Our events are always free and open to the public, though some will have suggested donations. All events take place at 555 W. 31st St. unless stated otherwise. Our coworking hours for members are Monday and Tuesday 10 am - 5 pm, Wednesday and Thursday 10 am - 9 pm.
What the Ferment? Vegan Cheese Workshop
From soy, to cashews, to walnuts, to seeds, anything can be cheese! Learn different fermentation techniques to produce all kinds of traditionally dairy based products like yogurt and cheese, but free from any dairy and easily made in your own kitchen. Whether you're already vegan, vegan curious, or skeptical that a vegan alternative can be just as good as dairy, all are welcome to expand their fermentation palate!
Reading Group: Absolute Ethical Life
In our moment when shared ethical languages seem impossible and where associational life is in decline, this reading and discussion group aims to investigate several related questions: What conditions do ethics require? Is it possible to create a shared ethical world that is neither oppressively exclusive nor so capacious as to be meaningless? Is ethics even a useful register through which to discern "a good life" or are they dependent upon other social/material questions? For this session, we'll discuss "Abstract Right" and "Morality" from Hegel's Philosophy of Right. No pressure to do the entire reading, and no need to have attended the previous session in order to join this one!
“Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea” Screening + Tinkering with Junk
Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea is a 3D documentary film about the life and work of artist, marine, and acrobat H.C. (Cliff) Westermann. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, Westermann’s dramatic personal history can be traced through beguiling, surreal artworks he made to process the horrors he witnessed on the front lines. In so doing, he became an inspiration for many young artists. The film reveals ways in which Westermann protected his empathic spirit – and sanity – by ‘sculpting’ his body, artworks, friendships, his hand-hewn house, and his art-filled letters to his dearest friends and family.
From 5:30 to 8 PM, we will tinker with junk to create our own sculptures. BYOJ(unk). At 8 PM, we will screen the film.
Citywide Newsroom
Journalists from all publications are invited to work together at the club all day, whether you’re a member or not. We will have a citywide pitch meeting/discussion at 1 pm.
News Night
Our monthly gathering of newshounds and journalists. Like old pub gatherings where people would go to hear the town crier read the news aloud, a trio of journalists will each explain a story they’ve worked on recently, followed by audience questions, comments and concerns.
Bat Walk in Palmisano Park with the Urban Wildlife Institute
Learn first-hand how the researchers from the Urban Wildlife Institute at Lincoln Park Zoo study bats by participating in a bat walk around Palmisano Park. We will use special equipment to detect and record the bats that are flying around us. You will learn about the species that are present and their ecology, and how we identify recordings to understand more about their habitat needs.
Game Night Social for Labor Organizers
Come vent about your workplace issues and organizing struggles at a fun, informal game night, featuring cards, board games, and chess. Open to anyone interested in labor organizing, from organizing veterans, to workers completely new to organizing, who are curious about improving their workplace. Complaining builds community! Every fourth Friday of the Month.
Municipal Finance Book Club: “In a Bad State”, Intro and Ch. 1-4
A budget war is raging in Chicago, and our press is all over it. But rarely do we confront the deeper questions that underlie the conflict, here and in every other American city: Are we actually broke, and why? Who controls the cash that flows into and out of our cities? Is social democracy, let alone socialism, even possible at the municipal level–or are we destined to forever beg for scraps of state and federal revenue?
The “Spicy Villages of Mice” Present — A Poetry Reading
The queers and the translators get experimental! Join us at the end of June for an evening of new poems from a stacked line-up of Chicago and New York based writers.
Textile Night
Bring your current textile project or one you'd like to start and learn from your fellow textile artists while working communally.
Knitting, weaving, embroidery, crochet, and all other textile projects are welcome as are all skill levels.
Job Night: Bird Migration
Chicago is the most dangerous city for migrating birds. How did we get this title? Where do birds go after they hit our skyscrapers — and who picks them up? What can be done to better protect our feathered friends as they pass through the city? Join us for our third installment of Job Night, where we ask ornithologists and the founder of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors about bird migration.
"Crime Fictions" Book Release with Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
From award-winning sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve comes the first account of mass wrongful conviction in America, indicting a system purposefully designed to ensnare Black youth in order to close cases.
Join Dr. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve in a discussion at Mouse to hear latest book, “Crime Fictions,” a “devastating, systemic account that leaves us to wonder just how many innocent souls have been claimed by the racist lies police tell."
Three Iranian Documentary Classics w. Hamed Yousefi
Join art historian and documentarian Hamed Yousefi for a screening and discussion of three classic Iranian documentaries: The House is Black, Recording the Truth, and The Night it Rained.
Game Night Social for Labor Organizers
Come vent about your workplace issues and organizing struggles at a fun, informal game night, featuring cards, board games, and chess. Open to anyone interested in labor organizing, from organizing veterans, to workers completely new to organizing, who are curious about improving their workplace. Complaining builds community!
News Night
Our monthly gathering of newshounds and journalists. Like old pub gatherings where people would go to hear the town crier read the news aloud, a trio of journalists will each explain a story they’ve worked on recently, followed by audience questions, comments and concerns.
Citywide Newsroom
Journalists from all publications are invited to work together at the club all day, whether you’re a member or not. We will have a citywide pitch meeting/discussion at 1 pm.
Textile Night
Bring your current textile project or one you'd like to start and learn from your fellow textile artists while working communally.
Knitting, weaving, embroidery, crochet, and all other textile projects are welcome as are all skill levels.
Community Dinner
Join your friends at Mouse for a community potluck. Bring a dish, any dish! Fun, good times, and music.
A Night with Miss Translation: Bela Shayevich!
N+1 translation columnist Bela Shayevich (translator of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, among others) is hosting a translation mixer and mini-workshop for translators and the translation-curious. Bilingual participants are invited to bring "Nasty, Brutish, and Short" selections sections of text along with an interlingual translation. Together, we will work on collaboratively solving your most twisted translation problems. Examples of difficult texts may include: slangy dialogue, contorted sentences, rhyming poetry. Come empty-handed and monolingual, or send me your brutish selections by Friday, May 22: misstranslation@nplusonemag.com
Massage Night School #2: Arms and Shoulders
Ever curious about massage as a service, a performance, and a labor between bodies? Join Mouse for a “Massage Nightschool” where a friend of the club will share her experiences of learning from and leading massage workshops in various alternative spaces in Beijing. She will then lead a similar workshop at Mouse, this time focusing on arms and shoulders.
Poetry Reading with Joss Barton, Kay Gabriel and Jo Barchi
The girls are in town! Joss Barton and Kay Gabriel join Chicago's Jo Barchi for a night of hypercunt new poetry and performance.
A History of Chicagoland Mapmaking
Join Donald and Tanya Smith as they present a history of land surveying and map making in Chicago. They are the owners of the Greeley-Howard-Norlin Smith 170 y.o Land Surveying and Map Making Company, established in Chicago in 1854, still owned and established by members of the same family. The presentation will focus on some of the more interesting, and Bridgeport specific projects from the historical archive of their family business.
Municipal Finance Book Club: Excerpts from The Power Broker, Part 2
In this week’s excerpt, we’ll learn more about the inner workings of Robert Moses’ public authorities, whose practically limitless borrowing powers allowed Moses to build public works without having to yield to legislative scrutiny or grassroots pressure. Then, we’ll see how Moses’ insulation from democratic control led him to commit key strategic blunders, ultimately resulting in his downfall at the hands of New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Big Trouble in the Windy City: Problematic Monuments in Chicago’s public art landscape
In Chicago, as in some other cities, the public art landscape has a surprising history of promoting anti-worker, racist, and even fascist ideals as opposed to their counterpoints. This presentation examines the history of some Chicago’s monuments pertaining to these three categories: the Haymarket Police Monument, Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery, and Balbo Monument/Balbo Drive which is dedicated to (Italian) fascism.
Chess Afternoon
Join your friends at Mouse for an afternoon of friendly chess matches, tea, and biscuits. All skill levels are welcome. Sponsored by the Chicago Chess Foundation.
Reading Group: Absolute Ethical Life
What conditions do ethics require? Is it possible to create a shared ethical world that is neither oppressively exclusive nor so capacious as to be meaningless? Is ethics even a useful register through which to discern "a good life" or are they dependent upon other social/material questions? Readings will be decided by participants but will include Hegel, Marx, Lazarus and Macintyre.
News Night
Our monthly gathering of newshounds and journalists to learn from one another. Like old pub gatherings where people would go to hear the town crier read the news aloud, a trio of journalists will each explain a story they’ve worked on recently, followed by audience questions, comments and concerns.
Citywide Newsroom
Journalists from all publications are invited to work together at the club all day, whether you’re a member or not. We will have a citywide pitch meeting/discussion at 1 pm.
Textile Night
Bring your current textile project or one you'd like to start and learn from your fellow textile artists while working communally.
Knitting, weaving, embroidery, crochet, and all other textile projects are welcome as are all skill levels.
“Life Worth Living” Play Reading
Come to a reading of a new play by Elaine Schiff directed by Shea Leavis. A contemporary trauerspiel (mourning play) in the tradition of 17c German Baroque theater. After an ambitious student dies mysteriously, his creative writing professor worries that the death was somehow his fault. The student’s spirit won’t pass on. A psychic landscape reckoning with how sexual violence inheres at the university.
“Li Wen at East Lake” Screening + Letter Writing
momoration returns to Mouse, this time in partnership with the Living Room to explore a series of site-specific art projects based in Wuhan, China. We will first focus on the “East Lake Art Project” (2016), where artists and concerned citizens near the historical East Lake area used various spontaneously organized art installations and activities to protest real estate development. The mockumentary, “Li Wen at East Lake,” both theorizes and documents the tactics of this project. We will make translations of the essays generated from this event available a week prior to the screening to provide a deeper dive.
Job Night: Waste Management
Have you ever wondered how wastewater is cleaned? How food is composted at an industrial scale? How garbage trucks work? For our second job night, Mouse brings together three workers in waste management for an open-ended, audience led conversation into how this essential societal function works.
Municipal Finance Book Club: Excerpts from The Power Broker, Part 1
Join the Municipal Finance Book Club as we approach these questions through excerpts from Robert Caro’s legendary The Power Broker, his biography of Robert Moses, the powerful planner who reshaped the urban fabric of mid-century New York City. In this week’s excerpt, we’ll learn about the financial crisis that the Democratic machine’s corruption caused in New York City before the First World War. Please read the following chapters for Part1: Chapter 18: New York City Before Moses and Chapter 28: The Warp of the Loom.
“Algorithm of the Night” Book Talk: A.S. Hamrah in Person
Join “our age’s most irreplaceable critic”, A.S. Hamrah, for a discussion of his new books Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema.
Massage Nightschool
Li Li completed an intensive, month-long massage training program at a trade school in Beijing in March 2025. In subsequent months, via connections she had amassed in her hippie dippie era, she hosted a series of massage workshops at various artist-run spaces and went on an 8-day massage spree running a massage booth at an underground noise music festival in the city.
Wednesday April 15, 7–9pm, Li Li will lead a massage workshop at Mouse, inviting all to explore the dialogue between one body and another. The main focus area for the evening will be upper and lower backs.
The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid
The documentary The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Ali Mirsepassi & Hamed Yousefi, 2015) explores the life and thought of Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid in his intellectual crusade to halt rising western influence in Iran. The self-proclaimed philosophical spokesperson for the Islamic Republic, Fardid constructed a “mystical” and “spiritual” political philosophy that undertook to deliver Iran from the culturally “debasing” and spiritually “dehumanizing” experience of Iranian modernity.
Chess Afternoon with Girls Who Chess
Tired of playing games with men? Come play women instead. Join us at Chicago's all-women's chess club, Girls Who Chess. Followed by quick & easy mindfulness techniques to reset and refocus. No experience needed. All skill levels welcome, even if you've never played before! This is a space to train your brain, build confidence, and connect, all without judgement.
Soybean Investigations: Midwest Soy in the World
As the nation’s largest grower of soy beans, about 25% of Illinois land is dedicated to growing soy beans. Midwest fields feed pigs in China, cows in Canada, and lambs in Egypt. It is traded in Chicago, and then shipped around the world. Its price and its supply is at the center of ongoing struggles between great powers the world over. Mouse will convene three experts in different areas of the soy trade: an experienced soy farmer, a soy commodities trader, and a scholar of midwestern soy farming in the Brazilian Cerrado.
Halsted Street, USA
Emmy & Peabody award winning, Oscar-nominated filmmaker David E. Simpson joins Mouse for a screening of his 1999 film Halsted Street, USA. This riveting, kaleidoscopic "road movie" traces this unique thoroughfare nearly 400 miles, from its origin in the cornfields of southern Illinois to its terminus in the city's boisterous heart. Along the way the film presents a fascinating and profoundly American cultural mosaic with Halsted Street as the thread that links a multitude of seemingly disparate communities. Narrated by Studs Terkel. Screening + Conversation with filmmaker to follow.
Textile Night
Bring your current textile project or one you'd like to start and learn from your fellow textile artists while working communally. Knitting, weaving, embroidery, crochet, and all other textile projects are welcome as are all skill levels.