Culture calendar: February 2019

At the Wall Street Journal’s inaugural health technology conference, speakers like Anne Wojcicki (CEO and co-founder of 23andMe) and University of California, Berkeley professor and genome-editing pioneer Jennifer A. Doudna, Ph.D., discuss how tech advances and innovations are disrupting the global healthcare industry.

The first-ever Sneaker Con, hosted in a New York comedy club in 2009, drew about 600 sneakerheads. Now, it’s considered one of the premier sneaker events worldwide, with over 19,000 attendees at last year’s New York City event looking to buy, sell, and trade their rare kicks. Sneaker Con travels to various international cities each year—this year, it will be in Vancouver.

Kick off the Year of the Pig in style at Chicago’s grand Symphony Center. The concert hall’s annual Chinese New Year celebration opens with the Hubei Chime Bells National Chinese Orchestra performing with exact replicas of 2,500-year-old metal and stone chime bells followed by vocal artistry and acrobatics by the renowned China National Peking Opera Company.

The newest iteration of the British art fair makes its Hollywood debut this month with a star-studded host committee that includes Serena Williams. The fair, held in a tent on the Paramount studio lot, will feature 70 exhibitors, including contemporary art galleries like Gagosian and Marian Goodman Gallery, alongside a curated program of talks, site-specific projects, and films.

Now in its fifth year, the Winter Stations international design competition will bring temporary public art installations to Toronto’s waterfront. Pieces like “Above the Wall” and “Chairavan” transform ordinary lifeguard stations into thought-provoking explorations on a timely theme: migration.