The Block Museum’s collection is a resource for looking closely, asking questions, and thinking with others. In a recorded talk presented with Northwestern’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement, three artworks open new ways to consider Vigil, George Saunders’s novel and the 2026–27 Campus Reading Program selection. The works do not illustrate the book. They bring its questions about truth, responsibility, and compassion into sharper focus.

Kirsten Lopez, The Block’s Curatorial Coordinator for Collections Information and Digital Interpretation, considers Mark Dion’s Chart 35, Anatomy of Global Warming (2021), James Rosenquist’s A Free For All (1976), and Will Barnet’s Between Life and Life (1998). Moving between the artworks and scenes from the novel, she explores how people decide what is true, justify their actions, and imagine the lives they might have lived.

In a closing conversation with Isabella Ko, The Block’s Engagement Coordinator and Educator, Lopez describes how her initial frustration with Vigil became a reason to return to it:

“I could choose to say, ‘Well, I didn’t like it,’ and close the book. Or I could choose to sit with it and really figure out what it was I didn’t like and why.”

Kirsten Lopez

That willingness to stay with a difficult question is central to The Block’s work and to the goals of the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement. Looking at art alongside literature creates room for interpretations to be tested, complicated, and shared. The conversation offers an example of how The Block’s collection can support deeper understanding of a text and of the perspectives we bring to it.

About the Campus Reading Program

Northwestern’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement brings people together to engage across differences through conversation and shared inquiry. Its Campus Reading Program selects a thought-provoking book each year for undergraduate students and the wider campus community. Working with schools and units across Northwestern, the Center organizes events that invite readers to consider the book from different perspectives and practice constructive dialogue.

The 2026–27 selection, Vigil, follows a dying oil company CEO who insists he has nothing to regret, even as visitors from his past and beyond confront him with the consequences of his life. The Block presented this collection talk in partnership with the Campus Reading Program on September 24, 2026.