Originating at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100 + year period. In conjunction with this exhibition, a national group of curators, educators, and scholars convened […]
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Throughout 2020-21 The Block Museum is reflecting on artworks from the collection that explore ideas of excess, consumption, and the environment, and offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the climate crisis. Our project is inspired by The Story of More by Hope Jahren, Northwestern University’s 2021-2022 One Book One Northwestern (OBON) selection. In this online talk, Lois Taylor Biggs, […]
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Artist: Dayanita Singh (Indian, born 1961) Title: Pothi Box Date: 2018 Medium: 30 unbound image cards, teakwood enclosure, and embroidered muslin Dimensions: 7 7/8 x 6 ½ x 1 in Credit line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Lisa Graziose Corrin […]
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Over three nights, Block Cinema organized a series of talks and screenings with three leading video artists and filmmakers. These wide-ranging conversations touched on everything from landscape representation to abstraction, and from environmental segregation to racial violence. I don’t think experimental films in and of themselves are accessible or inaccessible. I think the apparatus around […]
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The NAACP’s 1935 exhibition, “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” and its use in anti-lynching activism represents a critical but often overlooked moment in American art history. In March 2022, The Block Museum hosted a special conversation about this historical exhibition, the intersection of art and activism, and connections to A Site of Struggle and our community today. […]
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Throughout Winter 2022, The Block Museum of Art and The Northwestern University Center for Audiology, Speech, Language, and Learning (NUCASLL) partnered on an innovative clinical study centering on art-based discussion in the treatment of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Working together, the units developed the trial program “Conversations Through Art” as a clinical treatment case-study. The […]
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On February 25, 2022 filmmakers Frédéric Moffet, Joelle Mercedes, and Deborah Stratman joined Block Cinema for a conversation on their short films centered on birds and birdwatching practices. With works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Margaret Tait, Frédéric Moffet, Deborah Stratman, and additional artists, the program explored human-avian relationships from a variety of formal, emotional, and conceptual perspectives. I often […]
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In 1971, ten civil rights activists, including 24-year-old Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, were wrongfully convicted of arson in Wilmington, North Carolina. Through interviews with the parents of the Wilmington 10 (as well as political prisoner Assata Shakur, filmed just before her escape from the Clinton Correctional […]
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The challenging materials on view in A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence can elicit a range of personal responses. Knowing this, the exhibition curators reached out to Chicago-based mindfulness and meditation teacher Joshua Bee Alafia to discuss the project and how they might offer an audio tool in the spirit of care. […]
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“Terra Femme is Stephens’s magnum opus. It is also a meditation on the unresolved matter of women’s relationship to earthly places. What kind of home is earth, family, society? Where does the body go to live and to die? What does it mean to move through the world with this particular body, raced and gendered, […]
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