The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a $10,000 Creative Projects Grant from the Illinois Arts Council to commission four Chicago-area filmmakers to create new 16mm films exploring Lake Michigan. Titled Lake Effects: Shoreline Visions by Chicago Filmmakers, the project will provide artists with funding, film stock, and production services, culminating in […]
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The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a $28,910 Matching Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve two experimental animated films by artist Rowena Pattee Kryder: Metamorphosis (1962) and Passages (1982). Kryder (1935–2014) is a largely overlooked figure in postwar experimental animation. Working outside commercial studios, she created films through […]
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$6,700 grant will support films and conversations exploring Indigenous knowledge, science, and healing during Block Cinema’s 25th anniversary year Block Cinema at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art has been awarded a $6,700 Science on Screen grant for the 2026–27 season. The grant, awarded by the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation with support from the Alfred […]
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Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25 celebrates a milestone with a year of special programs and new initiatives The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of its Block Cinema program with Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25, a year-long series exploring the evolving possibilities of the moving image. […]
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This past winter quarter, Block Cinema invited its undergraduate student workers to take on a new kind of assignment: to respond, in their own voices, to films in the Exhausted America series. The series, inspired by the work of Professor Heather Hendershot, gathered films that hold a mirror to moments of national weariness and disillusionment. […]
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The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents Exhausted America, a Block Cinema film series featuring rare 16mm and 35mm screenings that explore endurance, competition, and disillusionment in American life. The series runs February 19 through March 12, 2026, and includes Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Robert Altman’s […]
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In July 2025, Northwestern’s Rhetoric, Media, and Publics PhD program hosted its seventh Media Aesthetics Summer Institute, a weeklong gathering of graduate students and visiting scholars organized around the theme “Excluded Media.” Convened by Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator of Cinema and Media Arts at The Block Museum, and Dilip Gaonkar, Professor of Rhetoric, Media, […]
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This past year, Block Cinema set out to explore a big question:How can moving images be created in ways that honor and protect the environment? With support from the Earth Rising Foundation’s Sustainable Visions grant and in partnership with Northwestern’s Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group, Block Cinema hosted a three-part series of eco-processing […]
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In August 2025, Block Cinema’s groundbreaking Trans Portraiture series traveled beyond Evanston to Philadelphia, where Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts, presented highlights of the program at the 31st annual Visible Evidence Conference. Visible Evidence, the premier international gathering of scholars and practitioners of documentary and nonfiction media, convened this year […]
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Project highlights Block Cinema’s growing role as a center for media research and discovery at Northwestern University. The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) to support the restoration and preservation of four rare films by independent Kentucky animator Ed Counts (1946–2009). […]
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