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 […]
On October 16, 2019, to inaugurate a year of programming around the One Book One Northwestern 2019-2020 selection, Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space, Block Cinema welcomed Chicago-based filmmaker (and Northwestern Film Studies PhD) Yvonne Welbon to present her 2003 documentary Sisters in Cinema. […]
On September 28, 2019 members of Pop Up Youth Radio, a project of Yollocalli Arts Reach, transformed The Block Museum lobby into an on-air studio, broadcasting live from the Pop America 1965-1975 exhibition opening. Wattz Up! is a weekly radio show on WLPN 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio. Broadcast live from Studio Y in Little Village, Chicago on Saturdays from […]
The exhibition Pop America, 1965-1975 on view at The Block Museum of Art from September 21, 2019 to December 8, 2019 is is the first exhibition to unify Latin American and Latinx expressions of Pop and explore how artists working across the hemisphere embraced its bold and colorful imagery, references to mass culture, and representations of everyday […]
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 […]