HYDE PARK — The Smart Museum of Art is hosting an Esquire-themed cocktail party Thursday to celebrate the ideas borne out of the Atomic Age, including the museum itself.
Starting at 6 p.m., the museum at 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. will host a free 1960s-inspired cocktail party with live jazz and free drinks — and 1960s cocktail attire is encouraged.
The party will celebrate Esquire magazine with Tom Hayes, son of famed editor Harold Hayes, as the final installment of a series of events by the museum on how Chicago brought about and was shaped by the Atomic Age.
David and Alfred Smart, for whom the Smart Museum is named, founded the magazine in 1933 in Chicago, but it was in the 1960s that the publication rose to prominence by pushing the boundaries of journalistic style and magazine design while tapping into the anxieties of the Cold War.
The party will be followed by a screening of Hayes’ documentary about his father’s leadership of the magazine during the ‘60s, “Smiling Through the Apocalypse.”
There will also be party games inspired by University of Chicago graduate Erving Goffman's seminal sociology book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” which was one of the early academic works to suggest that people put on an act when talking with others and withhold their true self “backstage” in their mind.
The party will mark the end of a nine-month collaboration between the Smart Museum and rogue tour guides Paul Durica and Nick Fraccaro, who have led tours of Hyde Park and the city to explore how the city was instrumental in bringing about the Atomic Age and profoundly changed by it.
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