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Steve Johnson

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Henry Darger was a solitary Chicago janitor who became an icon of outsider art after his death. He spent most of his adult life in a one-room apartment in Lincoln Park, a neighborhood much less tony in his time. When he died in 1973, his landlords and neighbors, who were virtually his only friends, discovered in the apartment a riot of creative output: a 15,000-plus-page novel, typewritten, and his sprawling watercolor landscapes, mostly extensions of or improvisations on the quasi-Civil War "child slave rebellion" he depicts in the novel. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-40-great-museum-objects-20170706-story.html" target="_blank">Read more.</a>

40 local museum treasures you need to see now

Four Seasons diorama, "Messages from the Wilderness" Field Museum, 1st floor west It's easy to overlook this one. Passing by, it just looks like an old-school museum diorama, and the...
Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/sc-music-nick-cave-skeleton-tree-ent-0916-20160916-column.html" target="_blank">Read the full review.</a>

Disco Demolition is now a museum show

Almost four decades ago, a struggling major league baseball team, a young deejay and a musical genre collided to create a small burst of anarchy in center field at Comiskey...
Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/sc-music-nick-cave-skeleton-tree-ent-0916-20160916-column.html" target="_blank">Read the full review.</a>

The Art Institute wants to show you new Gauguin

Art historians know there was much more to Paul Gauguin than paintings of "bare breasts and mangoes," as Gloria Groom, the curator of a new Art Institute exhibition on the...
Throngs pack the lines outside the main entrance to the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. A new pricing plan was approved Wednesday by the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners and set to take effect July 1.

Shedd’s first price hike in 17 years approved

Shedd Aquarium entry lines will move faster and its pricing will be simpler, although, for some, more costly, under a plan approved Wednesday by the Chicago Park District Board of...