“Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa,” co-published by The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University and Princeton University Press, has been short-listed for the prestigious Alice Award in publishing. The book, released in January 2019, is the companion publication to the exhibition of the same name. […]
On January 26, 2019 The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University celebrated the opening of the exhibition “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time.”Caravans of Gold is the first major exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to […]
On April 24, 2019, a panel of six international archaeologists gathered at The Block Museum of Art to discuss their research and contributions to the field of archaeology. This unique event offered an insider’s perspective on the scholars recent findings in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria. Titled “From the Field: International Archaeologists in Conversation” the event […]
Sarah Guérin (Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania) and Christina Normore (Department of Art History, Northwestern University) organized a study day of the exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa at The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. On May 13, 2019, a […]
Kathleen Bickford Berzock, The Block’s associate director of curatorial affairs, recently presented on the Block exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time to an international audience at the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Her talk, “A World in a Fragment: Visualizing Trans-Saharan Exchange through Object-Based Comparisons […]
Artist Dario Robleto returned to Evanston this spring to continue his ongoing collaboration as Northwestern’s inaugural Artist-at-Large, hosted by the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and The Block Museum of Art. The Artist-at-Large Program brings contemporary artists to campus for in-depth exchanges with faculty and students; the Program joins other activities organized by […]
Block Museum hosts archaeologists working in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria, including panel & symposium The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University will host a week-long gathering of six archaeologists from Mali, Morocco, the U.K. and the U.S., working at the cutting-edge of research on medieval Africa. The unprecedented gathering April 22 to 26 will […]
Internationally acclaimed artist and Art, Theory, and Practice faculty member Michael Rakowitz explores culture as it is embodied in artifacts. In projects ranging from a recreation of the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon to selling dates in an NYC storefront, he has used both food and material fragments to recreate and reimagine cultural and personal […]
On February 16, 2019 the Art Institute of Chicago announced the results of significant new research on five terracotta sculptures–so named Bankoni after a village in present-day Mali where they were found. The objects date from between the 12th and 15th centuries. This places them “among the oldest surviving sculptures from sub-Saharan Africa and among […]
In September 2018 the Block Museum welcomed Sarah Estrela as a 2018-2019 graduate fellow. Block Museum Graduate Fellowships are offered to two graduate students annually, one from Art History and one from any department within the Graduate School. Graduate Fellows are integral members of the museum staff and support projects through exhibition and collection research, curating, writing […]