The Block Museum of Art is excited to introduce Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate. In this role, Llewyn supports the curatorial team by preparing acquisition justifications and managing communications related to the museum’s growing collection. With research interests spanning disability and queer studies, LGBTQ+ photo portraiture, leftist politics, propaganda, and video art, he brings both scholarly insight and a passion for accessibility to his work. We took a moment to sit down with Llewyn and learn more about his path to museum work and the projects that inspire him.

• Can you tell us a bit about your background and your field of study?

I came to The Block Museum from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where I worked in Visitor Experience and as a tour guide. I had previously worked at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, where I researched many contemporary artists to give tours of exhibitions themed around the Green family’s collection. At both institutions, I was really excited to write about and make connections between living artists and their predecessors, especially with the artist’s voice involved in how their work is presented. I have studied primarily modern and contemporary art, and was brought to art history after studying in Vienna, Austria, with the American Studies and photography historian, Steven Hoelscher. In the summer of 2019, I was drawn to working as a researcher and writer by the variety of art museums in Vienna focusing on contemporary artwork, especially the Hundertwasser Haus. The museum’s namesake, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, was an Austrian artist who was notoriously passionate about creating buildings that incorporated nature, with very little architectural background, to the chagrin of his contemporaries. My project in Dr. Hoelscher’s class was to present on his life’s work, including many buildings around the world, and on the museum as a whole, which I really enjoyed and which ultimately led me to change majors from studio art. I am currently pursuing two degrees at the School of the Art Institute: an MA in Arts Administration and Policy and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History.

• How did you find your way to museum work?  

After studying in Vienna, I wanted to get more involved with the museum community in Austin, Texas, where I pursued my undergraduate degree. I worked as an intern at the Blanton Museum of Art, which was on UT Austin’s campus and at that time had a show of Jeffrey Gibson’s artwork, Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day. I loved Gibson’s work, particularly his sculptures decorating punching bags with celebratory pop lyrics that were antithetical to the violence they receive as objects and thus represent for many of us. It was also exciting for me as a young student to be talking to visitors with a wide variety of experiences or lack thereof with artwork about what work drew them in and how they did or did not interact with the space. That influenced me to apply to earn a museum studies certificate at UT, and start reading books on museum work to begin thinking through how I could make the work I was starting in museums both more accessible and with less barriers to entry to the everyday public. Some of that work is very counter to the exclusionary origins of museums as places and to education, and thus ongoing and connected to many facets of day-to-day life.

• What particularly interests you about working within the context of a campus art museum?

After working at the Blanton as an intern, I started volunteering at Landmarks, the largely public sculpture collection at UT. As part of their volunteer Landmarks Preservation Guild, I lightly cleaned and wrote condition reports on Robert Murray’s sculpture Chilkat (1977), which was right next to a biology building I otherwise never visited. It suddenly opened up the whole campus for me in terms of visiting and thinking about Landmarks’ sculptures around Austin, wondering who was taking care of them and noticing small details on their exterior that needed paint or bird poop cleaned off; as well as thinking about what function, if any, this artwork was serving for the students at UT.

While I was earning a museum studies certificate, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and instead of interning, I needed to write research papers related to museum studies. I chose for the first paper to be on art museums during the pandemic, particularly the funding pressures local museums were under and how they chose to operate. I found the lack of access and relative institutional separation between my school and the Blanton difficult as an art historian, but at the same time, I appreciated their focus on attracting various audiences from in and around the greater Austin area. That responsibility to serve multiple publics while caring for living artists and collections drew me to working at a campus art museum.

• What drew you to The Block Museum? How does your work at The Block complement your studies at SAIC and other work within the field?

When I interviewed at The Block Museum, I was impressed by the consistent focus across departments that staff members shared on accessibility, especially in terms of research and general removal of barriers for researchers accessing the collection. In particular, their focus on Alt-Text and adding more resources for students to find objects that may be relevant to their research, such as subject tags, made me want to be part of the curatorial team. Often, when I searched collections, there was no way for me to know if an artwork had connections to gender studies without prior knowledge, for example. There is a lot of exciting work to be done to add to this access for researchers in and outside Northwestern, and I’m also impressed by the level of student involvement The Block has and continues to support!

At SAIC, studying Arts Administration and Policy, I had readings from professors and heard panels from visiting lecturers on how to analyze and benchmark processes internally. I had been a part of many public facing positions at arts organizations previously, and worked with systems of documenting or communicating that could have been improved with a bit of collaboration inside or between departments. Those negative experiences in art organizations have helped me a lot in my role at The Block so far, where I work collaboratively with the curatorial and collections teams to improve how we document and organize information related to acquisitions to the collection.

• How do your academic interests play into your work with The Block’s collection?

In terms of my own research, I am interested in the intersection of art and politics, and there are many, many arguments in favor and opposed to that intersection, many of which focus on measuring political artwork’s effectiveness. I think this deadens or denies some of the best reasons to make political work, including to shock, to comfort, or to teach. At SAIC, I worked with Walls Turned Sideways (WTS), a non-profit gallery serving currently and formerly incarcerated artists and their families. One of WTS’s founders, Sarah Ross, taught us about the work of Margaret Burroughs, an artist and activist who taught incarcerated artists in Illinois. Burroughs’ work is also in The Block’s collection, including her prints In School (1996).

I also study artwork that discourses with representation, the idea that an object can represent an identity or idea; especially as a historian who likes writing about artwork through the lens of queer studies. As a trans person interested in photo history, I particularly love Jess T. Dugan’s work, which I had seen circulating online as a teenager. Their photograph Caprice, 55, Chicago, IL, 2015 is one of the first photographs I studied at The Block, and I was struck by the rare inclusion (via the quote from Caprice accompanying her portrait) of acceptance from family that is portrayed as complicated—including the sitter’s decision to be family for her trans sisters. Those are just three examples of artworks that are tied into my research interests, but The Block Museum is rich with collections of this kind for any study focus.

• What museum exhibitions or programs (outside the Block) have inspired you lately?

Walls Turned Sideways’ recent exhibition We Will Have Our Spring was curated by Northwestern art history graduate student Gabrielle Christiansen, and focused on artwork that brought together prison abolition and restoration of the natural environment, especially in efforts against the pollution caused by prisons that has harmed artists and their surrounding communities. I recently visited the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia University for a talk by the artist Alfredo Jaar, who lectured on the work he had done on the Rwandan genocide in 1994. One of the things he said that has stuck with me is that he waits until he has a research level of what he called “responsible knowledge” before he creates work, which I have held onto when writing about artwork.

• Is there a particular upcoming exhibition or event at The Block or Northwestern that you’re excited for? Why?

This is not an exhibition per se, but I am really excited for the opening of “The Living Room”! It’s exactly the kind of space I would have loved to see when I was an undergraduate at UT Austin: a space for students to sit and study artwork in-depth in a museum environment that is more relaxed and focused on one-to-one encounter. I also love that The Block Museum Student Associates have a hand in planning that space, as I think their research and voice offers a different perspective for NU students to engage with. I helped to research one of the first artworks that will be up in The Living Room, Igshaan Adams’ sculpture Klip Gooi, Stone Throw III (2021), an artwork referencing the history of the Rieldans in South Africa, that has recently joined the collection. And of course, I am especially excited for the free coffee!

• What are your upcoming goals for your role?

I would like to make The Block’s collection more searchable in terms of geographic location, artist demographics, and themes related to the artworks’ subjects. Oftentimes as an art historian or a curator, you have to rely on tangential knowledge to make connections between the artists you think may have subject matter or personal histories that could be put in conversation. For me it is really exciting and part of the discovery process, but for people outside of our discipline, it can make the artwork they are looking for much harder to find. I am hopeful that by adding this information as we add work to the collection, we will make it easier for students, faculty, and other researchers to find work they would like to request access to at The Block.