This year’s The Block Collects installation features two projects featuring works selected by students:
2025 Student Acquisition
The Block Museum of Art’s collection supports learning across disciplines through exhibitions, research, and class and co-curricular visits. One of the ways we grow this resource is through an annual student-led collecting initiative undertaken by the Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs), an interdisciplinary group of Northwestern undergraduates. Throughout the academic year, they learn about museum interpretation, gallery teaching, and collecting practices, culminating in their recommending the purchase of one or more works of art that invite sustained looking and multiple avenues of inquiry.
The 2024–2025 BMSAs recommended the purchase of three works by artist Chitra Ganesh inspired by images from the comic book series Amar Chitra Katha, which popularizes Indian epics and folklore. These comics seek to educate children in India and across its diaspora on South Asian history, culture, religions, and mythologies. Like many stories written for children, Amar Chitra Katha reinforces conventional models of gender relations and sexuality as well as citizenship, nationalism, religious expression, and public behavior. Ganesh subverts these narrative traditions and their embedded patriarchal norms by constructing alternative worlds where women, girls, and other marginalized communities are empowered. Ganesh has cited canonical and contemporary feminist and queer scholarship as sources of inspiration for her work.
Art History 395: Horror Modernism
Modern art often confronts its audience with ruptures, whether of traditions, histories, landscapes, identities, bodies, or systems of power. In doing so, it asks us to grapple with the violence and disorientations that define modernity. In the process, some artists turn toward the conventions of horror to make sense of modern existence and to provoke radical reimaginings of the world.
Works in this installation seek to provoke visceral responses from their audiences in different ways. They were selected from The Block’s collection in collaboration with undergraduate students enrolled in Horror Modernism, a Northwestern Art History seminar taught by professor Jessy Bell in Spring 2025. The class approached horror as a method of examination, drawing on literary, media, and decolonial theories to understand how horror and dread work to unsettle dominant perceptions.
The students also considered questions of reception and exhibition. We asked, What does it mean to look at, process, and be affected by the horrific? The seminar culminated in thisexhibition of objects from The Block’s collection on the subject of horror and art.
Explore all Course Selections in Block Collection Database
Image: Nicholas Sistler (born 1954), Double Indemnity, 2010, photo-polymer intaglio print. Purchase funds provided by Dia and John Walsh; 2011.6.2.
