Thanks to a collaboration between the Elmhurst College Jazz Festival and the Elmhurst Art Museum, the art museum will exhibit a collection of drawings and paintings commemorating the acclaimed collegiate jazz festival as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. For the last half century, the Elmhurst College Jazz Festival has welcomed the industry’s top professional musicians and some of the nation’s best college bands to perform on the Elmhurst College campus.

The performance venue, Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel, is graced with vibrant, large-scale banners of such jazz lumimaries as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie. Another of the Jazz Festival’s distinctive traditions has been to commission an artist each year to design an album/CD cover to commemorate the event. This year, the Elmhurst Art Museum will exhibit a collection of this commemorative artwork, as well as the Festival’s performance banners, which were painted by former Jazz Band vocalist and Elmhurst alumna Bethany Norman’09. The exhibition will be accompanied by a jazz soundscape featuring highlights from the Festival.