Throughout 2020-21 The Block Museum is reflecting on artworks from the collection that explore ideas of excess, consumption, and the environment, and offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the climate crisis. Our project is inspired by The Story of More by Hope Jahren, Northwestern University’s 2021-2022 One Book One Northwestern (OBON) selection. In this online talk, Lois Taylor Biggs, […]
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Artist: Mikki Ferrill (American, born 1937)Title: Untitled, Chicago, ILDate: ca.1965, printed before 1980Medium: Gelatin silver printCredit line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the Irwin and Andra S. Press Collection Endowment Fund purchase, 2021.15 Image: Courtesy of the artist © Mikki Ferrill In 1960s Chicago, the Black gay and trans communities came […]
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Nam Jun Paik’s “One for Violin Solo” (1962), performed by Myrtil Mitanga, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Class of 2017. The piece undermines clichés of the classical music genre through an unanticipated gesture. Charlotte Moorman, who valued drama, humor, theatricality, and subversion in her work, was drawn to the ceremony of the piece, as […]
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John Cage’s “Cello Etude Boreales, no. 1” (1978) performed by Drake Driscoll, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Class of 2018. The pieces was created using star charts from the Atlas Borealis as a source of randomness. Cage traced the star maps and then used additional chance operations to determine, with painstaking precision, the specific […]
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Takehisa Kosugi’s “Chamber Music” (1962), performed by Drake Driscoll, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Class of 2018. The “music” resides in her movements within the bag, in the sound it makes, and in the sequences of shapes and forms it assumes.
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On Saturday, May 17, 2014 the Mary and Leigh Block Museum hosted “An Artists’ Congress.” Organized in conjunction with the exhibition The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929-1940, this groundbreaking public forum re-imagined meetings of the 1930s American Artists Congress and took Left Front member Louis Lozowick’s question “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Today?” […]
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Picture a sundial and you’ll probably think of an object made from brass or another type of metal. But in early modern Europe you could find versions of a sundial and other scientific instruments constructed from paper. Suzanne Karr-Schmidt, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Prints and […]
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