The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, announces that Kathleen Bickford Berzock will retire from her position as Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs in June 2026. The Block is immensely grateful for Berzock’s extraordinary contributions to the museum and to Northwestern. Berzock arrived at the University in January 2014, having spent eighteen years as […]
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Meet Muyang Chen, a fourth-year Northwestern University student majoring in Anthropology and Art History. With academic interests rooted in modern and contemporary art — especially queer art and its political, affective, and material strategies — Muyang brings a critically engaged approach to understanding how artworks operate within (and push against) institutional contexts. As a curatorial […]
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Meet Aja Frazier, a Northwestern University student double majoring in History and Asian Languages and Cultures. With a focus on Japanese women’s history and performance studies from the Edo through Showa periods, Aja brings a deep curiosity about the ways art and scholarship intersect — and she’s exploring those connections firsthand through her work as […]
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The Block is delighted to welcome Uche Okpa-Iroha as the museum’s 2025–2026 graduate art history fellow. Uche is a PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University whose research explores the development of modes and theories of representation—how they have been historically constructed and how they continue to shape artistic and scholarly inquiry today. A […]
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The Block is delighted to welcome Eduardo Ramírez Bello as the museum’s 2025–2026 graduate interdisciplinary fellow. Eduardo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He holds a B.A. in Hispanic Literature from the University of Guadalajara and an M.A. in Peninsular and Spanish American Literature from the University […]
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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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The Block Museum of Art is excited to introduce Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate. In this role, Llewyn supports the curatorial team by preparing acquisition justifications and managing communications related to the museum’s growing collection. With research interests spanning disability and queer studies, LGBTQ+ photo portraiture, leftist politics, propaganda, and video art, he brings both scholarly […]
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Belonging, storytelling, and collaboration take center stage at national gathering of academic museums. From June 24–26, 2025, a cross-departmental team from The Block Museum of Art—including Erin Northington (Campus and Community Education), Teagan Harris (Terra Engagement Fellow), Lindsay Bosch (Communications), and Kirsten Lopez (Collections and Digital Interpretation)—attended the annual conference of the Association of Academic […]
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The Block Museum’s collection of more than 6,000 works is fully digitized and accessible through our eMuseum platform, but that doesn’t always mean it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Search tools rely on structured metadata—keywords that help surface an object when a user types in terms like “diaspora” or “activism.” Without consistent, descriptive […]
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Stephanie S. E. Lee and Kathleen Bickford Berzock reflect on international exchange and the power of print In May 2025, two Block Museum team members, Stephanie S. E. Lee and Kathleen Bickford Berzock, traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to participate in Afro-Eurasian Histories of Print, a traveling seminar organized by the Clark Art Institute’s Research […]
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