November 2026 Issue: Film 50 (Print Edition)

Film 50 2026

Chicago's screen gems

This has gotta be Chicago's year, right? Isn't every year difficult and daunting? Yes, but not like this one. Vital insights about transformation and perseverance elevated our exchanges with the members of the 2026 Film 50, the eleventh edition of the list, and we've got the history of our Hall of Fame members standing tall behind them. With the hundreds of film workers we look toward—in professions not limited to production, exhibition, projection, criticism—we see industries that bloom from the elastic imagination of the players. We were looking for reinvention, intelligence, versatility, and yes, urgency, and the folks you are about to meet display all these traits. (Ray Pride)

CAPE Crusader

How Rashid Johnson's origin story in Chicago made him an art superhero

At first glance, Rashid Johnson’s artistic output appears anathema to institutional success. His complete lack of fealty to one medium—photography, painting and sculpture all figure heavily in his practice—makes a retrospective approximation of his oeuvre unwieldy at best. Then there’s his irreverence: how can you curate Johnson’s work without letting its bathetic, self-mocking vernacular render the whole enterprise ridiculous? Johnson’s status as an artist of color making work about race doesn’t help his case given our present political environment, replete with federal power brokers hellbent on relegating identity to secondary status within the arts. (Johnson isn’t exactly the timid diarist with his explorations of racial identity: one of his first major solo shows bore the caustic title “Stay Black and Die.”) When Johnson’s work bedazzled the Guggenheim’s ramp in a career-wide retrospective last April, then, it felt like nothing short of a miracle. (Charles Venkatesh Young)

Off the Road

The artists Bob Waldmire and Elijah Miller might be a generation apart, but Route 66 connects them

Perched in a section of the comprehensive Bob Waldmire exhibit at the Pharmacy Gallery and Art Space in downtown Springfield, Illinois, is a watercolor the late artist and cartographer did of “The Amputee.” Bob spotted this one-legged grackle in September 2008 at sundown in a Flying J parking lot on Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman, Arizona. (Dave Hoekstra)

Blind No More

Jeffrey A. Winters has a read on how oligarchs rule through democracy

In his new book, “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy,” Winters argues that the current gulf between oligarchs and average citizens is larger than any gap that existed during European feudalism or imperial Rome. He writes that Americans have a “blind spot” about the power of the oligarchy, though the deck has been stacked in favor of the wealthy since the nation’s founding. The oligarchy has become more extreme and “in your face” in recent years, with tycoons like Elon Musk flaunting their wealth and giving millions to candidates who will further cut their taxes and oppress the poor. (Mary Wisniewski)

Arts & Culture

Art: Detroit’s MOCAD at twenty

Dance: Compagnie Hervé Koubi and their “Sol Invictus”

Design: Stereo Furniture's livable, collectible furniture

Film: The four senses of Chicago cinephiles

Lit: Chicago’s indie bookstore renaissance

Music: Andrew Bird is hiding in plain sight

Stage: Seojung Jang's lighting design travels from Seoul to Chicago

Reviews

We're at peak season. Are you?

Poetry

"Wake": A new poem by Eamon Dunn