Event Details
Date & Time:
Fri October 9, 2026
12:30 PM-2:00 PM
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
To celebrate Northwestern University’s Homecoming and Reunion Weekend and in conjunction with Picturing the Modern Metropolis, the Block Museum offers a special program on the newly opened Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. Informed by her incisive coverage on this new landmark for the Sun Times and WBEZ, journalist Natalie Moore (Senior Lecturer and Director of Audio Journalism Programming, Medill) will consider the impact of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s architectural and racial landscape. After the presentation, she will be joined in conversation by Leslie Harris, Professor of History. The program will be preceded by a lunchtime reception in the Block Museum lobby at 12 pm.
About the Speakers:
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer and director of audio journalism programming at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The Chicago native is known for her reporting on segregation and inequality. For 17 years, she was a reporter and editor at WBEZ. Moore has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Moore’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. She is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. Moore writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Moore also is a playwright. “The Billboard,” a play about abortion was produced by 16th Street Theater in 2022and won a Jeff Award for best new work/short run.
Leslie M. Harris is Professor of History and Black Studies at Northwestern University. A specialist in Pre-Civil War African American history, she has authored or co-edited six books, including award winning In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City (2003) and Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (2019). Harris has also participated in a number of public history projects and accompanying books. Harris is currently completing Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History, a book that combines memoir with family, urban and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change. Harris received her undergraduate degree at Columbia and her doctoral degree at Stanford. Before moving to Northwestern, she taught for 21 years at Emory University. Her work has also been supported by the Newberry Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Mellon and Ford Foundations, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, and the University of Maryland.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu
