The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University is thrilled to announce the receipt of a $100,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in support of the upcoming Winter 2022 exhibition A Site of Struggle: American Art Against Anti-Black Violence. This is the second round of support the Warhol Foundation has presented The Block for A Site of Struggle, after a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship awarded to curator Janet Dees made possible formative exhibition research. The project has also been made possible by a lead grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards.
“A Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Warhol Foundation supported the development of A Site of Struggle in its early stages. I am honored that the foundation has recognized this project with an implementation grant that will ensure its fullest realization,” notes Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
A Site of Struggle opens at The Block in January 2022 and will run through July 2022 before traveling to Alabama’s Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. Accompanied by a major publication co-published by Princeton University Press, the exhibition explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100+ year period. The project represents more than three years of curatorial research and development as well as consultation with emerging scholars, museum professionals, and Northwestern faculty and graduate students and leaders across the local community.
A primary focus of The Andy Warhol Foundation’s grant making activity has been to support the creation, presentation, and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature. “We are grateful for the Foundation’s recognition of curator Janet Dee’s groundbreaking scholarship in this area and for enabling us to share this research and vision with a wide audience,” says Lisa Corrin, The Block Museum Ellen Philips Katz Director.
The mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonne projects. To date, the Foundation has given nearly $260 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
“We are very pleased to support the Block Museum’s A Site of Struggle: American Art Against Anti-Black Violence,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “The exhibition provides important historical precedents and context for the work that protests, processes, and memorializes anti-Black violence in the United States today.”
