The Block is delighted to welcome Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas as the museum’s 2026–2027 interdisciplinary graduate fellow. Emmanuel is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University whose research examines how cultural production across Mexico and the United States has shaped understandings of national identity, placemaking, and history.
At The Block, he brings this perspective to the exhibition Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas and The Living Room, connecting his interests in images and cultural memory with opportunities for teaching and dialogue.
We took a moment to ask Emmanuel about his background, research, and his work at The Block this year.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and your field of study?
Originally from a small town in Guanajuato, a state in Mexico’s broader agricultural Bajío region, I grew up in the Inland Empire of Southern California. My interests and training have consistently revolved around image-making and visual expression. Indeed, both my BA in Film and Television Production from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and my MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) paired rigorous historical and theoretical study with a sustained research-based artistic practice. Such transdisciplinary education prepared me for professional positions, such as digital media producer, graphic designer, and educator. Now, as the graduate interdisciplinary fellow, I draw on my doctoral training to contribute meaningfully as a curatorial assistant to The Block’s original exhibition Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas.
My dissertation project considers mid-century Mexican cinema of the 1930s–60s, focusing on artists and media moving across painting and film production. Specifically, I look at fiction films that feature representations of artists to ask how they rendered art-making legible to broad audiences. Through this investigation, I demonstrate that art and image-making were discursive formations shaped to highlight Mexico’s modernity and elevate its international standing. In other words, not only were images crucial in shaping the real-life careers of artists, but they also defined Mexico on an unprecedented global scale by negotiating artistic hierarchies.
What areas of research most animate your work, and how do they connect to broader conversations in art history, history, or museum studies?
While my research is grounded in film and media studies, it engages interdisciplinary conversations in visual culture, art history, cultural history, and the history of technology. It examines how images, media, and cultural institutions move across time and travel across borders, shaping personal and political identities in the process. Such dynamic attention to images defines the work that museums carry out on a daily basis.
Echoing these varied disciplines and methodologies, my research treats the politics of images as a central problem of modern life. My objective is not simply to describe what a visual culture like cinema looks like or to outline how it was produced. Rather, it is to contextualize the sociopolitical impact of art and image-making, explaining how visual compositions were made emotionally meaningful to audiences and why their conventions persist across time.
What projects are you focusing on during your fellowship at The Block?
This year, I contribute to The Block’s mission of curricular integration across the university through two projects: the original exhibition Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas and the ongoing Living Room project, which showcases one artwork a month from the museum’s collection.
As curatorial assistant to Pasados Presentes, I support the curators, Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, and Kyle Stephan, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, as they develop the exhibition’s core questions, design, and installation. I help the team plan the exhibition’s public programming and interpretation strategies, including leading bilingual Spanish-English gallery talks. Collaborating closely with The Block’s curatorial and engagement teams, I am stewarding two iterations of The Living Room in the winter and spring that speak to the exhibition’s themes. I will provide extended labels and Collection Spotlight essays and facilitate object teaching lessons.
What aspects of the curatorial process are you most eager to explore during your time here?
During the fellowship, I look forward to delving into the exhibition’s engagement and interpretation phase. I am excited about leading gallery talks and working closely with the artworks for curricular teaching. Each object offers innumerable avenues to discuss the exhibition’s themes, so I am planning and outlining my gallery talks to find cohesive and accessible points of entry.
How do you see this fellowship connecting to your dissertation, future research, or professional goals?
The interdisciplinary nature of the fellowship enables me to keep thinking beyond siloed methods and disciplines. Aside from endowing me with valuable curatorial practice, the experience allows me to develop innovative, transdisciplinary research methods and articulate new perspectives that reinforce my dissertation argument. It also helps me visualize alternative formats to present my research, so that its stakes are more clearly understood by broader audiences. Through this practical experience, I am also witnessing career paths adjacent to academia where I can continue to impact student learning.
What museum exhibitions, curatorial approaches, or scholarly projects (outside The Block) have inspired your thinking recently?
Revolution in the Fictions of the Tropics, on view at the academic museum El Carolino at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Puebla, Mexico, not only engaged me intellectually but also demonstrated how profound philosophical questions can be made poignantly clear through simple artistic gestures.
It is the mid-career retrospective of the multidisciplinary artist and scholar Francisco Guevara. It utilizes both colonial materials and techniques, such as cochineal, featherwork, and metalsmithing, which hold deep significance in the histories of colonization in the Americas, and industrial materials like neon and blacklight as a metaphor for “seeing in the dark” to expose the hidden histories of oppression. This artistic intervention becomes an avenue to explore how fantasies of place have consolidated across time, especially for the tropics as spaces long subjected to colonial cycles of extraction. Inverting these colonial fantasies, the exhibition instead frames “empire” as an equally impossible exotic fantasy that invariably consumes itself in the attempt to colonize and control the world. Deeply theoretical, the work evocatively invites recurring introspection to understand how colonial processes continue today wearing different masks and bearing different names.
Is there anything upcoming at The Block Museum or Northwestern that you are particularly excited about?
As a lifelong learner, I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge of the Spanish colonial period through the extensive suite of public lectures and workshops planned for Pasados Presentes with leading art historians and renowned artists.
