We’re celebrating the subversive, the weird, the illusive nature of art and artists with a 9-hour festival. Join us for workshops, performances and exhibitions from around the city, all celebrating the one night of the year where anything goes. Check below for a full schedule of events, workshops, performances and programs.

All Day Events
Artist-run Parking Lot Gallery Artists are taking over our parking lot and turning it into an outdoor gallery! Ten artists, chosen from around the city, will be given a 10-foot storage unit to display their works in a self-contained, self-curated exhibition. Every exhibition will be different, so check out all ten! Special thanks for PODS for the donation of storage units

Flesh and Bone Artists Jeriah Hildwine, Stephanie Burke and Annie Heckman assemble a monster mash of paintings, sculpture and photographs from Chicago artists. Spend the day perusing zombie paintings, sculptures of dismembered body parts, and ghostly images. Melissa Ann Pinney Melissa Ann Pinney has been photographing children in costumes since 1985. In particular, Pinney is interested in the intersection of masquerade and feminine identity. Pinney will showcase this fascination by displaying her photograph Sarah in a Blue Mask, along with several of the masquerade masks she’s collected over the years. You can make your own masks too, by joining in on our Mask Workshop from 1-3pm

Ghosts in the graveyard Stan Chisholm plants his foam, acrylic, and ink tombstones in the Art Center’s front lawn. This 2-D artist is known for lacing his graphic line artworks with quippy one-liners and intriguing quotations.

S***, Shower, and Shave Artist-run Garage Spaces brings their creative antics to the Art Center’s outside pavilion space. This time around, it’s a lesson on engaging the enemy. Artists will show you how to create your own arsenal out of modified shaving cream cans. Then, it’s off to battle. Inside a giant, custom-made inflatable, you are encouraged to deploy your weapon in a giant shaving cream fight to the finish.

Art Thieves Now you see a work of art, now you don’t! Performance artists from Links Hall will be roaming the building all day secretly sneaking off with artworks straight out of the gallery. Keep your eyes peeled as the crafty artisans creep around looking for art to hijack.

Piñatas!! Can you spot the piñatas hanging around the Art Center’s entrance and lobby? Artists Elke Claus and Jenelle Davis create intriguing and deceptive piñatas resembling items we pursue, or items that might be pursuing us.

Scheduled Events
1-2pm Trick or Treat Writing Workshop with the Neighborhood Writing Alliance Delve in to your memories to create original writings focused on food and mischief. The Neighborhood Writing Alliance gives you some tricks for writing mischievous poems, short fiction and narratives. Participants will have the chance to perform their work later in the day.

1-2pm Mrs. Hound performing Live Artists become performers in this concert/installation. Artists Chelsea Culp, Doug Fogelson, Andy Hall, Carron Little and Conrad Freiburg perform in this artist-run band. As the music plays, band members creates their own stage on which to perform out of random materials.

1-3pm Mask Making with Marty Burns Still looking for that one item to bring your costume together? Look no further. Teaching artist Marty Burns shows us how to make some fun, masquerade style masks.

1-4pm Smashing Pumpkins 1 woman. 1 ladder. 30 pumpkins. Artist Meg Duguid puts a cinematic spin on the post-Halloween tradition of smashing pumpkins into little bits. From atop her ladder (which will be atop the Art Center) Meg will drop each pumpkin 10-feet, while 30 cameras placed around the splash zone record the whole thing. The footage will be combined to create a matrix-like documentation of an exploding pumpkin.

1-6pm Crystal Blog Every time we turn around there are more and more developments in technology. People are lining up for the new iPhone, computers are becoming faster and stronger and suddenly everything feels like it is at your fingertips. But what about the information that is beyond this realm? That’s where the Crystal Blog comes in. Created by artist Molly Shea, the Crystal Blog is part performance and part sculptural. The Blog’s glass orb has the ability to contact “the lost souls of the internet”, make subtle predictions and talks with those who have passed over to the Internet’s other side.

2-3pm Kalapriya Dancers performing Bharata Natyam Dancers from Kalapriya Indian Dance Company perform traditional Bharata Natyam dances. This classic form of Indian dance hails from the south of India. The movements combine artistic facial expressions with a feeling of spirituality to create a high sense of drama.

2-3pm Youth Theater Workshop with the Looking Glass Theatre Young Ensemble An interactive workshop lead by members of the Looking Glass Theatre Young Ensemble. Kids will learn theater exercises and storytelling techniques to help them build, re-tell and perform their own scary stories and trickster tales.

2:30-4pm Trick or Treat Performance with the Neighborhood Writing Alliance Participants in the “Trick or Treat Writing Workshop” perform their works. Hear poems, short fictions and narratives, all featuring the them of food and mischief.

3-5pm Hearsay: Tricks and Gifts by Lara Oppenheimer, Trevor Martin and special guests Artist Lara Oppenheimer and Trevor Martin put on their scientist hats as they explore tricks, pranks, and mayhem. Listen in on the biology of mischief while making a little or your own. You can create poems, drawings and stories that tap into your trickster self.

3pm-5pmTeachings to Relieve Your Inner Slug, art-making workshop with Paul Nudd Artist Paul Nudd shows us how to make some monster themed art in this all-ages drop-in workshop. You can make googly globs, hollow out some cut-out heads, do life-sized body portraits, and make your own flies. Yuck!

4pm-6pm Membrane Amorphous shapes inhabit a corner of the Art Center. They continuously shift and change form throughout this endurance performance, performed by artists Jessi Walsh and Aurora Tabar.

4-6pmDraw Yourself as a Superhero If you were a superhero, what kind of superhero will you be? Could you fly? Read minds? Talk to fish? Join First Aid Comics to create your own comic book where you can be whatever you want to be.

4-6pm It’s Alive! Bringing the Story to Life University Theater’s Teaching Lab Collaborations at the University of Chicago present a performance based workshop focused on using props and technique to perform stories of folklore’s greatest tricksters.

6pm Sacred Spaces dance performance by The Moving Architects The Moving Architects perform excerpts from their work “Sacred Spaces” by Artistic Director Erin Carlisle Norton. Sacred Spaces uses bound movements performed with little sense of breath or recuperation, emphasizing a search for connection, unison, and moments of softness.

6:30-8pm Trickster Tales: Workshop for Adults Was there a time you played a wicked trick on someone else, or they on you, and you lived to tell the tale? Share these mischievous stories in a workshop led by professional storyteller and a Chicago Moth story slam winner, Judith Heineman. Can you tell a whopper? Liars’s contest included! Judith will also tell a few classic Wise Fool/Trickster Tales from around the world. Meet Nasruddin, Raven, Anansi, Sr. Mono (Monkey) and more…

7pm Monster Wedding with Erica Gressman Halloween Night. It’s the one time of year the grotesque feel welcome and outcasts take center stage. What better night for a wedding of the damned? A performance-based piece by MFA candidate, Erica Gressman, Monster Wedding is on one hand an eerily entertaining performance of ritual and culture; and on the other a striking comment on the distinction between sacred and profane.

7pm Rosemary Lee presents La société du Spectacle. Rosemary Lee will screen an appropriated version of La société du Spectacle, a 1967 work by French philosopher Guy Debord. Lee will revisit the classic work, reevaluating the efficacy of situationist tendencies.

7pm Noise Art and Mischief Artists from Live Box bring a little racket to the party. Noise Art & Mischieftakes you on a tour of the Art Center’s gallery spaces, and the sounds the artists associate with them. Presenters include: Max Alexander, Ryann Dunn, Jenny Vallier and Joseph Kramer, and Mark Beasley.

7pm Scary Movie Party The Hyde Park Art Center welcomes this annual festival of homemade gore. This is the seventh installment of the movie contest and festival. This year we’ll be screening these no-budget scary movie shorts right here as a pre-Halloween fright fest. Saturday, October 30 1-10pm, FREE