Brendan Fernandes Turns Chicago’s Murphy Auditorium Into a Performance Score
At the Driehaus Museum, a renovated Gilded Age auditorium is no longer simply being preserved. It is being activated. Chicago-based visual and performing artist Brendan Fernandes is using Murphy Auditorium as the setting for In the Round, a nearly year-long exhibition that runs until 14 November and centers on Score for the Murphy Auditorium, a collaborative dance work developed for the space.
The project is Fernandes’s first artist-in-residence presentation at the museum, and it treats the auditorium as an active collaborator rather than a neutral backdrop. Visitors are encouraged to move around the dancers as they shift within, atop, under, and along the perimeter of a 12-sided mirrored bench by AIM Architecture. The choreography unfolds in cycles of gathering and separation, with dancers forming temporary duets, trios, and larger groupings before breaking apart again.
Murphy Auditorium itself carries a dense architectural history. Built by the American College of Surgeons in 1926 on Chicago’s Near North Side, it was acquired by the Driehaus Museum in 2022, entered renovation in 2023, and was designated a Chicago landmark in 2024. Its ornate cast-bronze doors by Tiffany Studios and stained-glass windows by the Willet Company remain part of the building’s visual authority, even as Fernandes introduces a very different kind of movement into the room.
The exhibition also includes textile works Fernandes developed at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and a sound installation by Chicago-based experimental musician Alex Inglizian. The score shifts gradually, moving from low organ tones to quicker piano passages and back again, echoing the dancers’ own patterns of repetition and release.
Fernandes has said he drew inspiration from Judson Dance Theater and the experimental artists and dancers who gathered around it in 1960s New York. That lineage is visible in the work’s openness: the choreography is structured, but not fixed, and members of Chicago’s dance community will continue to perform throughout the run. Scheduled programs include an open rehearsal on 8 May and a new performance on 9 May.
For Lisa M. Key, the museum’s executive director, the exhibition reflects the institution’s broader mission. The project, she said, brings the past forward into the present. In Fernandes’s hands, that idea becomes physical: history is not sealed behind glass, but set in motion through bodies, sound, and a room built to be seen from every angle.
