Nuclear Reactions

Lectures, tours, exhibitions, and events observing the 75th anniversary of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Chicago Pile-1, and the concurrent 50th anniversary of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture.

Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy on the original site of the Chicago Pile-1 experiment. Photo by Tom Rossiter.

1942: A Historic Breakthrough, an Uncertain Future

Seventy-five years ago, University of Chicago scientists led by Enrico Fermi ushered in the Atomic Age by achieving the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Commemorating the Anniversary with the Arts

Recognizing the historical significance of this development, the University organized a series of public events beginning in Fall 2017 to commemorate and discuss the complex legacy of what transpired on December 2, 1942. UChicago Arts—in partnership with the Department of Art History, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Music, Committee on Creative Writing, Department of Visual Arts, Arts, Science & Culture, and the Gray Center—presented Arts and the Nuclear Age, a series of lectures that culminated in an afternoon and evening of performances and talks on December 2, 2017. Programs interacted with several installations responding to Fermi’s experiment, as well as with Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, which reached the 50th anniversary of its unveiling at the exact 75th anniversary of the experiment.

For more about the commemoration, visit nuclearreactions.uchicago.edu.

Public art

Throughout Fall 2017, UChicago Arts and the University’s Public Art Committee, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, present a series of temporary installations on campus that explore the complex legacy of the Chicago Pile-1 experiment, including Nuclear Energy, Henry Moore’s sculpture that was created to mark the experiment’s 25th anniversary.

Nuclear Thresholds
September 18, 2017–January 7, 2018
Outdoors at the Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave
In-progress artist talk at the site on September 16, 2pm

As part of the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 (the site of the first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction), UChicago Arts and California-based firm Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects (OPA) present a temporary architectural installation at the location of the original pile, marked for the last fifty years by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture. Based on computational modeling of unstable processes, the installation creates a material threshold around Nuclear Energy that resonates at radically different scales. It invites visitors to interact physically with the shape and patterns of criticality that drove the experiment, provoking deep questions about the scientific, historical, and existential thresholds CP-1 crossed. Installation opens during the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Presented by UChicago Arts. Nuclear Thresholds is made possible by the University’s Public Art Committee.

Lantern Pile
November 15–December 15, 2017
Eckhardt Research Center lobby, 5640 S Ellis Ave

UChicago Arts presents an installation that provided an intimate space to view video documenting both the creation of Chicago Pile-1 and the subsequent history of the nuclear era. Lantern Pile takes its roughly cubic form from the original pile, in which heavy wooden beams supported a dense structure of graphite bricks that made the inducement of sustained nuclear fission possible. In contrast, this installation is an empty cube constructed of white paper and bamboo poles, lifted several inches above the lobby floor. Visitors can enter the Lantern Pile to view four different channels of video documentation, much of it newly discovered. The installation’s form and materials echo that of a Japanese paper lantern, and the video projected inside is visible outside like a candle in a lantern, providing space for personal reflection on Fermi’s achievement and the ramifications of living in a nuclear age.

Presented by UChicago Arts. Curated by Laura Steward.

A performance by Cai Guo-Qiang
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 3:20pm
Outdoors by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave

After a solemn recital of 75 gongs of the Rockefeller Chapel carillon, renowned artist Cai Guo-Qiang will perform a multicolored, large-scale pyrotechnic artwork, opening a poetic portal to that moment 75 years ago. Cai was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007.

Presented by UChicago Arts and supported by the University’s Public Art Committee.

Related events

Throughout Fall 2017, the arts organizations and departments at the University of Chicago presented lectures, performances, installations, and screenings to mark the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile-1 experiment and its complex legacy.

Arts and the Nuclear Age Lecture Series

Lectures

Serge Guilbaut
Thursday, September 28, 2017, 5pm
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157, 5540 S Greenwood Ave

Serge Guilbaut is a leading Marxist art historian of postwar art in the United States and Europe. He is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Guilbaut’s book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983, remains one of the most important and canonical texts on 20th century art. On the emerging cold war front in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Guilbaut argued, the postwar American abstract painting of artists such as Jackson Pollock was strategically coopted by US government agencies and museums, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to propagate a capitalist ideology of freedom in Western Europe. As a result, the center of the art world shifted, for the very first time in history, to the United States. Guilbaut’s 2008 catalogue and anthology Be-Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946-1956 expanded on that early book and accompanied an exhibition at the Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. In retrospect, Guilbaut’s transatlantically oriented scholarship has become an important pre-history to the rise of the contemporary global art world.

Presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2017/18 Smart lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Susan Courtney
Thursday, October 19, 2017, 4pm
Logan Center Screening Room 201, 915 E 60th St

Susan Courtney is a Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. Her work investigates historical relationships between popular conceptions of identity (especially race, gender, region, and nation) and pervasive forms of moving image culture, ranging from cinema to television to contemporary media. Along with a wide range of articles, she is author of Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (2005) and, most recently, of Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South (2017), a book which uses a range of moving image material to explore questions of race and region in light of the post-war context of the cold war, the atomic age, and the civil rights movement. A central concern of the book is the emergence of the idea of the “atomic age,” as it brings together not just feature films but also educational films, test footage, and related home movies of the era.

Presented by the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Takako Arai and Jeffrey Angles
Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 5pm lecture | 6:30pm reading
Logan Center, Room 801, 915 E 60th St

Arai Takako was born in 1966 in Kiryū City, Gunma Prefecture to a family engaged in textile manufacturing, a traditional industry in Kiryū. Arai is known for writing socially engaged poetry. A frequent theme of her work is the lives of working women and the ways that they have been shaped by contemporary trends, especially the push toward globalization, the recent economic downturn, and the 2011 earthquake-related crises in northeastern Japan. Jeffrey Angles is a professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets, including Arai Takako. He also writes poetry, mostly in Japanese.

Presented by the Program in Poetry & Poetics, and supported by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Jessica Hurley
Thursday, November 2, 2017, 4:30pm
Rosenwald Hall, Rm 405, 1101 E 58th St

Jessica Hurley works on twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures, with a particular focus on how narrative forms organize our literary, social, and infrastructural worlds. Her book manuscript, Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, argues that existing accounts of the nuclear as a sublime paradox or a future threat occlude its very tangible operations in the present, as budgets, laws, environments, and other quotidian infrastructures are formed and deformed by the state’s commitment to nuclear technology.

Presented by the Department of English and the Society of Fellows. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Phil Ford
Friday, November 17, 2017, 3:30pm
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 1010 E 59th St

Phil Ford is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His published work has focused on postwar American popular music (especially jazz and film music), American cold war culture, radical and counter–cultural intellectual history, and sound and performance. He is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), a cultural and intellectual history of hipness in American life from the 1940s through the 1960s situated in the context of American intellectual engagement with the Cold War. He is also the co-author (with Jonathan Bellman) of the musicology blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, which he founded in 2006 and maintains to this day. His current interests revolve around music and philosophy and, more particularly, on magical and occult styles of thought; at present, he is working on a book on this topic.

Presented by the Department of Music. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Simon Starling
Thursday, November 30, 2017, 7pm
Logan Center Screening Room 201, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St

A screening and talk by British visual artist Simon Starling as part of the University–wide CP–1 commemoration. Since emerging from the Glasgow art scene in the early 1990s, Simon Starling has established himself as one of the leading artists of his generation, working in a wide variety of media (film, installation, photography) to interrogate the histories of art and design, scientific discoveries, and global economic and ecological issues, among other subjects. The recipient of the 2005 Turner Prize, Starling has had major exhibitions in Kunsthallen and museums throughout the world, and his work can be found in the collections of some of the world’s leading art institutions. Starling will screen two of his recent films, Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010), which documents a complex multi-media installation on the early days of nuclear energy development and the monument designed by Henry Moore commemorating its discovery, and At Twilight, which takes as its inspiration W.B. Yeat’s 1916 play At the Hawk’s Well.

Presented by the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative, the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Department of Visual Arts, the Film Studies Center, and the Logan Center for the Arts. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Cai Guo-Qiang
Friday, December 1, 2017, 12pm
Joseph Regenstein Library, Rm 122

Artis Cai Guo-Qiang in conversation with Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College; Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia; and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art. Born in Quanzhou near the Taiwan Strait in 1957, Cai began painting with gunpowder in 1986, a material whose destructive and creative potential makes it a perfect analog for nuclear fission. His artistic experimentation with the form of the mushroom cloud grew out of this work, and he began making small mushroom clouds from a hand-held mortar at meaningful locations, including the Nevada Test Site and the Statue of Liberty. Cai’s mushroom clouds take nuclear energy’s most destructive form and animate it with sublime visual pleasure, demanding we confront the duality of the power unlocked in 1942.

Presented by UChicago Arts. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Arts and the Nuclear Age: 1942 | 1967 | 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 4:15-6:15pm | Reception immediately following
Reynolds Club, McCormick Tribune Lounge, 5706 S University Ave

The culminating lectures for the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile-1 experiment and the concurrent 50th anniversary of the unveiling of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture. Features talks by eminent Moore scholar (and former Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate) Anne Wagner, architect Ludovico Centis, and principals Luke Ogrydziak and Zoe Prillinger from California-based firm Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects (the design team behind Nuclear Thresholds, the temporary architectural installation on the CP-1 site). For more information on the December 2 events, click the “December 2, 2017” title to expand the schedule.

Presented by UChicago Arts and the Department of Art History. “Arts and the Nuclear Age: 1942 | 1967 | 2017” is made possible by the Division of the Humanities, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago.

Reactions: New Perspectives on Our Nuclear Legacy

December 1, 2017

For a full schedule of events sponsored by the sciences on December 1, please visit nuclearreactions.uchicago.edu.

Cai Guo-Qiang
Friday, December 1, 2017, 12pm
Joseph Regenstein Library, Rm 122

Artist Cai Guo-Qiang in conversation with Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College; Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia; and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art. Born in Quanzhou near the Taiwan Strait in 1957, Cai began painting with gunpowder in 1986, a material whose destructive and creative potential makes it a perfect analog for nuclear fission. His artistic experimentation with the form of the mushroom cloud grew out of this work, and he began making small mushroom clouds from a hand-held mortar at meaningful locations, including the Nevada Test Site and the Statue of Liberty. Cai’s mushroom clouds take nuclear energy’s most destructive form and animate it with sublime visual pleasure, demanding we confront the duality of the power unlocked in 1942.

Presented by UChicago Arts. The “Arts and the Nuclear Age” lecture series is supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

World Premiere of “Plea for Peace” (2017) by Augusta Read Thomas
Friday, December 1, 2017, 4:15pm
Mandel Hall, 1131 E 57th St

A vocalise for soprano and string quartet, commissioned by the University of Chicago for the Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Chicago Pile-1. First performance by Jessica Aszodi, Soprano, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra Musicians: Yuan-Qing Yu and Ni Mei, Violins; WeiJing Wang, Viola; and Ken Olsen, Cello. For more information, please visit augustareadthomas.com.

December 2, 2017

From 2:30–9:30pm on the 75th anniversary, UChicago Arts and partners across campus will present artistic responses to the CP-1 experiment. Visitors are encouraged to attend the full range of events, but most of them can also be experienced individually.

“Meditation on CP-1”
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 2:30pm
Eckhardt Research Center lobby, 5640 S Ellis Ave

Movement and music piece developed by dancer and choreographer Emily Coates (Yale), physicist Young-Kee Kim (UChicago), and composer Sam Pluta (UChicago).

This work is made possible by the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry and the Physical Sciences Division.

Welcome remarks by Bill Brown, Senior Advisor to the Provost for Arts
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 2:50pm
Outdoors by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave

Remarks by Cai Guo-Qiang, artist
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 3:00pm
Outdoors by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave

A performance by Cai Guo-Qiang
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 3:20pm
Outdoors by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave

Presented by UChicago Arts and supported by the University’s Public Art Committee.

“The Curve is Exponential”
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 3:25pm
Music can be enjoyed outdoors by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, ~5625 S Ellis Ave, or at Rockefeller Chapel

A new score for carillon + electronics composed by PhD candidate Ted Moore and premiered by University Carilloneur Joey Brink. This piece is written in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the first human-controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The structure of the piece roughly follows the events in the days surrounding the experiment at the University of Chicago in 1942. The audio recording that accompanies the carillon projects sonic gestures, soundscapes, and noises onto the surrounding area creating a multidimensional network, along with the carillon, of sonic agents and motives. The final section of the work reflects on the scientists’ consideration of the gravity of their discovery–not only how it would affect the war, but how it would affect all of humankind for the rest of time. The work can be experienced at Rockefeller Chapel or by Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture, which was unveiled on December 2, 1967, the 25th anniversary of the experiment.

Listen to the recording of the premiere

Presented by UChicago Arts and Rockefeller Chapel.

Arts and the Nuclear Age: 1942 | 1967 | 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 4:15-6:15pm | Reception immediately following
Reynolds Club, McCormick Tribune Lounge, 5706 S University Ave

The culminating lectures for the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile-1 experiment and the concurrent 50th anniversary of the unveiling Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy sculpture. Features talks by eminent Moore scholar (and former Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate) Anne Wagner, architect Ludovico Centis, and principals Luke Ogrydziak and Zoe Prillinger from California-based firm Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects (the design team behind Nuclear Thresholds, the temporary architectural installation on the CP-1 site). For more information on this lecture series, click the “Lectures” section above to expand the list of talks.

Presented by UChicago Arts and the Department of Art History. “Arts and the Nuclear Age: 1942 | 1967 | 2017″ is made possible by the Division of the Humanities, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago.

Alumni & Student Music Composers: Chicago Pile-1 Commemoration Commissions
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 7:00pm
Reynolds Club, McCormick Tribune Lounge, 5706 S University Ave

The Arts, Science & Culture Initiative, working in partnership with the Department of Music and colleagues in the sciences, has commissioned three works by alumni and current student composers to be performed as part of the 75th anniversary. Composers: Amelia Kaplan, PhD (Associate Professor of Composition and Director of the New Music Ensemble at Ball State University, Indiana); Clifton Callender, PhD (Professor of Composition and Artistic Director of the New Music Ensemble at Florida State University); Kevin Kay, MA 2018 (independent composer; Kay’s music has been performed at the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Charlotte New Music Festival, and more).

Presented by the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative and UChicagoGRAD.

University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Echoes of History
Saturday, December 2, 2017, 8:00pm
Mandel Hall, 1131 E 57th St
Admission: Free; Donations requested: $10 general, $5 students/children

Three powerful and poignant musical reflections on historical turning points of the last 100 years: Eric Ewazen’s A Hymn for the Lost and the Living, written after 9/11; Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima; and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 in D minor, “The Year of 1917”. Jennifer Iverson, Assistant Professor and scholar of twentieth-century music, with a special emphasis on electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies, will provide commentary on the Penderecki work.

Presented by the Performance Programs in Music. Conducted by Barbara Schubert.

Helpful Information for Planning Your Visit

Ellis Avenue between 56th and 57th streets will be temporarily closed on Sat, Dec 2, between 2–4pm.
Parking will be restricted from 7am to 4pm.