Curious Theater Branch, a performance group co-founded by InterArts faculty member Jenny Magnus, gets a special mention in a Chicago Tribune article defending an eight-hour experimental performance by Billy Corgan (famously known as a member of the musical group Smashing Pumpkins).

Mark Guarino, the author of the March 28 article In defense of Billy Corgan’s ‘Siddhartha,’ points out that the criticism Corgan received in the press was not indicative of the depth of Chicago’s experimental art scene, as he explains: “especially because I’m familiar with the rich tradition of artistic outsiders that Chicago has attracted and groomed. These have included the burgeoning group of young writers — including Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg — who established a colony in the building ruins of the 1893 Columbian Exposition starting in 1910; the freethinkers who coalesced around the Dill Pickle Club for decades; the folk music radicals who established the Old Town School of Folk Music in 1957; the Chicago Imagists, who emerged from the School of the Art Institute in the 1960s; the free jazz musicians who founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1965; the avant-garde theater makers of the Curious Theatre Branch and Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.; and the countless left-field writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, photographers, musicians and artists who have created difficult, confrontational and ultimately acclaimed work far below the scope of the major media gatekeepers.”

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