Sixty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family to a run-down apartment on Chicago’s West Side, ultimately paving the way for the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Now that his birthday is a national holiday, Chicago celebrates with several opportunities to honor the day’s dedicatee. Here are four happenings that keep the King in Martin Luther King Day.
Music Institute of Chicago features Jonathan Bailey Holland
For its annual MLK celebration, the Music Institute of Chicago has booked the composer and dean of Northwestern’s music school Jonathan Bailey Holland to deliver a keynote address. Holland’s opera “The Bridge” about the civil-rights struggle in Selma, Ala., is scheduled to premiere in Boston later this year. The new professional choral ensemble Chroma, consisting of singers of color, world-premieres “Unknown,” a piece commissioned for the occasion by the Music Institute from Abisola Toukourou. Jan. 18, 3 p.m.
Chicago Sinfonietta’s “Open Heart”
The Chicago Sinfonietta’s annual celebration of King, this year titled “Open Heart,” includes Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and “breathe/burn: an elegy,” a 2020 Sinfonietta commission by Joel Thompson for orchestra and solo cello, composed in memory of Breonna Taylor, who was killed during the execution of a no-knock warrant in Louisville, Kentucky. The weekend will also bring the premiere of an orchestral suite that traces back to a novel written by Sinfonietta cellist Edward Kelsey Moore. Jan. 18-19.
Chicago History Museum’s MLK Day
The Chicago History Museum is granting free admission to Illinois residents on MLK Day, and between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. will have a sing-along, button-making, printmaking and a staged reading of the play “Lawndale King.” The play, by Willie Round, who also co-created the powerful “Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till,” dramatizes the period when King moved to the West Side of Chicago to combat housing discrimination. Jan. 19.
Hyde Park Arts Center “Chaos or Community”
The Hyde Park Arts Center titled its day of MLK programming “Chaos or Community,” after the subtitle of King’s book “Where Do We Go from Here?” The day begins at 11 a.m. with collective meditation, runs through a performance by the storyteller Amari Amai called “I Heard the Voice” and another by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and ends with a documentary screening. Jan. 19.
Museum of Science and Industry’s Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition
The Museum of Science and Industry will open this massive show of Black art works, the largest continually running juried exhibition of Black art in the country, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The work of more than 100 artists, including teens, is featured in this year’s exhibition. The timing coincides with a preview of Crafting Character: The Costumes of Paul Tazewell, a spring exhibition devoted to the Oscar-winning Black designer whose fashion has shaped movies like “Wicked” and Broadway hits such as “Hamilton.” Jan. 19
Graham Meyer is a Chicago arts writer.
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