Picturing the Modern Metropolis brings together more than 100 prints, photographs, and drawings from The Block’s collection

The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Prints and Photographs from The Block’s Collection, on view September 9 through December 6, 2026. Bringing together more than 100 works focused primarily on the 20th century, the exhibition examines how artists pictured the scale, speed, diversity, and shared public life of the growing American city.

The exhibition includes work by Christo, Robert Cottingham, Allan Freelon, Lawrence Gipe, Martin Lewis, Vivian Maier, Robert Rauschenberg, Clare Romano, Ed Ruscha, Edward Steichen, Andy Warhol, Brett Weston, and W. Eugene Smith, among many others. Reflecting The Block’s deep ties to Chicago, it also features extensive selections by Bronislaw M. Bak and Henry Simon, along with works by Yuichi Idaka, Nathan Lerner, Richard Nickel, Aaron Siskind, and other artists connected to the city’s Institute of Design.

In the 20th century, industry, commerce, migration, and culture contributed to an expansion of urban life in the United States. Artists were drawn to the city as a subject, highlighting aspects of the urban environment from spectacular skylines and lively streets to neon signs and weathered walls.  They also developed new visual languages to express the sensory experience of the metropolis. Oblique viewpoints, fragmentation, abstraction, double exposure, and dramatic effects of light and movement transformed familiar surroundings into sites of experimentation. This experimentation extended to the moving image, represented in the exhibition by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s landmark 1921 film Manhatta, presented in the gallery in a digital restoration made from the only known surviving 35mm print.

“This exhibition offers a chance to see the breadth of The Block’s collection through a subject that artists returned to again and again,” said Corinne Granof, Academic Curator at The Block and co-curator of the exhibition. “Together, these works show how artists found new visual possibilities in the city and helped shape the ways we continue to imagine urban life.”

Organized in three thematic sections, Picturing the Modern Metropolis moves from panoramic skylines and monumental infrastructure to the public life of the street and the visual fragments embedded in the city’s surfaces. Across photography, printmaking, and drawing, artists approached Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh as places of mobility, encounter, and individual expression. For some who came to the United States in response to war, persecution, or political upheaval, the city also represented the possibility of beginning again.

“Many of these artists learned about the city by moving through it and looking closely,” said Eduardo Bello, 2025–26 Block Museum Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow and co-curator of the exhibition. “Their images show modernity taking shape through everyday encounters, educational institutions, and local creative communities. Seen together, the works make the metropolis feel less like a fixed subject than a visual experience continually made and remade.”

Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Prints and Photographs from The Block’s Collection is curated by Eduardo Bello, 2025–26 Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, at The Block Museum of Art. The exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. The Graduate Fellow is generously supported by The Graduate School (TGS), Northwestern University.

EXHIBITION PROGRAMS

Public programs accompanying Picturing the Modern Metropolis include talks, gallery conversations, and a Block Cinema screening exploring the modern city through art, architecture, photography, and film:

• September 30 — Exhibition Keynote: ‘The Modern Metropolis’ & Images of the City. Photography historian Greg Foster-Rice examines the relationship between picture-making and lived urban experience.
• October 9 — Our Changing City: The Obama Presidential Center. Journalist Natalie Y. Moore discusses the newly opened Obama Presidential Center and its impact on Chicago’s architectural and racial landscape in conversation with historian Leslie M. Harris.
• October 22 — Curator’s Talk: Modernity in the Making. Co-curator Eduardo Bello leads an in-gallery conversation about the exhibition.
• November 5 — Curator’s Talk: All the Noise and the Hurry. Co-curator Corinne Granof leads an in-gallery conversation about the exhibition.
• November 5 — Block Cinema: Chicago: First Impressions of a Great American City (1961). Block Cinema presents a newly rediscovered print of Denis Mitchell’s impressionistic BBC documentary portrait of Chicago, in its first screening in 60 years.
• November 11 — Vacant Stares: Adrienne Brown on Rethinking Urban Emptiness. Adrienne Brown, Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, presents her current research on reimagining urban emptiness.

All six programs are free and open to the public; RSVPs are appreciated.

Top Image: Yuichi Idaka (American, 1914–2012), Untitled ca. 1946. Gelatin silver print, 7 5/8 × 9 7/16 in. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of the Bauhaus Chicago Foundation, 2024.21.7. Courtesy of the Estate of Yuichi Idaka.