Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5
Silent Sustained Reading
A coveted time to simply focus on reading!
Bring your favorite book, snack, or drink, and we will have space to spread out and enjoy reading in the company of others who also love to read. All peoples and ages are welcome.
Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5
Opening Reception for Group Photography Exhibition curated by Mady Cantrell
Additionally featuring a show of Collage Photography of Andi Olsen in celebration of Lance Olsen's book An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies
Lance Olsen’s Book Release & Reading
With the literary mastery of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, award-winning author Lance Olsen presents a lyrical imagining of an artist’s solitary, disembodied life, as dreamlike as it is captivating.
At the end of his life in 1973, Henry Darger’s mind is a series of recollections: of his decades spent working as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals; of his nights writing and making hundreds of collages that would never be seen until after his passing; of the man who was once his lover; of his abuse as a child, at the hands of his father and his boarding school instructors.
Informed by the real writings, collages, and other fragments of Darger’s solitary life, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is a project of meticulous research and masterful telling, diving deep into the imagination of a man who wasn’t interested in attention, even less in fame, and created for no one save himself—and to save himself.
In an intense, chimeric first-person, Lance Olsen captures the radical interiority of an artist about whom extraordinarily little is known. Paired with the photo collages of visual artist Andi Olsen, this is a literary scavenger hunt for fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Lidia Yuknavitch, and José Saramago.
Lance Olsen's Reading and Book Release
An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is about the so-called outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), who for decades spent his days as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals, his nights writing (one of his novels, In the Realms of the Unreal, is 15,145 pages long; all went unpublished) and making over 350 collages (also never seen by another human in his lifetime) depicting the horrific adventures of the hermaphroditic Vivian Girls whose mission was to save a world filled with child slaves, a metaphor for the one which Darger inhabited.
Olsen’s novel, accompanied by discordant images by collagist Andi Olsen, is interested in capturing Darger’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view.
Looking to writers like Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and José Saramago for companionship, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies raises questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than as a business privileging quantity over quality.
Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5
Silent Sustained Reading
A coveted time to simply focus on reading!
Bring your favorite book, snack, or drink, and we will have space to spread out and enjoy reading in the company of others who also love to read. All peoples and ages are welcome.
Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5
Closing Reception for Group Photography Exhibition curated by Mady Cantrell (Copy)
Additionally featuring a show of Collage Photography of Andi Olsen in celebration of Lance Olsen's book An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies
Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5
Collage & Chill
No theme. No agenda. Just collaging.
Supplies are provided, but feel free to bring your own as well!
Suggested donation of $5