Founded in 1916 in the wake of the scandalous Armory Show, the Arts Club of Chicago aimed to present the city with new images, sounds, and ideas. Conceived as an exhibition and social space that would cultivate sophisticated conversations around a range of media, the Arts Club has maintained its core interest in presenting culture "in the making." Today, it continues to serve as a key venue in Chicago for the presentation of work by the national and international avant-garde, including such artistic luminaries as Sharon Lockhart, Josiah McElheny, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and many more. This volume addresses the visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, and literature presented by the Club over its one-hundred-year history with new scholarship by leading writers in each field. Janine Mileaf and Susan F. Rossen offer an in-depth look at the tastemakers of modernism in the city, from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein to local cultural player Rue Winterbotham Carpenter. A dynamic exploration of the intertwined histories of the Arts Club and Chicago, this colorfully illustrated book celebrates both an institution and a city that have remained innovative and forward-thinking throughout the decades.

Chicago has for decades years been one of the most prominent cities where European surrealism is avidly collected and displayed. However, there has yet to be a scholarly exhibition and catalogue that addresses the local manifestations of this international mode of art. A Home for Surrealism focuses on a select group of painters whose work in the 1940s and ’50s both transformed the domestic and domesticated the surrealist, particularly in Chicago. Working independently, but within a chain of social and artistic relationships, this group explored the interior as a site of projected imagination and fantasy, and the self as the generator of such altered perception. Including contributions by Robert Cozzolino, Adam Jolles, and Joanna Pawlik, the book provides a richly illustrated account of an international movement’s unlikely—but somehow ever so fitting—home in America.