A People’s Salon: Illinois Humanities’ New Event Series with Jane Beachy

Starting August 28, Illinois Humanities will debut A People’s Salon, a monthly, themed event series that merges performance, current events, and hospitality—presented through the lens of the public humanities.

The project is curated by Jane Beachy, Illinois Humanities’ Senior Director of Public Engagement, a veteran of hosting events that subvert and interrogate the historical, global phenomenon of salons. Not to be confused with beauty parlors, salons are intimate gatherings, typically hosted by women, that serve as artistically expressive incubators of thought and culture. 

Jane previously organized salons in Seattle and New York, but she’s most well-known for Salonathon, a beloved seven-year series that was an iconic “underground, emerging, and genre-defying” staple of Chicago’s arts and culture scene in the 2010s. 

“A similarity between all the salons that I've done before and this [public humanities] series is a burning desire to really feel, know, and understand what is inside of someone else to the extent that they are beautifully, generously willing to offer that forward and share it,” she explained. 

Why is Illinois Humanities the ideal host of this series?

I think drawing on a historical tradition and reinterpreting it is inherently a humanities activity. 

The bringing together of people from our various humanities communities so that they can meet and learn from, and hear from, and understand one another is inherently a public humanities activity.

Tell us a bit about the history of salons.

There's one history people are probably maybe the most familiar with: elite European women gathering bourgeois people in their living rooms. And even that was subversive in a way, because that was actually women finding a way to wield political influence that they otherwise did not have. There are all the examples of Jewish women, like Sara Levy and Fanny Von Arnstein, in Weimar Germany hosting salons. Or Gertrude Stein and Natalie Clifford Barney, lesbian expats, hosting salons in Paris in the 1920s. Or, around the same time, the Harlem Renaissance, A’lelia Walker and Zora Neale Hurston hosting them.

With the really ancient and fascinating and complex history of salon gatherings, going all the way back (at least) to the Arabian Peninsula in the 600s with Sukaynah Bint Al-Husayn hosting in her home and the public square—there's so much to both interrogate and learn from in that history about why this kind of form has continued to show up around the world for thousands of years under radically different circumstances, across cultures and across time.

How does A People’s Salon subvert some of the more “elitist” examples of salons throughout history?

Salons will be as exclusive as you make them, and it is our explicit goal to make this salon as inclusive as we can.

If you think about our discussions about the literary canon—and how that has evolved and at times needed to be completely exploded and pushed against, or reexamined, or decimated and then started over, or questioned whether it even needs to exist—these histories of reframing, of taking a concept that seems to continue to pop up on its own over history, over and over again, but to bring it into the present moment so that it can serve, hopefully, a purpose that is about being more creative, connected, and just—as Illinois Humanities strives to do in our work—it feels really, really aligned.

And so this isn't a series that's meant to just have people sit politely around in the living room and “become society.” But I think that in living rooms, even those of Haymarket House, that is where contemporary society and culture shifts. And that's where the future is made, not just in one room, but in all the rooms like this that are all around the world.

It's all about the invitation, first. That says everything. Who's invited? Because who's invited—in this case: everyone [laughs], but anyone who's connected to the humanities... anyone who participates in one of our programs, anyone who just simply likes to learn and hear from other people. But [collectively,] we [all get to] decide that everyone in that room is important, and we re-emphasize that through hospitality and by who is on the “stage.”