Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Olio (2016), presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, work songs, and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes […]
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Visitors to the Block Museum of Art on February 7, 2018 enjoyed William Blake’s art through music when students from the Bienen School of Music performed two song cycles inspired by Blake: Benjamin Britten’s 1965 Songs and Proverbs of William Blake and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1957 Ten Blake Songs. The performances took place in the museum’s gallery surrounded by […]
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Inspired by the work of William Blake, poets Ed Roberson, Reginald Gibbons, Rachel Jamison Webster, and Parneshia Jones joined Tristram Wolff, English and Comp Lit professor for a discussion and expanded reading on February 28, 2018. Wolff addressed the theme of the garden in Blake’s poems, followed by readings by the assembled poets from Blake’s poetry and the poets’ own work. Blake’s […]
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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 […]
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In Spring 2017, the Block was honored to host the book release event for the Northwestern University Press publication “Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden” Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African […]
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50th anniversary of the ‘Summer of Love’ celebrated with major exhibition and publication Exhibition runs Sept. 23, 2017 to March 11, 2018 More than 200 works featured – including over 50 rare Blake engravings and illuminated pages Catalogue co-published by Block Museum and Princeton University The Block Museum of Art will present a major exhibition on […]
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