Meet Angelina Randazzo, a Northwestern University senior studying Radio/Television/Film and earning a certificate in Integrated Marketing Communications. A filmmaker from Metro Detroit, Angelina is interested in how moving-image work, photography, and documentation intersect with contemporary art. As a curatorial intern at The Block Museum of Art, she is exploring those connections within the museum’s collection, with a particular interest in performance, documentation, and memory

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

I’m originally from Metro Detroit and am currently a senior at Northwestern studying Radio/Television/Film with a certificate in Integrated Marketing Communications. Most of my interests revolve around filmmaking, time-based contemporary art, photography, and curation. I’m a filmmaker myself, but I’m also really interested in the ways moving-image work can exist outside of traditional cinema spaces and how film, photography, and other forms of documentation intersect with contemporary art.

For the past two years, I’ve interned at contemporary galleries and art spaces in Chicago and Detroit, experiences that have made me especially interested in working closely with artists and watching their work evolve from an idea into something that eventually meets an audience. At Northwestern, I’ve also become increasingly interested in curation and programming as another form of creative practice, thinking not only about individual works, but about what happens when you put works in conversation with one another.

What drew you to The Block Museum? What are you looking forward to working on?

The Block’s expansive print and photography collection was one of the things that initially drew me to the museum. I’m especially looking forward to potentially conducting research on the black-and-white photographs by the artist team Shunk-Kender and photographer Harry Shunk. I’m fascinated by the idea of art documentation becoming an art form in itself. This feels especially significant with ephemeral and performance-based work, where a photograph can become one of the primary ways a performance continues to exist and reach audiences long after the original moment has passed. That relationship between performance, documentation, and memory is something I’m really interested in exploring. I’m also very drawn to The Block’s avant-garde holdings and excited to discover parts of the collection I haven’t encountered yet!

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

I was particularly inspired by Jimmy DeSana’s photographs at DOCUMENT Gallery this past spring. New York’s No Wave movement and downtown art scene have been a major visual inspiration for my own filmmaking, so getting to spend time with DeSana’s work in person was really exciting. I love the surrealism of his photographs and the ways he uses the body, color, and strange physical entanglements to make familiar spaces feel unfamiliar.

I was also interested in seeing his work alongside Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s, whose use of the studio, mirrors, fragments of bodies, and collaboration with queer communities creates a different but complementary approach to photography. The exhibition made me think a lot about how photographers can construct entire worlds within relatively contained spaces.

Can you share a favorite artwork or object you’ve encountered so far in The Block’s collection?

I’ve been especially interested in discovering The Block’s time-based media collection. I actually didn’t know the museum had one before beginning my internship, so looking through those holdings has been exciting for me given my background in film.

One work I’m really looking forward to spending more time with is Gillian Wearing’s 1995 video Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face I Saw Yesterday Down Walworth Road. I first encountered Wearing’s practice through Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say in an art class at Northwestern, taught by Lane Relyea, and I’ve been captivated by her work ever since. I’m particularly drawn to the way she blurs the line between documentary observation and constructed performance, using seemingly simple encounters to explore identity, self-presentation, and the relationship between private and public life.