Smart Reads

Join in the Smart Museum of Art’s new virtual book club, Smart Reads! 

Smart Reads aims to foster care within our community during an unprecedented time of collective social anxiety and separation. Over the next year, we invite you to delve into books surrounding love, art, culture, politics, relationships, and more. Each book selection features a series of small group conversations hosted by Dorian H. Nash, along with guest facilitators. 

FREE. To help build a community of participants, capacity is limited and advanced registration is required. 

Smart Reads is presented by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

Fall 2020 book selection

All About Love

Our first selection, All About Love is by feminist icon bell hooks. We invite you to read along with us and engage in three thought-provoking conversations with host Dorian H. Nash and special guest facilitator, Erika Dudley. 

Register for Smart Reads
 

Schedule
Please register to receive the zoom links for each session.


About the book
The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation, All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

About the facilitator
Erika Dudley is with the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago. A historian, artist, community organizer, and chef, her particular interest is the intersection of humanities, access, and food. Her academic focus (Harvard University) is French History and Italian. 

In addition to serving as President of the Board of Urban Growers Collective, she is a member of the Healthy Chicago 2025 Food Access Work Group, a member of the Chicago Food Policy Council, and a trainer for Dismantling Racism in the Food Systems. She is a board member of the Sunflower Project nonprofit. She also serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the University Medical Center’s Comprehensive Care, Community, and Culture Program. She is a board member of the Chicago Art Department, chair of its Development Committee, and a reviewer of the CORE Residency.

Smart Reads will return in December 2020 with a new book selection—stay tuned!