Driehaus Museum and Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association Partner For Murphy Auditorium Concert Series

The Driehaus Museum and Chicago Symphony Orchestra has announced a partnership on a new three-part chamber concert series in the historic Murphy Auditorium (50 East Erie.) Inspiring audiences to discover connections across disciplines, CSO will curate evening-length concerts that reflect the themes of the Driehaus Museum's 2025 exhibitions. The series kicks off with a program in celebration of A Tale of Today: Materialities from 6:30-8:30PM on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, featuring an introduction to the exhibition by its guest curator Dr. Giovanni Aloi. Tickets are $50 and include admission to see A Tale of Today: Materialities during regular museum hours.

The partnership comes on the heels of the restoration and reopening of the Murphy Auditorium as part of the Driehaus Museum campus in 2024. Originally constructed between 1923 and 1926, the recent renovation has transformed the Murphy Auditorium into a world-class performance space.

This concert series is generously sponsored by the Zell Family Foundation.

Driehaus Museum Executive Director Lisa M. Key stated, "With this announcement, we celebrate the union of two Chicago institutions for the benefit of our community. The CSO is ideally suited for the Murphy Auditorium, now an integral part of the Museum's campus, and the Murphy Auditorium's opulent and intimate environment is a special place to showcase the CSO's prodigious talents. By connecting music to our exhibitions, this program series will offer a unique opportunity to broaden our perspectives through the dialogue between music and art."

"This partnership with the Driehaus Museum offers a unique opportunity for the CSO to explore the profound connections between visual art and music,” said Cristina Rocca, Vice President of Artistic Administration. “We've curated programs that resonate with the themes of the Museum's exhibitions. The intimate setting of the Murphy Auditorium provides a space where these dialogues can flourish, offering audiences an immersive and deeply moving artistic experience."

CSO Chamber Music: A Tale of Today: Materialities

Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM

Tickets $50 ($25 student)

In celebration of A Tale of Today: Materialities, musicians from CSO perform Phillip Glass's Quartet Satz, a contemporary and unique string quartet that was composed for the Kronos Quartet. The program continues with Beethoven's Serenade for Flute, Violin, and Viola, and concludes with George Chadwick's String Quartet No. 4 in E Minor. Tickets are available at driehausmuseum.org/programs.

A Tale of Today: Materialities (on view through April 27, 2025) invites living artists to select a material from the Museum, research its history, and produce site-specific installations designed to uncover hidden cultural, historical, and ecological networks, connecting the fabric of the Mansion to distant shores, traditions, and ideologies. Organized by guest curator Giovanni Aloi, this immersive, three-floor exhibition includes new works from artists working in a variety of disciplines including Olivia Block, Rebecca Beachy, Jonas Becker, Beth Lipman, Jefferson Pinder, Laleh Motlagh, Luftwerk, Edra Soto, Bobbi Meyer, Richard Hunt, Ioto, Barbara Cooper, and Ebony G. Patterson. Materialities is presented as part of the Driehaus Museum's contemporary art series, A Tale of Today, in which emerging artists build upon the immersive experience and cultural history of the Gilded Age building to expand our understanding of the world through the art, architecture, design. A Tale of Today: Materialities is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city's artistic heritage and creative communities.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, educator, and maker specializing in the histories of art and politics of aesthetics in representations of nature in art. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and US correspondent for Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion. Aloi is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series ‘Art after Nature', and has authored four books including Why Look at Plants? - The Vegetal World in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019) and the forthcoming Vegetal Entwinements (2023) co-edited with Michael Marder, Estado Vegetal (2023), I'm not an artist: reclaiming creativity in the age of infinite content (2025), Botanical Revolutions (2025), and Lawn (2025). He lectures at museums and universities internationally and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Queen Mary University of London, Goldsmiths, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Sotheby's Institute of Art in London and New York. He received his Ph.D. in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries.

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