CHICAGO, IL.- In conjunction with the Chicago Humanities Festival, Spertus Museum is proud to present an exhibition of New York-based artists and identical twins, Trevor and Ryan Oakes, who invented a method to render, by hand, an accurate camera-obscura style tracing of the world onto a curved surface. Entitled Double Vision, the exhibition includes highly-detailed drawings, made this summer for this project, of Chicago points-of-interest such as the award-winning new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies building, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, and the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, as well as a series of early sculptures about light and vision that led up to the conception of this revolutionary idea. Double Vision will be on display in the entrance vestibule of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, 610 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, from October 29 to November 30, 2008. This exhibition is free and open to the public.

As part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Spertus Museum will host a panel discussion, Seminal Notions: The Idea and Practice of Perspective, Sunday, November 9, from 4 - 5 p.m. Among the most important achievements of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art and technology were the conquest, articulation, and deployment of notions of visual perspective. One of the discovery’s most celebrated recent chroniclers, Columbia University art historian Jonathan Crary will join Ryan and Trevor Oakes, whose work is characterized by an in-depth investigation of light, vision, and the interplay between the visual cortex and the human retina, for a discussion moderated by Chicago Humanities Festival artistic director Lawrence Weschler.

Spertus is pleased to present these programs in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival. This year’s theme “Thinking Big” takes an interdisciplinary look at human works, concepts, ideas, and yearnings of large scope and high ambition. The Seminal Notions panel discussion at Spertus is generously sponsored in part by Carol Rosofsky and Robert Lifton in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Since re-opening in November 2007, Spertus Museum has enthusiastically pursued a new mission — to re-examine Jewish culture in order to celebrate, challenge and advance modern Jewish identity, and in doing so, demonstrate the endlessly powerful and reciprocal effect between Jewish and broader culture. Spertus Museum is based on three floors of the new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies facility at 610 S. Michigan Avenue.