In the four years before the Roe v. Wade ruling made abortion legal in the United States, a clandestine organization of Chicago women offered low-cost, safe and confidential services to over 11,000 women—the Jane Collective. The film “Jane: An Abortion Service” offers an invaluable oral history, through the words of women who founded, operated, and […]
Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Olio (2016), presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, work songs, and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes […]
In conjunction with the Block Museum of Art’s Up is Down: Mid-Century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio, an exhibition exploring the groundbreaking Chicago design firm that brought Bauhaus aesthetics to the American public through innovative explorations with light and film, curators Amy Beste and Corinne Granof sat down for conversation with artist […]
Since the 1960s, experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky has been making a distinctive and stunning body of work. His silent 16mm films are lyrical explorations of the world around him, focused on the textures, colors, and rhythms of everyday objects and movements. His sharp eye for details reveals the small moments of beauty and wonder to […]
Local filmmaker and Northwestern professor Kyle Henry’s Rogers Park captures the life, diversity, and flavor of the northside Chicago neighborhood in its story of two couples as they attempt to keep their relationships afloat. Henry and screenwriter Carlos Treviño craft a film that is both universal in its characters’ raw and authentic emotional lives and […]
Telling stories in a digital environment — for desktop/laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones — requires storytellers to gather information differently and to offer users access to how and where those stories are consumed. In Spring 2018, Northwestern students in the Medill School of Journalism turned their storytelling lens on the Block Museum of Art exhibition […]
How do representations of women of color serve to “brand” TV networks and film studios? In May, 2018 Professors Aymar Jean Christian and Miriam Petty screened clips of recent critically acclaimed shows like Insecure and Queen Sugar and discussed how they fit into strategies of major media brands. The conversation was presented by the […]
The Middle East and North African Studies Program and Block Museum of Art joined together in May 2018 to present three days of series of screenings and discussions with one of Iran’s leading filmmakers, Bahman Ghobadi. The series, titled Life on the Border: The Cinema of Bahman Ghobadi, was made possible by Tamilla Ghodsi (WCAS ‘91) […]
Visitors to the Block Museum exhibition “Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt” have been transported not only by the ancient objects on display but also by an ambient exhibition audio track that heightens the meditative experience in the gallery. The exhibition audio is the result of the course “Museum Sound Design” taught by Stephan […]
The Block Museum was thrilled to serve as one of many partners for the 2017 Northwestern University Black Arts Initiative conference “Black Arts International: Temporalities and Territories (October 9-13). This week-long event focused on art and scholarship of the black diaspora around the world. Conference presenters considered notions of time, space, and place and the ways in […]