In conjunction with this year’s conference, ASA is partnering with Chicago non-profit organizations to provide a variety of local tours and opportunities.
Off-Site Tours
Chicago is a city best understood on foot, on a bus, and in conversation with the people who know it best. ASA President Tanisha Ford and ASA staff have been working with local nonprofits to offer four off-site tours that take you beyond the Palmer House and into the archives, neighborhoods, galleries, and streets where Chicago’s histories have been made, contested, and remembered.
Each tour is led by a local organization or scholar with deep roots in the work. Space is limited, and tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
We’re also partnering with the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago to promote special sessions at their Social Justice Institute in conjunction with the conference. These are free to attend, but space-limited.
About prices: all proceeds go to the host organizations; the ASA keeps none of it. Think of your ticket less as an admission fee than as a small, direct investment in the people doing this work year-round.
Indigenous Chicago Walking Tour & Center for Native Futures
Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 2:00–4:30 p.m. | Tickets: $40 each | Limited to 25 participants
Chicago sits on Native land, and always has. You’d never know it from most tours of the city, which manage to narrate five centuries of downtown history while leaving Indigenous people out of the frame or freezing them in as scenery.
This walk, led by Site Committee member Rose Miron, restores them to the center of the story, standing in front of the same landmarks you’ve walked past a dozen times and telling you what else happened there. The route runs about two miles over roughly ninety minutes. We start at the southeast corner of the DuSable Bridge and finish across the water at the “Defense” relief, a sculpture worth a long, hard look once you know what you’re looking at.
From there we head to the Center for Native Futures, where co-founder Debra Yepa-Pappan will welcome the group, walk us through the current exhibition, and sit down with us to talk through what we saw on the route. CfNF is the only all-Native, artist-led arts nonprofit in Zhegagoynak (the Potawatomi name for this place) and it came together during the pandemic when a group of Native artists decided the city needed a permanent home for their work rather than an occasional guest slot in someone else’s. It’s tucked into the Marquette Building, a nineteenth-century Loop landmark whose own decorative program has some things to answer for. The juxtaposition is not an accident, and the artists have plenty to say about it.
Schedule:
- 2:00–3:30 p.m. — Walking tour, ending at CfNF
- 3:30–4:30 p.m. — Exhibition viewing and group discussion
Getting there: Walk or grab a rideshare to the DuSable Bridge. CfNF is a block from the Palmer House, so the trip back is short.
Accessibility: If you need an accessible route, let ASA staff know ahead of the tour date and we’ll make arrangements.
National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture: Museum, Neighborhood, & Lunch
Friday, October 23, 2026 | 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. | Tickets: $55 each; includes lunch | Limited to 40 participants
Walk west on Division Street and you’ll pass beneath a Puerto Rican flag arcing overhead — forty-five tons of steel bent into something that looks like it’s rippling in the wind. There’s a second one at the far end of the strip. Between them sits Paseo Boricua, and at its western gate, in a rambling brick building that spent its first century as the Humboldt Park stables, is the only free-standing museum in the country devoted year-round to Puerto Rican arts and culture.
NMPRAC got its start in 2000, when Billy Ocasio — a former alderman for the ward, and the museum’s president and CEO since 2014 — joined with neighbors and local arts supporters to claim the derelict receptory and transform it. The renovation took years. The payoff is a courtyard of mosaic work depicting the island, framed by Queen Anne turrets and red tile, that visitors enter through the original carriage arch. In 2012 the museum became the first institution in over two decades to join the City of Chicago’s Museums in the Park.
We’ll get a guided pass through the galleries, then a look behind the scenes at the archives and the Community Archiving Lab, the room where the neighborhood’s own record of itself is being assembled. Then we head outside for a mile on foot through the district to explore how Paseo Boricua came to be, how the flags got built, and what it takes to hold cultural ground in a neighborhood under pressure. We’ll end the tour back at the museum for a delicious catered lunch filled with Puerto Rican delicacies. Come hungry.
Schedule:
- 10:00–11:00 a.m. — Museum tour
- 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. — Community walking tour
- 12:00–1:00 p.m. — Lunch at the museum (included in ticket price)
On the route: the Mozart Paseo Boricua Flag, the NMPRAC Community Archiving Lab, La Casita de Don Pedro, the neighborhood’s murals, the HPH Wellness Center, the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos affordable housing development, Humboldt Park itself, AfriCaribe, La Estancia Housing, Roberto Clemente High School, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, and the restaurant district.
Getting there: Rideshare between the hotel and the museum.
Accessibility: The museum is ADA accessible, and the walking route is fully wheelchair accessible.
Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project Bus Tour
Friday, October 23, 2026 | 2:00–5:00 p.m. | Tickets: $40 each | Limited to 48 participants
In the summer of 1919, thirty-eight people were killed in the worst outbreak of racial violence Chicago has ever seen. It reshaped where people could live, where they could go to school, and who the police protected — and then, remarkably, the city more or less agreed to forget about it. For decades, a single small marker was the whole of its public memory.
CRR19 is changing that, one address at a time. The project takes its cue from Germany’s Stolpersteine — the brass “stumbling stones” set into sidewalks where Holocaust victims once lived — and applies the same logic here: instead of one monument in one park, a marker at each of the thirty-eight places where someone died. Scattered across the city, they’re impossible to visit all at once and impossible to walk past without stopping. The project launched on the riot’s centennial with a straightforward premise: you can’t get to racial justice by going around the past, and the structures built in 1919 are still standing.
Over three hours we’ll travel to roughly ten of these sites, getting off the bus and back on again, with guides who can tell you what happened on each corner and what has and hasn’t changed since.
Schedule: Roughly two hours on the ground at stops, plus an hour of travel between them
Getting there: Pick-up and drop-off are directly in front of the Palmer House.
Accessibility: Please note that the bus is not ADA-compliant and this tour is not fully accessible. If you have questions about whether it will work for you, contact ASA staff before purchasing.
Newberry Library: Building Tour & Archival Collections
Saturday, October 24, 2026 | 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. | Tickets: $25 each | Limited to 50 participants
Spend a Saturday morning inside the Newberry, one of the great independent research libraries in the country — and, for once, not on deadline. We’ll split into two groups of twenty-five and swap halfway through, so everyone gets both halves.
Schedule:
- The collections session (60 minutes): Newberry staff will bring out material from the library’s Indigenous Chicago holdings alongside a “Best of the Newberry” selection. You’ll see them up close, with curators who know their histories. Bring your questions; this is the rare tour where the objects can answer back.
- The building tour (45 minutes), plus 15 minutes in the exhibition gallery and shop: Learn about how the Newberry Library came to be, what it’s up to now, and the many ways you can put it to use. You’ll get your history here, but you’ll also see a working library. Tens of thousands of people come through every year, and the staff are candid about the ongoing effort to keep the collections useful to all of them.
The building itself is the result of an argument. Founded in 1887 and camped in three temporary homes before this one, the Newberry hired architect Henry Ives Cobb, who envisioned a monument to rival the great libraries of Europe. Head librarian William Frederick Poole wanted something plainer that would get books into readers’ hands faster. Neither entirely won. What stands across from Washington Square Park is the compromise — grandeur and utility in an uneasy truce you can still read in the floor plan.
Getting there: A 30-plus minute walk from the hotel, or an easy rideshare or CTA trip.
Accessibility: This event is fully accessible for all participants.
Ticket Purchases
Every dollar goes to the host organizations. The ASA retains no portion of tour ticket revenue. Your purchase goes directly to the groups leading these tours.
Tickets are non-refundable but transferable. If your plans change, you are welcome to pass your ticket along to someone else; however, ASA will not facilitate any transfer or exchange of money. If you transfer your ticket, please instruct the new ticket holder to give the original purchaser’s name to the guide upon arrival at the meeting point.
You’ll receive a simple receipt for your ticket purchase from JHUP, our registration partner. Then, ASA staff will contact you ahead of the Annual Meeting with meeting locations, times, and other details for your tour.
Questions? Email us: asastaff@theasa.net.
Social Justice Institute
The Social Justice Initiative at University of Illinois Chicago is pleased to present the Social Justice Institute, in conjunction with the ASA’s annual conference.
The Social Justice Institute is open to both ASA attendees and the general public. The Institute brings together leading scholars, organizers, artists, and musicians to broaden and deepen our understanding of contemporary justice issues, providing space to share, connect, and advance the intellectual work taking place both on and off campus. Sign up to receive additional information on our Environmental Justice Tour with UIC Freshwater Lab, panel discussions, book signings, film screening and pedagogical workshop with the director, Black Midwest Initiative reception, and more!
Space is limited, so mark your calendars for this unique opportunity and sign up to be notified when registration opens.