The books on our shelves that we choose to keep are an important part of our identity and our experiences. Why do we keep the books that we do? What kinds of feelings and memories do these books represent?

Hearth + Shelf is sparking conversation around the city by asking Chicagoans to open up their homes to talk about their personal book collections. A local event series, Hearth + Shelf was created by Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange. One evening a month, a host selects a casual theme and a stack of books to share with an intimate audience from the comfort of their living room.

Courtesy of Hearth + Shelf.

On Wednesday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m., join Abby Satinsky for her talk, A Guide for the Perplexed:

Hearth + Shelf, by New Hands.

Abigail Satinsky is the Program Director at threewalls in Chicago and a member of InCUBATE, a research collaborative on arts administration and arts funding. She’s a regular contributor to Bad at Sports and has written for Proximity Magazine, AREA Chicago, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, The Artist-Run Chicago Digest, as well as a forthcoming essay in Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, published by the Smart Museum of Art and the New Press in 2012. She also edited the most recent edition of PHONEBOOK, a directory of artist-run spaces and projects across the United States, published by threewalls.

Theme: A Guide for the Perplexed
Description: Speaking about the relationship between the act of toothbrushing and recent art, Allan Kaprow said that “ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.” Kaprow, Eileen Myles, and John Dewey will be our spirit guides for an evening on the art of living creatively in modern America. We’ll be reading accounts of everyday life at Black Mountain College in the ’40s, Berkely in the ’50s, alternative communities of the ’60s and ’70s, and recent Chicago experiments in socially engaged art as negotiations of utopia in the present-tense. Expect jokes on the meaning of life and feel-good vibes.

Courtesy of Hearth + Shelf.

Upcoming Hearth + Shelf events:

April 25, 2012 Laura Pearson and Dan Koretzky
Dan Koretzky is co-founder and president of Drag City, a Chicago-based record label. Laura Pearson is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in arts and culture journalism.
Theme: TBD

May TBD: Zach Dodson
Zach Dodson’s hybrid typo/graphic novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, came out in 2008 under the nom de plume Zach Plague. He has launched such experiments as Featherproof Books, Bleached Whale Design, and The Show ‘n Tell Show. He is currently working on a sci-fi/historical southwestern adventure romance about bats.
Theme: TBD

Courtesy of Hearth + Shelf.

Past hosts have included Jeremy Tinder, Naomi Vaughan, Julia Kramer, and Martine Syms and Marco Braunschweiler.

If you are interested in attending a Hearth + Shelf event, email info@summerforum.org. To see the list of past selections and hear some readings from the events, check out the Summer Forum blog.

For more information, visit their website.

Emmaline Niendorf is an Integrated Marketing Associate with Otherwise Incorporated.