Since its January 2022 exhibition, A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, The Block Museum has partnered with Feinberg School of Medicine palliative care physicians Gordon Wood and Joshua Hauser in an interdisciplinary collaboration that foregrounds the use of art in educating medical professionals. Following their June gallery talk, Perspectives on Art, Medicine, […]
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The partnership that yielded The Block Museum and the McCormick School of Engineering’s collaborative Artist-at-Large Program, which brought Dario Robleto to Northwestern from 2018-2023, began seven years ago when McCormick wanted to expose its students to more art. Kyle Delaney, the school’s executive director of strategic initiatives and marketing, and his team invited The Block […]
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How can funding models and grant-writing processes be more equitable and inclusive? At The Block, collaborators Kate Hadley Toftness and Lois Taylor Biggs (Cherokee Nation and White Earth Ojibwe) are challenging traditional approaches to fundraising with practices informed by Indigenous practices of collaboration, reciprocity, and sustained dialogue. In the below essay, originally published on the American […]
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Academic libraries and museums foster many outstanding collaborations supporting teaching, learning, and research within their respective institutions. These collaborations, like other progressive activities, require significant invisible labor, caretaking, and resources that have not always been documented. A new publication from The American Library Association titled Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community: Academic Libraries and Museums in […]
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In early November, the Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs) visited the Shorefront Legacy Center to hear from Founder Dino Robinson Jr. on the role of a community archive. Founded in 2002, Shorefront Legacy Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting, preserving, and educating visitors on Black histories from Chicago’s suburban North Shore communities. Facilitated […]
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How do academic art museums support cross-disciplinary teaching and learning, in and outside of the classroom, and with communities on and off campus? This was the question on the table during a two-day engagement between the Block Museum and students of Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. On Thursday and Friday, September 8 and 9, 2022, […]
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What does climate change actually look and feel like? From forest fires in the American West and desertification in northern China to climate migration in coastal Louisiana and Latin America, the ongoing climate emergency is a global problem that demands radically new, collaborative modes of scholarship and creativity. For the past few years Michael Metzger, the […]
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In the years leading up to the 2019 exhibition Caravans of Gold, Block Museum staff formed relationships with colleagues based at partner institutions in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria. Chief among our collaborators was Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), the federal government agency which manages the collection, documentation, conservation, and presentation of Nigerian […]
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On Saturday, August 13, 2022 the Block Museum celebrated the opening of “A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence” at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery Alabama, where the exhibition will be on view through November 6, 2022. The Block has been honored to work with the Montgomery Museum of Fine […]
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Block Museum Student Associate Mayán Alvarado-Goldberg (Major Neuroscience and Minors Global Health and Native American and Indigenous Studies ’24) shares a personal account of an unexpected partnership this year that lead to an extraordinary alignment of languages, family, and culture. Throughout the fall and spring quarters of 2022, a number of members of the Block […]
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