home and the public palace—the exhibition calls attention to the initial reasons for artistic production and admiration. There will be a public tour of the exhibition at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, March 14.

Books of poetry by the three Latin American poets who will read their work

The Center for Latin American Studies
An Afternoon of Latin American Poetry: Lectura de poesía y coloquio
4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 12
Classics 10, 1010 E. 59th St. 702-8420. Free.
 
Three established Latin American poets will read their works in Spanish, with some poems in English translation. The poets are Olivia Maciel, a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Literature, and Alberto Blanco, both from Mexico, and Juan Carlos Galeano from the Amazon region of Colombia. The readings will be followed by a colloquium discussion and reception.

Merry-Beth Noble, “Self-Sustaining Advice Mobile,” wire, clothes pins, paper airplanes, dollar bills, advice, instructions, on display in “Counter/Depression”

Weissbourd Annual Conference of the Society of Fellows
“Depression: What Is It Good For?”
Friday, March12 through Saturday, March 13
Franke Institute for the Humanities, Regenstein Library, Room S102, 1100 E. 57th St. https://depressionconference.uchicago.edu/. Free, but registration is required.
 
Co-sponsored by the Franke Institute, Critical Inquiry and the Department of English Language & Literature, this conference will draw scholars, artists and intellectuals together to ask how society might use the experience of depression as the very index of its current political climate and as a key to future political thinking. Topics include therapeutic effects of political protest, depression’s effect on the brain, the relationship between economic and psychological depression, the privatizing definitions and economic incentives of pharmaceutical advertising, and the specificities of depression, and responses to it, in Chicago. Also under the conference’s umbrella are several exhibitions, screenings and performances. Among the exhibitions is “Counter/Depression” at the Center for Gender Studies, 5733 S. University Ave.

The Department of Music
Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride
7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11 (preview)
8 p.m. Friday, March 12 and Saturday, March 13
2 p.m. Sunday, March 14
Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. 702-9075. Preview performance: $10 general, $5 students. Regular performances: $15 general, $8 students.
 
In its 20th annual benefit event for the Department of Music, the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, joined by the University Chamber Orchestra, will present Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride. The product of the infamous satirical team Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience contains all of the ingredients for a delightfully complicated love triangle: jealousy, perfection, duty and love. The story follows two rival aesthetic poets as they compete for the affections of the title character, Patience.