This winter, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents two exhibitions drawn from recent museum acquisitions of photographic portfolios. The exhibitions Hamdia Traoré’s Des marabouts de Djenné and Muslim Portraiture in Mali and Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years After the Gold King Mine Spill will be on view February 4–June 14, 2026.

Distinct in subject, the exhibitions each explore how contemporary artists utilize the medium of the extended photographic portfolio to tell a comprehensive story. The exhibitions also share a focus on artists who use photography to document and interpret the presentation of their own communities. 

“These portfolios by Traoré and Montoya both demonstrate the intimacy that comes from proximity to people and their stories.” says Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs.  “The photographs draw us in. As viewers, we are invited through them into places and moments that most of us otherwise would not know. These two impactful portfolios speak to how The Block’s collection is growing in its representation of global voices and artistic practices that resonate deeply with conversations across Northwestern.”

Traoré’s Des marabouts de Djenné extends the museum’s ongoing commitment to Africa-based artists and themes, and connects with important campus programs including the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), Religious Studies (RST), the programs of African Studies (PAS) and Middle East and North African Studies (MENA), and the Herskovits Library of African Studies. The series presents portraits of Muslim scholars and teachers, known as marabouts, from Traoré’s hometown of Djenné, a historic center of Islamic learning in Mali. The work also resonates with themes explored in The Block’s 2019 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa.

Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water) contributes to university-wide dialogues around Indigenous studies and environmentalism, including ongoing Block partnerships with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) and the Climate Crisis + Media Arts working group. Her portfolio traces the path of contamination following the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, reflecting on its cultural and ecological aftermath for Diné and other Indigenous communities in the American Southwest. The exhibition also continues conversations that were part of The Block’s 2025 exhibition Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland.

“The Block is honored to be the home for these important portfolios, and we look forward to rich discussion of the artists’ work across Northwestern,” said Lisa Corrin, the Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director of The Block Museum of Art.

“It was important for us to present these portfolio series in their entirety, in close collaboration with the artists themselves. A complete photographic portfolio offers a fuller picture of an artist’s subject and practice. Presenting the works in sequence invites viewers to follow the artist’s thinking across time and place. These photographic series will become lasting resources for students, offering opportunities to study how artists can construct meaning through sustained engagement with their subjects.”

Hamdia Traoré’s “Des marabouts de Djenné” and Muslim Portraiture in Mali

The storied city of Djenné, a center of Islamic learning and scholarship since the twelfth century, is the hometown of Bamako-based photographer Hamdia Traoré (b. 1992, Mali). His series Des marabouts de Djenné (Marabouts of Jenne) comprises thirty portraits of marabouts, whose work sustains the city’s intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Made between 2018 and 2023, Traoré’s portraits capture his subjects onsite within the spaces of their work, seated with the tools of their practice — Qur’ans, writing boards, amulets, and prayer beads. Created amid a period of political and social upheaval in Mali, these images reflect endurance, devotion, and continuity.

“I want viewers to know who these marabouts are — teachers with schools, men of learning and care,” says Traoré. “By photographing them where they work and teach, I am preserving their presence for today and for the future.”

Des marabouts de Djenné marks Traoré’s first solo exhibition in the United States. His work will be shown alongside mid-twentieth-century black-and-white portraits of marabouts by Mamadou Cissé, Abdourahmane Sakaly, Tijani Sitou, and Félix Diallo drawn from the Archive of Malian Photography in collaboration with the artists’ studios. Seen together, these historical and contemporary images evoke representations of faith, identity, and authority in Malian visual culture over time. The exhibition of Hamdia Traoré’s portfolio was developed in collaboration with the artist and Candace M. Keller, Associate Professor, Art History & Visual Culture, Michigan State University and co-founder of the Archive of Malian Photography.  At The Block, the exhibition is supported by the Kadin/Spiegel Family Endowed Fund and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

About Hamdia Traoré

Hamdia Traoré is a documentary photographer based in Bamako, Mali. His photographs have been exhibited both in Mali and abroad. He has worked as a freelancer for the United States Embassy, the British Embassy, and the Consulate of Monaco in Mali, as well as for international NGOs including SPANA, Tree Aid, Sightsavers, DevWorks, Vétérinaire Sans Frontières Belgium, and the Organization for the Prevention of Blindness. He is also affiliated with the photo agency Andolu Images. In 2015, he received the Documentary Award in the Architecture category from the Humanity Photo Awards of the China Folklore Photographic Association. Instagram: @hamdiatraore

Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years After the Gold King Mine Spill

On August 5, 2015, the rupture of the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River, turning its waters as well as that of the San Juan River and its other tributaries, a shocking yellow. In 2016, artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984) embarked on a journey from the historic mining town of Silverton to Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation, tracing the path of the contamination and documenting its ongoing cultural and environmental impacts.

2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the disaster. Through The Block’s exhibition, Montoya is revisiting that journey through photography, sound recordings, water samples, and cartographic data that she compiled between 2016 and 2019. Combining photo documentary and poetic approaches, Montoya’s work reflects on the enduring presence of toxicity across landscapes and the intertwined relationships between people, other-than-human beings, and water.

By centering Indigenous knowledge systems and acts of resilience, Montoya challenges extractive frameworks and invites reflection on environmental justice in the Southwest and beyond.

“Sometimes they appear beautiful, other times haunting,” Montoya explains. “These images highlight the relationships that various communities sustain through water — tó — despite repeated contamination from upstream locales. The Gold King Mine spill makes this visible, even when the harm itself is not.”

This work was previously featured in conjunction with the Spill exhibition shown at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years After the Gold King Mine Spill marks Montoya’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. The exhibitiion was curated by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Marisa Cruz Branco, Terra Foundation Fellow, in collaboration with the artist. It was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Ahéhee’ (thank you) to Janene Yazzie, John Hosteen, and Wade Campbell for Diné language and curatorial guidance.

About Teresa Montoya

Teresa Montoya (Diné) is a photographer, social scientist, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research and creative practice focus on contemporary problems of environmental governance in relation to historical legacies of land dispossession and resource extraction across the Indigenous Southwest. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, Anthropology Now, Cultural Anthropology, Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Ecology and Society, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Visual Anthropology Review, and Water International. She has curatorial experience in various institutions, including the Field Museum where she served as a guest curator for Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. She is the founding member of Diné in Focus, a collective dedicated to Diné photojournalism through a Diné lens. Website: https://teresamontoya.squarespace.com/