In 2002, artist Paul Chan was working as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, formed by the Chicago-based activist group Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices for Creative Nonviolence), which was on the ground in Bagdad to protest the imminent Iraqi war. Chan captured the calm before the storm in his “ambient video essay,” […]
In October 2018, the Block Museum hosted a panel discussion with Chicago artists committed to prison reform and to using art as a mechanism for change. In recognition of the 2020-2021 One Book One Northwestern reading selection Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption we are happy to make audio and transcript of this […]
In November 2018 the Block Museum of Art welcomed documentarian PJ Raval for a conversation on his award-winning feature documentary Call Her Ganda. The film following the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina woman killed by an American Marine, and the struggle for justice waged by her family, friends, lawyers, and investigative journalist […]
Each week throughout Spring 2020, a member of The Block’s team has offered selections that resonate with them at this moment. Today, Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts, chooses the platform to draw attention to a single event with relevance to our moment “The images of police violence that have circulated over the last […]
At age 30, Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. A Moon For My Father (2019), an essay film made in collaboration with her partner, the British sculptor Douglas White, positions Akbari’s illness within layers of personal and national history. Rich in texture and astonishingly intimate, Akbari’s film […]
Set in an alternate-reality socialist democratic United States, Lizzie Borden’s speculative fiction Born in Flames (1983) finds the country still plagued by social injustice. This feminist classic is a low-budget, grassroots production, documentary-like in its reflection of a long-gone grungy yet vibrant downtown New York City. Made at the height of the Reagan years, it […]
Consisting of more than 700 artworks, the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at New York University comprises the largest institutional holdings of Iranian, Turkish and Indian modern art in any American university museum. This unparalleled historical resource was amassed by Abby Weed Grey (1902-1983), a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner” from St. Paul, […]
Director Jessie Maple is a true trailblazer: the first African-American woman to join the International Photographers of Motion Picture & Television union, she also established a long-running venue for independent Black filmmakers in her own home. New York Women in Film and Television called Maple’s work “a forerunner of the independent, minority filmmaking that would cultivate directors […]
Throughout its Fall 2019 season Block Cinema screened selected programs from Ism, Ism, Ism, a groundbreaking touring film series that offers the first comprehensive survey of Latin America’s vibrant experimental film history. Organized by filmmakers and curators Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time II: LA/LA initiative, these programs featured […]
On October 10, 2019 Block Cinema joined with Northwestern’s MA in Sound Arts and Industries to welcome Academy-Award-Winning Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom for a discussion of David ‘s Lynch’s 1980 classic The Elephant Man. Although noted for its evocative black and white cinematography and for John Hurt’s sensitive and powerful performance as Merrick, the film’s […]