Online Projects

On this page you will find links to web sites created in conjunction with Block Museum exhibitions as well as special online projects. The Block Museum produced a number of these web sites in collaboration with Northwestern’s art and technology-related organizations. Other sites have been mounted independently by Northwestern departments, such as the University Library. All of these online projects are focused investigations utilizing web technology to present expanded information not possible through traditional exhibitions or catalogues.

Anatomy of Gender

In collaboration with Northwestern art history professor Lyle Massey, the University Library and Academic Technologies created this site to accompany the exhibition The Anatomy of Gender: Arts of the Body in Early Modern Europe at the Block Museum. The site explores the relationship between sex, gender and images of dissection in Renaissance and early modern European anatomical texts, ca. 1540-1800.

Pictures of Music

Seven Northwestern University undergraduate and graduate students developed and produced this innovative and informative site, which explores how graphical music notation — compositions which use pictures rather than traditional notation to denote music — is interpreted by composers and performers, in particular by contemporary musicians in Chicago. The Academic Technologies division of Northwestern's Information Technology division collaborated on this site.

Imaging and Imagining Space: A Collaboration Between Art and Science

In conjunction with their 2001 Block exhibition, photographer Pamela Bannos, Senior Lecturer in the Northwestern Department of Art Theory and Practice, and astronomer Farhad F. Zadeh, Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, explore different ways of depicting space: optical images from the Hubble Space Telescope and radio images from the Very Large Array.

The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz

The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz is an interactive, multimedia Web site concerned with the production of art in Auschwitz between 1941 and 1945. The site was prepared in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, which the Block displayed in the fall of 2002. The presentation of this rich variety of documentary and interpretive materials serves as a permanent and perpetually expanding forum for the exploration of aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and moral issues relating to the role of art in the Holocaust. This project is made possible through the generosity of Judd and Frieda Weinberg.

William Hogarth and Eighteenth Century Print Culture

During the 1996 - 1997 academic year, seven Northwestern University graduate students and one professor in the Department of Art History curated an exhibition reinterpreting prints by the eighteenth-century British artist William Hogarth. The exhibition was a result of the Block's collaboration with the Department of Art History's Program in Art Objects. It appeared at the Block Museum in 1997, and its accompanying web site, with full illustrations and complete text, was the first Block Museum of Art exhibition to appear online.

Wall Of Respect

This web site chronicles and interprets the Wall of Respect, a Chicago mural depicting African American leaders. The mural was first painted in 1967, repainted in the following years, and destroyed in 1971. Six Northwestern University graduate and undergraduate students produced the Wall of Respect Web site in 2000, as part of a collaborative project between the Block Museum and the Academic Technologies division of Northwestern's department of Information Technology.