The Block Museum of Art is pleased to announce several acquisitions over the course of 2023, 2024 and 2025 related to the exhibition Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland. The acquired works include pieces from the four Woven Being collaborating artists —Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent), Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa), Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)—as well as works created specifically for the exhibition by Roy Boney (Cherokee Nation), Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe), and Wanesia Misquadace (Minnesota Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe Fond du Lac Band).

“The works acquired through Woven Being are part of The Block’s commitment to honoring Indigenous voices, histories, and artistic innovation. We are proud to ensure that the themes, relationships, and questions raised by Woven Being will continue to resonate through teaching, learning, and research at Northwestern for generations to come,” says Lisa Corrin, The Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director of The Block. 

The acquisitions were selected by The Block’s curatorial team with an eye toward documenting the exhibition and its central themes within The Block’s permanent collection. They also expand The Block’s collection of work by Indigenous artists and connect to Native communities in the Chicagoland region in important ways. These acquisitions will make possible the continued impact of these artworks on teaching and learning at Northwestern after the exhibition has closed.

In 2024, The Block acquired a selection of photographs from Nora Moore Lloyd’s ongoing series Chicago’s Native American Community: Our Elders Look Back, 1998-2010. This group of 15 black and white and color portraits, taken over the course of 18 years, depicts individuals from different Indigenous communities who relocated to Chicago in the mid-20th century. Lloyd interviewed all the elders who sat for her portraits, and records of their conversations accompany each work. Writing about the project in 1998, Lloyd stated that she intended to use the “traditional method of stories” to share how the Chicago Native community formed its own identity in an urban context while members maintained their own ties to cultural heritage and home communities. “A community’s progress is based on understanding its history, i.e. a reminder of how we arrived at the present by those who brought us here,” Lloyd wrote. “The value of learning about our past from those that helped create it cannot be overstated.”

In 2024, The Block also acquired Andrea Carlson’s painting Perpetual Genre. The work takes up historical accusations of Indigenous cannibalism and savagery, narratives used by colonizers to justify colonial violence and seizure of Indigenous land. Carlson explores how the present-day legacy of these accusations—a kind of “perpetual genre”—continues. Visual motifs reflecting cannibalism and land grabbing are evident throughout the painting. For instance, the rightmost sculpture is a rendering of a statue held in the British Museum’s collection, which depicts a boy biting into a human limb. The sculpture, which has become known as “the cannibal,” originally contained two figures fighting over a game of knucklebones, but the second figure is now missing, leaving the impression that the remaining boy is eating a disembodied limb. With Perpetual Genre, Carlson explores parallels between how cannibalism falsely became associated with the sculpture, just as narratives of cannibalism have been and continue to be leveled against Indigenous people.

ᏕᎭᎾ ᏥᎧᎪ (Come to Chicago) is a new painting created specifically for Woven Being and was acquired by The Block in 2025. The work depicts Boney’s great-aunt Myrtle, who moved to Chicago after the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. This act drew Indigenous people from reservations and into urban areas under the pretext of jobs. However, such promises were often empty; Boney’s great-aunt Myrtle relocated to be a nurse but was only offered work as a candy striper.

Boney’s painting offers a Cherokee perspective on the impacts of federal relocation policies. The artist is an active advocate for Cherokee language revitalization, and he incorporates the Cherokee syllabary into the work, including a passage from a Cherokee story about traveling to far-away places.

Kelly Church’s Looking to the Future—What would you Choose? was also acquired in 2025. The work features one of Church’s signature egg-shaped black-ash baskets, and is made to hold vials of gold flakes and corn seeds, and a flash drive with a photo presentation. Black ash trees in the United States have been devastated by emerald ash borers, an invasive beetle species. Church’s work invokes the impacts of such threats to the natural world and poses a question to the viewer: if given the choice between objects of socially constructed value (represented by the gold flakes), or things with inherent natural value and longevity (such as the corn seeds), what would you choose?

The Block has also acquired three birch bark bitings currently on view in Woven Being: Kelly Church’s Turtle and Dragonflies, Wanesia Misquadace’s Three Turtles and Denise Lajimodiere’s Flower. Birch bark biting, an art form where paper-thin sheets of birch bark are bitten to form designs, is deeply rooted in Anishinaabe tradition and the Great Lakes region. The bitings have become emblematic of Woven Being—they can be seen enlarged on the museum’s exterior, and their wood-grain texture is featured in exhibition graphics and the forthcoming companion publication (available Summer 2025).

Left: Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa, born 1967). Turtle and Dragonflies, 2024. Birch bark. 5 x 6 inches; Wanesia Misquadace (Minnesota Lake Superior Chippew Tribe, Fond du Lac Band). Three Turtles, 2024. Birch bark, 2 ½ x 4 inches; Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe). Flower, 2024. Birch bark, 3 ½ x 6 inches. Right: Birch bark bitings on The Block’s exterior, January 2024.

The Block will also acquire a group of oil pastel drawings by Jason Wesaw, inspired by his time at The Block and the museum’s proximity to Lake Michigan. He similarly explored this relationship to the lake in Water Carries Memory, a new installation featured in Woven Being that brought sand from the shores of Lake Michigan into the galleries.

These acquisitions prompt a broad range of questions and reflections that connect to teaching and research across disciplines at Northwestern. They will ensure Woven Being’s legacy continues in dialogue with the broader collection long after the exhibition has closed.

“One of the goals of Woven Being was to explore and expand the idea of what contemporary Indigenous art can look like,” says Marisa Cruz Branco, Terra Foundation Curatorial Fellow for the exhibition. “These acquisitions span many different mediums, materials, and techniques, capturing a broad range of Indigenous modes of expression. Hopefully, this will provide a legacy of Woven Being that demonstrates the cultural and artistic diversity of Indigenous art as it relates to Zhegagoynak.”