After five years of commuting by New York-based former artistic director Lawrence Weschler—a situation that stretched him thin and created a second-city vibe around the whole affair—the Chicago Humanities Festival has hired itself a local leader.
As a very little kid, Bunzl says, one of the first differences he noticed between himself and his playmates was that they were surrounded by extended family, while his relatives were scattered across the globe. “I thought it was so cool that my family lived all over the world—England, the U.S., Israel, Spain, South America,” he says. “It didn’t occur to me then that there was a very specific reason: genocide.”
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There’s room for argument—and half the book is devoted to it, with responses from a half-dozen other writers. But nothing that’s happened since that book was published has changed his mind, Bunzl says, adding that the instance of anti-Islamic sentiment that’s shocked him most has been the uproar over the Ground Zero mosque: “So not American!”
Started in 1989 by Nuveen Investments chairman Richard Franke and run for 16 years by former president Eileen Mackevich, the Chicago Humanities Festival was originally a free, one-day program under the auspices of the Illinois Humanities Council. Now it has an operating budget of about $3 million, and the main event stretches over the first half of November, offering about 100 lectures, panels, and performances loosely gathered around a single theme. Tickets range from $5 to $28, but most events are free for students and teachers; last year’s attendance was 39,000. A children’s festival has been spun off into its own spring time slot, and there’s been an effort in the last couple years to consolidate programming and venues so that patrons aren’t trying to gallop across town to catch back-to-back presentations. (There’s one full day of programming at UIC this year, for example.) But both Bunzl and CHF executive director and playwright Stuart Flack say the biggest change came a year ago with a website upgrade that’s providing the two things CHF most sorely lacked: a permanent (albeit virtual) home and a year-round presence. Featuring a library of hundreds of free programs from previous festivals, most with accompanying teachers’ guides, it’s attracting more than 1,000 guide downloads a month and putting CHF programming into high schools around the world.
Sun 10/24, various Hyde Park locations, then 11/2-11/14, various locations, chicagohumanities.org.
