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Join us this fall!

September 19-December 1, 2024

Federico Solmi: The Great Farce

Federico Solmi’s multiscreen, monumental work The Great Farce (2017) conflates and distorts past and present, history and amusement, and reality and spectacle. The digital animation, featuring a cast of time-traveling world leaders with a feverish madness for power, presents a sprawling send-up of empire building as an enterprise and a...

September 19 - December 1, 2024Federico Solmi: The Great Farce

Films By Women/Chicago ’74

Films By Women/Chicago ’74

This fall, the Gene Siskel Film Center and Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of Films by Women/Chicago ’74. Screening series at both venues will revisit some of this historic festival’s most original and daring films and filmmakers, while reflecting on the event’s enduring legacies.

Films By Women/Chicago ’74

One Book Cover

Teaching “The Night Watchman” through The Block’s Collection [PDF]

In The Night Watchman, the 2024‒25 One Book One Northwestern selection, author Louise Erdrich explores themes of identity, family, and tradition as well as poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Inspired by the book, this selection of artworks from The Block’s collection highlights experiences of kinship, rural and urban life, community action,...

Teaching “The Night Watchman” through The Block’s Collection [PDF]

September 18-December 1, 2024

Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968–72

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bev Grant participated in and photographed left wing and radical protests in and around New York City. The exhibition will consider the period that Grant photographed and present new acquisitions by Grant, alongside related works in the collection from the era.

September 18 - December 1, 2024 Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968–72

September 18-December 1, 2024

Looking 101

Class is in session. Learn to look through art.

September 18 - December 1, 2024Looking 101

September 18-December 1, 2024

The Block Collects

Every year The Block brings new works of art into the collection to support Northwestern University’s teaching and learning mission.

September 18 - December 1, 2024The Block Collects

Upcoming Programs

Free and Open to All

Museums

Opening Conversation: Dissident Sisters

Join us in celebrating Fall exhibition, Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-72, and the stories it shares of civil rights and social justice movements in the United States. Artist Bev Grant will be in conversation with co-curator Ruslana Lichtzier, 2023-2024 Block Museum Art History Graduate Fellow, to discuss Grant’s artistic practice documenting and participating in radical political movements in the late 1960s and 70s.

The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University is an engine that drives questioning, experimentation, and collaboration across fields of study, with visual arts at the center....

OUR MISSION AND VISION

Stories From The Block

Black and white image of man with shovel standing on rooftop, with large smokestacks in background against cloudy sky

“An act of rebellion and hope:” Seed bank researcher Sarah Hollis on “One Man Dies a Million Times”

Three frames of a film strip, viewed in close up, show the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion

“Class Outside the Classroom:” Block draws on knowledge across Chicago for unexpected, David Lynch-i

People shovel mulch from an orange wheelbarrow into flower bed outside The Block

Actions for the Earth grows beyond museum walls with living sculpture Memory of Nature

Block staff sit around conference room table looking at large tv monitor and applauding

The National Endowment for the Arts announces $70,000 in funding for Block Museum exhibition

Rubens' Bacchus recreated in elaborate arrangement of everyday materials

Collection Spotlight: Vik Muniz, Bacchus Astride a Barrel, after Rubens

three students stand smiling toward camera next to two large photo prints propped against wall

Block Museum Student Associates select works by Cara Romero for 2023-24 Student Acquisition

square black-and-white photo on black background, of two people standing on a porch facing away from camera

An Unknown Truth, Just Outside the Frame: Madison Brown on A Little Truth

Woman in gray shirt leans over art on table pointing at detail just outside bottom of frame

Berzock co-chairs Working Group seeking to improve visibility of African objects in US museums