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 […]
A prominent member of the Fluxus movement and a legendary organizer of 60’s era Happenings, American artist Geoffrey Hendricks’s art communicates a fascination with nature, collaborative rituals, and the performance of gender and sexuality in public life. A frequent performer at Charlotte Moorman’s Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, Hendricks’ work was display in the Block Museum […]