Internationally acclaimed artist and MacArthur Fellow Fred Wilson addressed audiences at The Block on April 16, 2019. In his talk, Wilson shared insights into his work Afro Kismet— resonant with themes of migration and history explored in the exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. Throughout his career, […]
In the four years before the Roe v. Wade ruling made abortion legal in the United States, a clandestine organization of Chicago women offered low-cost, safe and confidential services to over 11,000 women—the Jane Collective. The film “Jane: An Abortion Service” offers an invaluable oral history, through the words of women who founded, operated, and […]
In conjunction with the Block Museum of Art’s Up is Down: Mid-Century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio, an exhibition exploring the groundbreaking Chicago design firm that brought Bauhaus aesthetics to the American public through innovative explorations with light and film, curators Amy Beste and Corinne Granof sat down for conversation with artist […]
In July 2018 the Block Museum hosted “Films and Videos by David Wojnarowicz and Collaborators” a screening and conversation presented in partnership with Iceberg Projects in conjunction with the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: Flesh of My Flesh. (June 23 – August 4, 2018) David Wojnarowicz is arguably one of the most important artists to emerge from the New York art […]
Over 350 guests joined artist Hank Willis Thomas at the Block Museum on April 14, 2018 for a talk on his politically charged work and the Block Museum exhibition Hank Willis Thomas: Unbranded. The exhibition brings together selections from two bodies of work: Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 and Unbranded: A Century of White […]
Artist and writer Jen Bervin embraces subjects as wide-ranging as the Mississippi River, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and the history of silk, weaving, and nanotechnology. On February 21, 2018 the artist, Jeanne Dunning, Art Theory & Practice professor, and Susy Bielak, Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Engagement/Curator of Public Practice, sat down for a conversation about Bervin’s work. In […]
On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, the Block celebrated the opening of the exhibition “Experiments in Form: Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, Frank Stella”, on view through June 24, 2018. The exhibition uses works in the Block Museum of Art’s collection by Sam Gilliam (b. 1933), Alan Shields (1944–2005), and Frank Stella (b. 1936) as starting points […]
Can cinema make you a good citizen? For a half century, the Indian government hoped so: until 1994, they required commercial cinemas to screen twenty minutes of state-sponsored content before the feature presentation, forcing its movie-mad people to absorb information about the country’s progress and development. In the 1960s, the organization that produced these shorts—Films […]
In February the Block teamed up with Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering to present a conversation with artist Jen Bervin. In Bervin’s recent project Silk Poems, she consulted nanotechnology and biomedical labs to fabricate a silk film with an ancient Chinese poem written in a six-character chain that corresponds to human DNA. The Block’s associate […]
Artist Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience project examines the relationship between location, repetition, technology, and surveillance in today’s media age In Aspen, Colorado in 1978, a group of MIT researchers affixed a stop-frame camera atop a car and drove it throughout the popular ski resort town. Combining the footage with a computer, laserdisc player, and touchscreen […]