Friday 11/8 – Thursday 11/14
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When Chicago police officer Scott Fortino went back to school for photography in 1998, some of his classmates at UIC loved his work, but others took issue with his methods. “In the course of a day of work, I enter and exit all types of places,” he says. “If I find a place interesting, I’ll make arrangements to return [and take pictures].” But when his peers saw his photos of public housing residents, he says, some “thought I was exploiting the situation of living in public housing and the situation of me being a police officer.” His most recent work–images of the police station holding cells and classrooms he sees on a regular basis–is intended to explore ideas of confinement and protection. The photographs are the focus of his first solo show, which runs through December 20 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan. There’s a free opening reception tonight from 5 to 7; Fortino will give a talk at 6. For more information call 312-663-5554 or see www.mocp.org.
9 SATURDAY Civil rights attorney Pearl Hart was in her 70s when she met and fell in love with 50-year-old novelist and human rights activist Valerie Taylor in the early 1960s. The pair went on to found Mattachine Midwest, Chicago’s first homosexual rights organization, and stayed together until Hart’s death in 1975. Taylor moved to upstate New York shortly after that, and then to the warmer climate of Tucson, where she became “the resident grandmother of the lesbian community,” lecturing on lesbian literature and history, writing more novels, and agitating on behalf of the elderly; she died in 1997. “I want to show [that Taylor and Hart] were positive, active women all the way into their mature adult years,” says local historian and journalist Marie Kuda, who cofounded the Lesbian Writers Conference with Taylor in 1974. She’ll present her slide lecture Valerie Taylor and Pearl Hart: A Love Story today from 1 to 3 as part of Horizons Community Services’ “mature adult” seminar series. It’s at 961 W. Montana and it’s free; for more call 773-472-6469, ext. 245.
12 TUESDAY Publicist and writer Jessica Hopper, who has a regular column in Punk Planet, will join the Sun-Times’s Laura Washington, Chicago magazine’s Steve Rhodes, and others for today’s panel discussion on the Craft of the Columnist. Part of Columbia College’s Creative Nonfiction Week, it starts at 3 at the college’s Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan. Other events today include a 6:30 PM reading by Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. The series started Monday and runs through Thursday, and all events are free. For a complete schedule of events call 312-344-8100 or see the Readings & Lectures listings in Section Two.
