Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art is proud to announce the receipt of a $45,000 Arts Project grant from National Endowment for the Arts.  The grant will support the upcoming Winter 2022 exhibition A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture.

The Block’s forthcoming exhibition is among 1,073 projects across America totaling nearly $25 million that were selected during this first round of fiscal year 2021 funding in the Grants for Arts Projects funding category. Currently in the planning stage, this exhibition and its accompanying programs will explore how has art has been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-Black violence, over a hundred-year period of American art history.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support The Block Museum’s work on A Site of Struggle” said Arts Endowment Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “The Block is among the arts organizations across the country that have demonstrated creativity, excellence, and resilience during this very challenging year.”

This significant grant is representative of ongoing recognition and support that The Block Museum has received from the federal arts agency. In recent years National Endowment for the Arts Awards to The Block have included support for the 2020 cinema series Morning Will Come: Modernity in Indian Cinema, the 2019 exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, and the 2017 exhibition William Blake and the Age of Aquarius.

“We are grateful for the NEA’s recognition and support of this important exhibition, and for their continued acknowledgement of our program,” notes Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philips Katz Director. “NEA funds not only make such ambitious projects possible, but stand as an important vote of support for the impact that arts organizations can have within their communities.”