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Spring CHF: Style

Expanding on what they do best, the Chicago Humanities Festival will present a themed four-day event this spring, their first ever. (April 28 – May 1.) The subject is style.

Headliners include fashion icon Iris Apfel, media entrepreneur imagesArianna Huffington, Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, photographer Sally Mann, actress Mary Louise Parker. Featured writers are contemporary historian Andrew Solomon, “Negroland” author Margo Jefferson, “My Struggle” autobiographer Karl Ove Knausgaard.

“It’s a theme I’ve wanted to explore for a long time,” says Alison Cuddy, program director. “Style is everywhere and yet it’s elusive. It goes beyond fashion, it concerns the global economy, media, politics, communication, protest.”

CHF had been hosting one-off events outside the fall festival for several years. While successful, single subjects didn’t create the buzz and good will that comes from a thematically grouped festival. “When we looked at what people were most passionate about CHF, it was the theme, an uber theme that allowed for different experiences as one moved through the festival,” says Phillip Bahar, executive director. “We thought, ‘How do we create another moment like that?’”

And so, a spring “mini” festival was designed, with more than 20 events. It’s a lot like the fall festival, bringing authors, thinkers, doers, dreamers to Chicago under the umbrella of a broad common theme, in this case, style.

images-1 Begun as a one-day event in 1989, CHF’s fall festival runs over five weeks and draws 38,000 to 120 events in multiple sites across the city. CHF achieves its long-sought goal of year-round programming with the spring festival.

Also this spring, CHF hosts “H is for Hawk” memoirist Helen Macdonald May 11.

And a one-day event cohosted with the MacArthur Foundation May 15 brings together WBEZ journalist Natalie Moore, Story Corps founder Dave Isay, Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond in a conversation about cities, stories, words and images.

“Programming is not a formula,” says Cuddy. “These events reflect who we are.”

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