1 The Beach (Navy Pier) Filled with more than a million recyclable antimicrobial plastic balls, the Navy Pier ballroom looks a lot like a day at the beach—complete with umbrellas, sunbeds, lifeguard chairs and donut-shaped floats. Created by New York-based designers Snarkitecture, the immersive art installation lets you pretend it’s summer in the middle of winter. (Through February 3)
2 Keep Moving: Designing Chicago’s Bicycle Culture (Design Museum of Chicago) Last chance to look into Chicago’s Bicycle Culture. From the city’s contribution to the early popularity of bicycles in America, as the nation’s center for bicycle manufacturing—it produced more than two-thirds of the bikes made in the United States—to its significance to the growing contemporary environmental movement. (Through March 3)
3 Indie Wed (Ravenswood Event Center) An alternative to traditional wedding expos, the longest-running independent wedding show in the United States brings together creative small business owners from across the country—fashion and graphic designers, photographers, musicians, planners—to help you avoid a cookie-cutter wedding. (February 2, 10am–4pm)
4 African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce and the Politics of Race (Chicago Cultural Center) An exploration of Chicago’s art and design legacy through a wide range of media—graphic design, illustration, cartooning, sign painting, product design—showcases how African-American designers and artists remade the image of the black consumer and shaped American advertising and consumer culture. (Through March 3)
5 Pancakes and Booze (Reggies Chicago) Underground pop-up art show and shopping experience features local artists, designers, small business owners and all-around creatives while up-and-coming bands and local DJs perform live and hundreds of freshly baked pancakes are flipped into the night. (February 15-16, 8pm-2am)
Greek-born Vasia Rigou is a Chicago-based art critic and pop culture journalist, largely on the subjects of contemporary art, design, and fashion. She moved to Chicago in 2013 to study Arts Journalism at the School of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC,) where she was awarded the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship. She grew up to appreciate art after years of carefully planned, culture-filled travel itineraries and museum-hopping around Europe with her family. During this time, she received a bachelor’s in English Literature, in her native Athens; a master’s in Media, in Nottingham, UK; and studied foreign languages—English, German, and Spanish at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her writing—reviewing museum exhibitions, gallery shows, art fairs, fashion shows, and music festivals among others—has been published nationally and internationally both in print and online. In 2017, she founded and now serves as editor-in-chief of Rainbowed.—an independently published website focused on the visual and performing arts, digital media, and popular culture. When she’s not writing about art or looking at art—wine in hand, she keeps up with Chicago’s creative entrepreneurial and startup community, makes lists for pretty much everything, drinks immense amounts of coffee and takes cross-country road trips every chance she gets.
