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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In October 2018, the Block Museum hosted a panel discussion with Chicago artists committed to prison reform and to using art as a mechanism for change. In recognition of the 2020-2021 One Book One Northwestern reading selection Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption we are happy to make audio and transcript of this […]
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Recent events have again laid bare the aggression, injustices, and inequities faced every day by African Americans. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery,—these are just three more names added to a tragically long list of unarmed black individuals whose lives have been taken by the hands of police officers empowered to protect them and through […]
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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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Susy Bielak began her talk for the powerful program, “Seen From Inside: Perspectives on Capital Punishment,” with the firm belief that art feeds freedom. “Art is an entrée to social justice,” she said. At this event, Northwestern University’s Block Museum, Center for Criminal Defense, and Center on Wrongful Convictions shared insights on the death penalty […]
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How does civil resistance operate in the Internet era? How do viral cell phone videos impact our experience of acts of violence from around the country? On May 27, over 70 students and faculty gathered at the Block Museum for “When You CAN’T Shake It Off,” a dive into the role and use of social […]
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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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