Block Museum of Art - Annual Report 2016-2017

2016–2017

ANNUAL

REPORT

MESSAGE FROM THE

DIRECTOR

At the Block, art experiences are a springboard for dialogue about issues and ideas that are relevant to our lives today. 2016-2017 was a year of transportive springboard exhibitions. These exhibitions placed a strong emphasis on contemporary art and artists whose work tackles topics as challenging as personal and historic trauma, cultural assimilation, gender identity, remembering, and the responsibilities of those who remember.

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Elders who were imprisoned in the Japanese-American internment camps in World War II came to the Block to share their stories in connection with an artwork by Kristine Aono featured in If You Remember, I’ll Remember. Presenting Aono’s monumental, participatory wall installation enabled the Block to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which ordered the wartime internment of over 120,000 JapaneseAmerican citizens and residents living on the west coast of the United States. [Pg. 20]

VISITING ARTISTS HIGHLIGHTS

Fortunately, the legacy of these projects will live on through acquisitions of work for the Block’s collection. Building the collection enables the Museum to inspire original student research and to serve as a significant teaching resource.

Finding opportunities to engage bold ideas through the artistic process is now a regular part of the Block’s program. This year French-Algerian artist Kader Attia created new work that grew out of campus visits to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies and meetings with scholars from Anthropology, African Studies, Art History, Global Health, Theater, and with scientists of the Feinberg AbilityLab. Together they considered the concept of “repair” in the face of the traumas of history. [Pg. 14] A new initiative connects artists to students and faculty in the McCormick School of Engineering through campus visits. It began this year with programs featuring artists Pedro Reyes, Hasan Elahi, Jen Bervin, and Dario Robleto. [Pg. 24]

ACQUISITION HIGHLIGHTS

THE “SPRING” OF YOUR SUPPORT

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The exhibition We Are Revolutionaries, the Wall of Respect and Chicago’s Mural Movement marked the 50th anniversary of the landmark mural created by artists on Chicago’s South Side, depicting more than 50 African American heroes and leaders. The Block acquired a study portrait of trumpet player and bandleader Miles Davis by artist Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004), one of the rare remaining traces of the historic Wall and the process of its creation. Donaldson was the first African American to earn a doctorate in art history at Northwestern. The sketch is currently being featured in the landmark exhibition Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by the Tate Modern in London. [Pg. 16]

It is with great pride that we also share the news that the significance of our work has been recognized and shared by a growing number of supporters, including our first grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. New endowments were established by members of the Block Board of Advisors, including the Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Engagement, the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and the Block Board of Advisors Endowment to support exhibitions, publications, and the Museum’s collection. [Pg. 42]

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With the support of the Block’s Board of Advisors and the artist’s estate, the Block acquired a number of works from Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, the first-ever museum survey of the artist’s playful, powerful, and subversive performances and photographs. This gift honored the extraordinary tenure of Daniel Linzer, who served as Northwestern University Provost from 2007 to 2017 and departed from Northwestern in July 2017. Dan was instrumental in championing the Block’s interdisciplinary mission and vision. [Pg. 9]

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From its exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember, the Block acquired a major work by Eastern Band of Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn, whose conceptual baskets, created from reproductions of archival documents and photographs, are a vehicle for weaving together her critical insights into US government policies regarding Native Americans. The gift was made possible with partial support from Sandi Lynn Riggs, Jean and Robert Guritz, and members of the Block Leadership Circle. [Pg. 12]

The Block’s engagement program amplified the themes of these exhibitions to ensure these extraordinary artworks became a lived experience for our visitors.

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS •

In February 2017, more than 200 participants joined Seneca artist Marie Watt for a series of Equity Sewing Circles, speaking together about issues of social justice while contributing stitches to a collective artwork that became part of If You Remember, I’ll Remember. [Pg. 19]

This support provides the “spring” necessary to elevate us to new heights in 2017-2018. We thank the University and our many friends who are committed to ensuring that the Block can continue to connect art to life for everyone who participates in what we do.

Lisa Graziose Corrin, Ellen Philips Katz Director

Block Museum Director Lisa Corrin

Corinne Granof, Curator of Academic Affairs, leads student docent training.

DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT HELEN HILKEN CURATORIAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT ALEXANDRIA KOTOCH LEAD PREPARATOR MARK LEONHART ASSOCIATE FILM PROGRAMMER JUSTIN LINTELMAN CHIEF PROJECTIONIST REBECCA LYON PICK LAUDATI CURATOR OF MEDIA ARTS MICHELLE PUETZ ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR JENNA ROBERTSON ASSISTANT REGISTRAR VERONICA ROBINSON CURATORIAL ASSOCIATE FOR SPECIAL PROJECTS ESSI RÖNKKÖ BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR RITA SHORTS ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS MANAGEMENT DAN SILVERSTEIN SENIOR BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR JEFF SMITH ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR HOLLY WARREN

STAFF

ENGAGEMENT MANAGER LAUREN COCHARD WATKINS COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS COORDINATOR LIZ WOLF

ELLEN PHILIPS KATZ DIRECTOR LISA GRAZIOSE CORRIN

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF CURATORIAL AFFAIRS KATHLEEN BICKFORD BERZOCK ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ENGAGEMENT/ CURATOR OF PUBLIC PRACTICE SUSY BIELAK COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER LINDSAY BOSCH SENIOR REGISTRAR KRISTINA BOTTOMLEY SECURITY ASSISTANT AARON CHATMAN COMMUNICATIONS COORDINATOR CAROLINE CLAFLIN STEVEN AND LISA MUNSTER TANANBAUM CURATOR OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART JANET DEES ASSISTANT MANAGER OF NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS BRYCEN DOBY MANAGER OF SECURITY SERVICES JAMES D. FOSTER CURATOR OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMS CORINNE GRANOF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANT ELENA GRYAZNOVA Janet Dees, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, provides insight into an artwork in the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember (2017).

BOARD OF ADVISORS Christine O. Robb Winnetka, IL, Appointed 2011, Chair, Board of Advisors, President and CEO, Artists’ Concepts, Inc. (WCAS’66) (SP WCAS’66) Anu Aggarwal Chicago, IL, Appointed 2015, Art Collector (SP KSM’97) Mary Baglivo New York, NY, Appointed 2017, Vice Chancellor, Marketing and Communications, Rutgers University (MDL’81) Maria Bell Los Angeles, CA, Appointed 2015, President/Founder, Vitameatavegamin (WCAS’85) Christine Bernstein Pacific Palisades, CA, Appointed 2016, Artist (Parent ’17) Stuart H. Bohart New York, NY, Appointed 2016, Former Financial Advisor, Fortress Investment Group (WCAS ’89) Priscilla Vail Caldwell Brooklyn, NY, Appointed 2016, Curator and Advisor, PVC Fine Arts, LLC. (WCAS’85) Stacey Cantor Glencoe, IL, Appointed 2014, Former Public Defender; Community Volunteer (WCAS’90) (Parent ‘20) John Corbett Chicago, IL, Appointed 2013, Gallerist, Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery, and professor (Comm PhD ’94)

Board of Advisors members Lynn Hauser and R. Hugh Magill with Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs

Lisa G. Corrin Evanston, IL, Ex-officio, The Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Block Museum Nicole Druckman, Evanston, IL, Appointed 2013, Grant Writer (WCAS’92) (SP WCAS’93) Kristin Peterson Edwards Darien, CT, Appointed 2013, Former Art Dealer; Community Volunteer (WCAS’92) Kate Ezra New Haven, CT, Retired, Yale University Art Gallery (TGS PhD ’83) James Geier Chicago, IL, Appointed 2013, Founder/President, 555 International Lynn Hauser Chicago, IL, Appointed 2012, Retired Ophthalmologist (FSM’74 ’76 ’80) (SP FSM’75 ’79 ’80) Ellen Philips Katz New York, NY, Appointed 2005, Trustee, Northwestern University (WCAS’70)

Zeynep Keyman Zurich and Istanbul, Appointed 2013, Art Collector, (Parent ’07, ’12) James A. Klein Riverwoods, IL, Appointed 2010, President, Acrobat Marketing Company (MDL ’68; ’69) Dianne Loeb, Seattle, WA, Appointed 2014, NU Regent; Community Volunteer (KSM’80) (SP KSM’81) Angela Lustig Chicago, IL, Appointed 2014, Artist; Former VP/Group Creative Director, Abelson Taylor (SP MDL’67 ’68) R. Hugh Magill Winnetka, IL, Appointed 2006, Senior Vice President, Northern Trust Company (SP Music ’86) Kim Allen-Niesen Los Angeles, CA, Appointed 2017, Art Collector (Parent ’16, ’19) Irwin Press Chicago, IL, Appointed 2012, Retired Professor, Notre Dame University; and co-founder, Press Ganey Associates (WCAS ’59) Richard M. Rieser, Jr. Northbrook, IL, Appointed 2013, Founder and former CEO, First Oak Brook Bancshares (SP SESP ’70) Sandra L. Riggs Lake Forest, IL, Appointed 2012, Board Member, The Alumnae of Northwestern University (Comm’65) Selig D. Sacks New York, NY, Appointed 2007, Managing Director and General Counsel, Ruton Capital (WCAS’69) (Parent ’17) Jean E. Shedd Evanston, IL, Ex-officio, NU Associate Provost for Budget, Facilities, and Analysis (KSM’97) Diane Solomon New York, NY, Appointed 2012, Art Collector (Parent ’10, ’15) Lisa Tananbaum New York, NY, Appointed 2015, Art Collector (WCAS’86) Martha Tedeschi Cambridge, MA, Appointed 2017, Director of the Harvard Art Museums (WCAS PhD’94) Ken Thompson Lincolnshire, IL, Appointed 2015, Managing Director, Level X Consulting (WCAS ’91) Gilbert Unangst Evanston, IL, Appointed 2013, Project Leader, Boston Consulting Group (KSM ’14) (SP KSM ’14) Sue Wilson Evanston, IL/Santa Barbara, CA, Appointed 2015, Community Volunteer (MDL’70) (SP WCAS’70 KSM’74)

Board of Advisors member Stacey Cantor and husband Lowell Cantor, Board Chair Christine O. Robb, and Susy Bielak, Associate Director of Engagement/Curator of Public Practice

MISSION

STATEMENT The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art enriches teaching and learning on the campuses of Northwestern University and in the communities of their surrounding regions by: •

Presenting art across time, cultures, and media;

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Convening interdisciplinary discussions in which art is a springboard for exploring issues and ideas;

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Collecting art that supports the Northwestern University curriculum.

Students perform during the opening of the Art Theory and Practice MFA Thesis exhibition Everything is Fine.

Visiting artist Walter Kitundu presents his site-specific lobby installation, Tracing the Building.

VISION

STATEMENT •

To be a dynamic, imaginative, and innovative teaching and learning resource at Northwestern University through an artistic program that is a springboard for thought-provoking discussions relevant to the curriculum and to our lives today.

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To inspire and develop a new generation of artists, scholars, and arts professionals by providing experiential learning opportunities bridging the classroom and the world beyond the campus.

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To serve as a crossroad between campus and community, by creating an environment where all visitors feel welcome to participate.

CAMPUS PARTNERS 2012–NOW NORTHWESTERN AFFILIATES

DEPARTMENTS & ACADEMIC UNITS

Alumni Relations and Capital Campaign Arts and Music Programs for Education in Detention Centers Bienen School of Music Black Arts Initiative Block Student Advisory Board Block Student Docents Buffett Institute for Global Studies Campus Inclusion and Community Center for Civic Engagement Center for Science in Society Center for Student Involvement Change Makers Chaplain’s Office Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora Community and Neighborhood Relations Dance Program Human Resources International Office Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Lipstick Theater Martin Luther King Day Committee Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Multicultural Film Collective Multicultural Student Affairs Native American and Indigenous Student Alliance Neighborhood and Community Relations New Student and Family Programs Norris Northwestern Alumni Association Northwestern Image Lab Northwestern Press Northwestern University Libraries One Book One Northwestern Ordinary Media Residential Colleges Academic Initiatives STITCH: Fashion Set Free Wirtz Center for Performing Arts Women’s Center Women of Color Gathering

African-American Studies Anthropology Art History Art Theory and Practice Asian Languages and Cultures Center on Capital Cases Center for Creative Writing Civil & Environmental Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences English French and Italian Gender & Sexuality Global Health Studies Graduate School History International Studies Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Learning Sciences Material Science McCormick School of Engineering Medill School of Journalism Middle East and North African Studies Music Education NU-ACCESS Performance Studies Philosophy Pritzker School of Law Program of African Studies Programs of Poetry and Poetics Psychology Religious Studies RTVF School of Communication School of Education and Social Policy Slavic Languages and Literature Sociology Sound Design Spanish and Portuguese

Northwestern students tour the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember.

District 65 middle school class tours the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember.

CULTURAL PARTNERS 2012–NOW CHICAGO

EVANSTON & REGIONAL

Alphawood Gallery The Art Institute of Chicago The Arts Club of Chicago The Center on Halsted Chicago Architectural Biennial Chicago Artists Coalition Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Chicago Humanities Festival Columbia College DePaul University Hyde Park Art Center INTIME Performance Festival Japanese American Service Committee Museum of Contemporary Art One State Together in the Arts Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Poetry Foundation Terra Foundation for American Art Tibetan Alliance School of the Art Institute of Chicago Smart Museum of Art University of Illinois at Chicago

Associated Colleges of the Midwest Beacon Academy City of Evanston City of Evanston Cultural Arts Curts Cafe Alliance District 65 Foundation Downtown Evanston Evanston Art Center Evanston Chamber of Commerce Evanston Community Foundation Evanston Literary Festival Evanston Made Evanston Public Library Evanston Public Schools Evanston Township High School Highland Park High School James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy Mather Senior Living Merion Senior Center Mudlark Arts Camp New Trier High School North Shore Convention and Visitors’ Bureau Project N.I.A. Wheeling High School Wilmette Park District Women Make Movies Youth Opportunity United (Y.O.U.) YWCA

NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL Americans for the Arts American Alliance of Museums Association Art Museum Curators Association of Art Museum Directors College Art Association District 65 Foundation Grey Gallery, NYU Museum Computer Network Museum der Moderne Salzburg National Arts Marketing Project Open Engagement Princeton University Press Society for Cinema & Media Studies Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery University of Notre Dame Yale University Art Gallery

EXHIBITIONS Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera September 17–December 11 Main Gallery Born in Hong Kong, educated in Vancouver and Paris, and later based in New York City, Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990) produced a large body of witty, playful, performance-based photography that both captured the pivotal downtown Manhattan art and club scenes of the 1980s and reflected the increasingly globalized movement of people across nations and continents. Tseng called himself an “inquisitive traveler, a witness of my time and an ambiguous ambassador.”

His works alternately function as witness to his life and community and as wry social commentary, raising critical questions about identity and culture.

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, on view at Northwestern University Block Museum of Art from September 17 to December 11, 2016, was the first major solo museum exhibition of the photographer’s works, which have long sparked the imaginations of younger artists. The exhibition featured over 80 photographs including well-known works— such as Tseng’s collaborations with Keith Haring and his East Meets West and Expeditionary series—as well as examples from the artist’s archive that have rarely been shown.

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera was organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia with the support of the Mapplethorpe Foundation. The exhibition was conceived and curated by the late Amy Brandt, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and was presented in her memory.

The Block Museum’s presentation of Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera was generously supported by Zeynep Keyman and the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation.

Muna Tseng, sister of the artist and executor of the Tseng Kwong Chi estate, leads a tour focusing on her brother’s life and legacy.

FA L L

FALL

New students take part in Wildcat Welcome freshman orientation week and tour the exhibition.

In fall of 2016, the Block Museum presented Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis, an exhibition of art and objects which spoke to themes of bereavement and materiality, curated by the Block’s Graduate Student Fellow C.C. McKee. The exhibition included a significant loan from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago: Felix Gonzalez–Torres’s Untitled (The End) (1990). A participatory work that invites audience to take sheets of paper, this loan extends until the work is fully diminished. After the exhibition, the Block Museum and the Northwestern University Libraries collaborated to reinstall the impermanent artwork in Northwestern’s Deering Library.

EXHIBITIONS Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Movie Posters September 17–December 11 Alsdorf Gallery The rare posters in this exhibition were selected from the Hamid Naficy Movie Poster Collection at Northwestern University Libraries Archives. Dating from the 1960s to the present, the posters in the collection document the social history of cinema in Iran and over half a century of dramatic political turmoil and change.

After the end of World War II, the Iranian film industry rapidly expanded and modernized. Two major parallel cinemas emerged—commercially driven filmfarsi (Persian language) productions and an influential new wave cinema of dissent.

The posters in Salaam Cinema! highlight the most prevalent filmfarsi genres, including pre-revolutionary melodramas and comedies that reinforce traditional values, cultural identity, gender stereotypes, and the Iranian star system. The exhibition also features posters from post-revolutionary, author-driven cinematic movements: dystopian new wave films that underscore the mounting paranoia, fear, and anger leading up to the 1978-79 Islamic revolution; nationalist films expressing the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War; films directed by and starring women that critically explore their representation on screen; and more contemporary art house films that examine post-revolutionary Iranian society.

FA L L

FALL

Students consider memorial objects on view in Keep the Shadow on loan from Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum.

Iranian cinema frequently addresses film culture itself—the act of filmmaking, genre conventions, the experience of going to the movies, and cinephilia that is specific to Iran. This self-reflexivity was central to the exhibition and the accompanying film series Iranian Cinephilia: From Filmfarsi to Art-House Cinema. A national symposium, Lucid Figurations: Iranian Movie Poster and Film Art, took place at the Block Museum on November 17th and 18th.

This exhibition was curated by Hamid Naficy, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Northwestern University’s School of Communication, in collaboration with the Block Museum’s Curator of Media Arts, Michelle Puetz; Simran Bhalla, PhD candidate in Screen Cultures; Azadeh Safaeian, PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program; and the students in Professor Naficy’s Winter 2016 course “National Cinemas: Iranian Art House Cinema and Visual Culture.”

The exhibition was presented in partnership with the Northwestern University Libraries and was generously supported through co-sponsorship by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Alsdorf Gallery at the Block Museum Endowment Fund.

Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis September 17–December 11 Katz Gallery During much of the 20th century, death was a private and comparatively silent event. However, during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, a politicized resurgence of highly visible and public acts of mourning emphasized the body ravaged by the virus. In some ways, these practices paralleled the public and material mourning practices of the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing objects and artworks related to mourning from the Victorian Era—intricately woven hairworks and ornate brooches kept as bodily relics of the deceased—and during the AIDS crisis, Keep the Shadow examined two analogous cultures of bereavement. The exhibition proposed that these historical periods uniquely relied on the materiality of the individual body, and items associated with it, as relics in order to grapple with mortality and persevere in the face of death. Curated by 2015-16 Block Museum Graduate Fellow, C.C. McKee.

Students consider Salaam Cinema!, the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the art of Iranian fim posters.

Artists in the exhibition included Eric Avery, Félix González-Torres, David Grieger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Mock, Domingo Orejudos, Andres Serrano and Leonard Rifas. The exhibition was curated by Block Museum 2015-2016 graduate fellow C.C. McKee.

Poster of The Golden Heel [Pashneh Talā] (1975), design by Masoud Behnam, film directed

by Nezam Fatem. Image Courtesy of Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives.

Poster of Requeim [Marsieh] (1978), film directed by Amir Naderi. Image Courtesy of Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives.

WINTER

EXHIBITIONS

Students reflect on Dario Robleto’s Defiant Gardens (2010)

If You Remember, I’ll Remember February 4–June 18 Main Gallery If You Remember, I’ll Remember was an invitation to reflect on the past while contemplating the present through works of art exploring themes of love, mourning, war, relocation, internment, resistance, and civil rights in 19th and 20th century North America. This exhibition included works by artists Kristine Aono (b. 1960), Shan Goshorn (b. 1957), Samantha Hill (b. 1974), McCallum & Tarry (active 1998-2013), Dario Robleto (b. 1972), and Marie Watt (b. 1967). By engaging with historic documents, photographs, sound recordings, oral histories and objects of material culture drawn from institutional and informal archives, these artists highlighted individuals’ stories or make connections to their own histories. Some made explicit links to events across time periods, while in others these associations are implicit.

2017 marked two milestones that connect to works in this exhibition. February 19th was the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 which ordered the war-time internment of over 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and residents living on the west coast of the United States. June 12th was the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision of the case Loving v. Virginia, which found laws prohibiting interracial marriage— then in effect in sixteen states—unconstitutional. Touchstones for other works included a class photograph of students at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School (operational 1879-1918), documents from a Chicago family archive relating to the early history of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a photograph of an early 20th century Potlatch off Vancouver Island, and the love letters of soldiers who served in various wars in which the United States was involved. If You Remember, I’ll Remember juxtaposed themes and histories that are rarely considered in relationship to each other.

Together these works posed questions about the purposes and processes of remembering and the responsibilities of those who remember.

If You Remember, I’ll Remember was organized by Janet Dees, Curator, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, and its title was taken from a 2013 essay by the artist Dario Robleto.

This exhibition was funded through support from the Bernstein Family Contemporary Art Fund, Stephen, Dianne, Katy and Becky Loeb, the Diane and Craig Solomon Contemporary Art Fund, the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the Mary and Leigh Block Endowment.

Visitors experience the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember (2017)

Seneca artist Marie Watt speaks with a student about the creation of her work Witness (2015) embroidered onto a double-length Native American trade blanket.

As part of the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember, the Block Museum of Art commissioned artist Marie Watt to create a new work that was reflective of the exhibition’s themes of empathy and remembrance. Throughout Winter 2017, over 300 community members from Northwestern, Evanston, and Chicago came together to lend their hands to the creation of a project. During these sewing circles, participants engaged in conversations around equity, community, and justice. The resulting work is Companion Species: Ferocious Mother and Canis Familiaris (2017), which was installed in the exhibition on April 20, 2017.

WINTER

EXHIBITIONS Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory January 21–April 16 Alsdorf Gallery The Block Museum presented an exhibition of newly commissioned work by the internationally acclaimed FrenchAlgerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970), based in part on the artist’s research in the collections of Northwestern University’s Herskovits Library of African Studies and interviews with university faculty across disciplines. Conceived as an installation, the exhibition featured collage, a sculpture, and an extended film-essay. Taken as a whole, the works expand on Attia’s long-term exploration of trauma and repair, both of the body and of society, and will probe the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and xenophobia in our time.

Kader Attia grew up moving between Algeria and the suburbs of Paris, and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that confronts cultural differences. His debut solo exhibition was held in 1996 in the Republic of Congo, and since then his artistic career has gained major international recognition, with inclusion in exhibitions such as the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), dOCUMENTA13 (2012), the 8th Lyon Biennial (2015), the 5th Marrakech Biennial (2016), and Dak’Art 2016. Attia has recently exhibited in major shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2016 he was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize, among France’s most prestigious arts award, and his solo exhibition Sacrifice and Harmony, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, was named German exhibition of the year by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory was organized by the Block Museum in partnership with the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The curatorial team included Block curators Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Janet Dees, and Antawan I. Byrd, PhD candidate in Art History. Support for the exhibition was provided by the Myers Foundations, the Diane and Craig Solomon Contemporary Art Fund, the Alsdorf Gallery at the Block Museum Endowment Fund, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Kader Attia speaks with faculty and visitors during exhibition opening.

Sculptures on display within the exhibition address the concept of “repair” both of body and society.

Image: Kader Attia, Still from Reflecting Memory, 2016, 40 min, HD film, courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Galleria Continua, and Galerie Krinzinger.

SPRING

EXHIBITIONS

Students and faculty at the opening of of the exhibition Everything Is Fine.

We Are Revolutionaries: The Wall of Respect and Chicago’s Mural Movement April 21–June 18 Katz Gallery In 1967, the Organization of Black American Culture painted a huge mural “guerrilla-style” on the wall of a decaying building on the South Side of Chicago. They called it the Wall of Respect. This mural, which grew out of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s, was controversial from the start and only survived a few years—but in that time it inspired a community movement that went on to paint vivid colors on walls across the city and beyond. The Wall of Respect’s 50th anniversary was 2017, and many events in the Chicago area commemorated its significance. Using photographs and documents relating to the Wall of Respect and other murals, this exhibition explored the mural movement in Chicago in its historical context, investigating how race and class have intersected with the spatial politics of the city.

This exhibition was collectively curated by students in the Department of Art History first year seminar, taught by Rebecca Zorach, Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History.

Everything is Fine: Department of Art Theory and Practice MFA Thesis Exhibition May 4–June 18 Alsdorf Gallery This exhibition and associated events and publications were the culmination of the course of study leading to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree. Candidates engaged in intensive research during their tenure in the Department of Art Theory and Practice as they developed their individual art-making practices in a climate of rigorous critical thinking.

The MFA Thesis Exhibition was the place in which they turned their research, as manifested in the works of art they have made, over to the public. The exhibition included the work of Lama Altakruri, Kentaro Kumanomido, Sara Milkes, Craig Neeson, Titus Wonsey

Ehent hiliquam fugiae voloria dolescia non con cus, comnis es secest autaspictis net a con Visitorset learn the history of Chicago’s estium qui asimi, sequost od eum comnis quae poremperes verios queWall coreofinRespect.

This exhibition and the associated events were co-organized by the Department of Art Theory & Practice and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Support provided by the Norton S. Walbridge Fund; the Myers Foundations; the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts; and the Alsdorf Endowment.

COLLECTION

EXHIBITIONS Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground February 4–April 2 Katz Gallery Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground looked at ways artists and other image makers construct narratives about industry. The exhibition featured artworks and documents of mining, and the complex networks of power, technology, and family and labor relations that keep this industry in motion. In bringing these works together, Mining Pictures sought to illuminate the representational tropes of scientific progress and human sentiment and expose the constructed quality of the visual stories about industry. The exhibition spotlighted the mining photography of Bruce Davidson and W. Eugene Smith, and set their work in conversation with prints, drawings, and photographs from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Curated by 2016-17 Block Museum Graduate Fellow, Talia Shabtay. This exhibition was generously supported by the Norton S. Walbridge Fund.

Talia Shabtay guides a tour of Mining Pictures.

Image: Bruce Davidson, Untitled from the portfolio Welsh Miners (1965) © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, Collection of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. (2001.26)

The Block Collects: Lovis Corinth April 2 - June 18, 2017 Katz Gallery This grouping of late self-portraits by Lovis Corinth (German, 1858–1925) from the Block Museum collection showed an artist intensely examining or perhaps even resisting his own mortality. Corinth was among the best-known artists working in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany and an influential member of the Berlin Secession, a group of artists formed to challenge the official artists’ association. This collection focus was curated by Curatorial Assistant Linnea Hodge (WCAS, Art History 2017).

P RO G R A M S

Professor Hamid Naficy leads Salaam Cinema! opening night.

Opening Program: Five Takes on Tseng Kwong Chi October 1, 2 PM

Attendees experienced Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs through the lenses of five local artists and thinkers. Through rapid fire presentations and performances, the program explored Tseng Kwong Chi’s legacy of cultural infiltration, political subversion and identity lived inseparable from art. Presenters included Chicago-based artists Rashayla Marie Brown and Leonard Suryajaya, Northwestern professors Joshua Chambers-Letson and Jessica Winegar, and Block Museum curator Janet Dees.

The Big Draw: Tracing the Building October 5, 6 PM Walter Kitundu is a multimedia artist and MacArthur Fellow whose practice ranges from building instruments to photographing wildlife. The Block Museum, a modernist structure designed by Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, sits a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan. As part of Evanston’s city-wide Big Draw, people of all ages were invited to join Kitundu in drawing in light on the Block building, responding to the architecture and the view beyond.

Opening Celebration: Salaam Cinema!

October 6, 5 PM The Block kicked-off of the Block Cinema film series Iranian Cinephilia with a celebration of the exhibition Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Movie Posters. The evening featured a gallery talk by curators Michelle Puetz and Hamid Naficy, as well as a conversation and screening with “the father of Iranian animation,” Nouredeen Zarrinkelk.

Keep the Shadow: The Body and Mourning October 13, 6 PM Block Graduate Fellow C.C. McKee drew connections between mourning-related objects and artworks from the Victorian Era and during the AIDS crisis—the foundation of his exhibition Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis. McKee was joined in conversation with professor Alessia Ricciardi, whose work has explored mourning from the perspective of psychoanalysis, literature and film.

A Conversation with Muna Tseng October 26, 6 PM Visitors experienced the work of Tseng Kwong Chi in a guided tour with Muna Tseng—choreographer, dancer, and sister of the artist. Tseng, who is the trustee of the Tseng Kwong Chi estate, led a guided tour of her brother’s life and art, giving insight to work whose complexity is belied by its easy humor and grace.

Inquisitive Traveler: A Walk Through the World(s) of Tseng Kwong Chi November 3, 12 PM Visitors experienced a lunch time walk through the world(s) of Tseng Kwong Chi led by Block Museum Curator of Global and Contemporary Art, Janet Dees. By focusing on a few select works in the exhibition Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, Dees highlighted some of the important themes running through the artist’s witty work.

Elizabeth and Todd Warnock Lecture Series: Jennifer Roberts (Harvard) The Sift: Screenprinting and the Art of the 1960s November 16, 5 PM Examining the work of Andy Warhol, Corita Kent, Ed Ruscha and others, this talk explored the specific material, historical, and conceptual qualities of the screenprinting medium.

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Artist Rashayla Marie Brown offers her “take” on Tseng Kwong Chi.

Artist Marie Watt leads a participatory sewing circle during the opening of the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember.

Lucid Figurations: Iranian Movie Poster & Film Art November 17, 7 PM Filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad opened the “Lucid Figurations” symposium with a discussion and screening of her 2014 film Tales.

November 18, 9 AM Two panels featuring international scholars and artists focused on the art of movie poster design and the culture of cinephilia in Iran. The symposium closed with a tribute to Abbas Kiarostami, presented by his son Ahmad Kiarostami.

Symposium co-sponsored by Northwestern University Department of Anthropology, Department of Radio-TV-Film, Screen Cultures Program, International Studies Program, Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Center for Global Culture and Communication

Opening Day: Kader Attia January 21, 2 PM The Block Museum celebrated the opening of a newly commissioned installation by internationally renowned artist Kader Attia, informed by his research in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies and interviews with Northwestern faculty across disciplines. Curators Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Janet Dees gave context to the project, followed by a conversation between Attia and Caroline Bledsoe and Peter Locke, faculty members in anthropology and global health studies. The conversation was moderated by art history PhD candidate Antawan I.Byrd.

Elizabeth and Todd Warnock Lecture Series: Purchased by L. Sickman in Peking: A Conversation with Marsha Haufler January 18, 5 PM Over the course of the 20th century, Western museums acquired quantities of thangkas (Tibetan-style paintings) made in Tibet and China. In the early 1930s, Laurence Sickman, acting on behalf of the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, acquired an impressive array of objects that became the foundation for one of the most highly regarded collections of Chinese art in America. Marsha Haufler, professor of art history at the University of Kansas, introduced Sickman’s thangkas and use them to illuminate the trade in such objects and their reception in American art museums.

This program was organized by the Department of Art History.

Opening Day: If You Remember, I’ll Remember February 4, 10 AM The exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember was an invitation to think about the present while reflecting on the past.

Visitors dropped in for a first look at the exhibition and joined artist Marie Watt in a sewing circle. Later, exhibition curator Janet Dees and participating artists Kristine Aono, Samantha Hill, Dario Robleto, and Marie Watt took part in a presentation and panel discussion on the show’s crucial themes.

Equity Sewing Circle with Artist Marie Watt February 8, 6 PM Blankets, one of the primary materials used by Seneca artist Marie Watt, are everyday objects that can carry extraordinary histories. Many of Watt’s larger blanket wor ks are made in community, notably in “sewing circles,” to bring people together in conversation and making. Over 140 community members joined us for hands-on participation in one of Watt’s projects while also taking part in conversation on the theme of equity.

Partners included Northwestern’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Steering Group, NAISA, CINAS, Multicultural Student Affairs, and the office of Neighborhood and Community Relations.

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History and Memory February 9, 7 PM In conjunction with the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember, curator Janet Dees introduced two videos by artist Rea Tajiri that highlight very personal experiences of the internment of Japanese Americans during Word War II— History and Memory (1991) and Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice (1994)

Deru Kugi Wa Utareru: Stories of Internment and Remembrance​ February 18, 2 PM February 19, 2017, marked the 75th anniversary of the signing of the executive order which called for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The Block commemorated this historic occasion through an interactive, intergenerational program held around the work of Sansei artist Kristine Aono. The afternoon was spent sharing stories of internment, and commemorating this historically relevant anniversary.

Hosting partners included Multicultural Student Affairs and the Japanese American Service Committee, Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, Japanese American Citizens League, Japanese Mutual Aid Society, and the Chicago Japanese American Council.

Cultural Production, State Violence, and Subjected Positions of Transgressions March 1, 5:30 PM The Northwestern Colloquium for Ethnicity and Diaspora provides a space for interrogating current issues of citizenship, race, and ethnicity. The Colloquium presented a panel that examined how national and state power leads to criminalization of racialized, gendered, queer(ed), and classed bodies. Speakers focused on the impact of visual culture in shaping continual and momentary “states of emergency” and the way that this violence is documented, archived, and remembered.

The Artist in the Archive: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Kader Attia in the Herskovits Library March 2, 5 PM As a foundation for producing his new commission for the Block, artist Kader Attia mined the holdings of Northwestern’s renowned Melville Herskovits Library of African Studies. The renowned library’s scope is as wide and diverse as the continent of Africa itself. Herskovits Library curator Esmeralda Kale presented a look at objects in the library’s collection that formed part of Attia’s research. Members of AfriSem, a consortium of graduate students focused on African Studies, then explored intertwined areas of Attia’s research—architecture, psychopathology, and prosthetics— taking materials from the Library as a point of departure.

Gallery Tour: Mining Pictures - Stories from Above and Below Ground March 7, 4 PM Block 2016-17 Curatorial Fellow Talia Shabtay offered a closer look at her exhibition Mining Pictures, examining images of the mining industry and the cultural construction of visual stories depicting workers and labor.

Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden March 31, 6 PM Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books) gathers, for the first time, poems from 35 of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Join award-winning editors and contributors Kwame Dawes, Matthew Shenoda, and Chris Abani for a reading and discussion of Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world. Book signing to follow.

This program was organized by Northwestern University Press.

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Elders shared their experiences of WWII incarciration during the Day of Remembrance.

Poets discuss the influence of Romare Bearden.

Department of Art Theory + Practice Visiting Artist: Adrián Villar Rojas April 3, 6 PM Known for his unique mixture of clay and concrete sculptures that crumble and decay over time, Adrián Villar Rojas’s installations draw on the history of Minimalist sculpture and Modernist architecture, creating works that refer back to classical antiquity as well as forward towards a future archaeology. Villar Rojas has been exhibiting worldwide for a number of years, including shows at the Venice Biennial (2011) and the Istanbul Biennial (2015). His project for the Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum in New York opened on April 14 2017.

This program was organized by the Department of Art Theory and Practice

Northwestern Program of African Studies Conference: AfriSem Keynote: Cajetan Iheka April 14, 4 PM What does Africa signify in the current moment, and how does it resonate with and trouble notions of African-ness?

Northwestern’s AfriSem presented a dynamic conversation on contemporary modes of thinking on “Africa” and “Africanity.” Keynote speaker Cajetan Iheka (University of Alabama) is author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature.

Installation Unveiling: Marie Watt: Sewing Community April 20, 6 PM In Winter 2017, community members from Northwestern, Evanston, and beyond joined together with artist Marie Watt to lend their hands to sewing circles, embroidering words of equity, maternity, and empowerment. These stitches and conversations became part of a new work for the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember. Community members joined us for the unveiling of this project and spoke with Watt about her community-based and participatory practice.

Open Engagement Open House April 21, 10 AM The Block Museum welcomed artists, scholars, practitioners, and advocates of socially engaged art from around the world visiting for the free Open Engagement national conference. Curator Janet Dees introduced If You Remember, I’ll Remember, artist Samantha Hill shared her work on the American South, curator Susy Bielak described the partnerships involved in community-based practice, and professor Rebecca Zorach went behind-the-scenes with the exhibition We Are Revolutionaries.

The program was presented in conjunction with the conference Open Engagement 2017 – JUSTICE.

Debt Dialogues: Reparations in the Native American and Japanese American Context April 26, 6 PM What does it mean to be indebted—politically, economically, artistically, or ethically? Artist Kristine Aono, whose work was featured in the exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember, was joined by Smith University’s Laura Fugikawa (Women and Gender Studies) as well as Northwestern’s Kelly Wisecup (English) to discuss the theory and complexity of reparations in American history.

Co-presented by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and made possible in part by the support of the Harris Lecture Fund.

Crowe Symposium: Art, Publics, Politics: Legacies of the Wall of Respect April 28, 10 AM; April 29, 9:30 AM In 1967, the Organization of Black American Culture painted a huge mural “guerrilla-style” on the wall of a decaying building on the South Side of Chicago. They called it the Wall of Respect. On the 50th anniversary of the project, scholars, artists, and participants convened to commemorate and mark the legacy of this act, which inspired a community mural movement that continues to resonate to this day.

Presented in partnership with the Department of Art History Participants in the Open Engagement Open House keep the conversation going.

WINTER/SPRING

Artwork in the MFA thesis exhibition Everything Is Fine invites audience participation.

Workshop: Poetry of Witness May 3, 5:30 PM All experience levels were welcome to a poetry discussion and creative writing workshop with the works of If You Remember, I’ll Remember. Together, participants read and discussed poems that repurposed found text to weave documentary works of witness through collage, juxtaposition, and response. After engaging with the exhibition, participants composed original poems that reframed individual experience through historical texts and materials.

This event was held in conjunction with the Evanston Literary Festival.

Department of Art Theory + Practice MFA Thesis Exhibition Opening May 4, 6 PM The Block celebrated the opening of Northwestern University’s Art Theory and Practice MFA Thesis Exhibition.

This event was organized by the Department of Art Theory and Practice and the Block Museum, Northwestern University.

Ordinary Media: Always-On Formats, Genres, Aesthetics May 18 Ordinary Media was a research workshop that investigates the ways in which digital technologies come to suffuse and saturate everyday experience. A day of new media screenings and talks culminated in a keynote from Shaka Mcglotten (SUNY Purchase), author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality.

The Block Collects: Lovis Corinth May 24, 4 PM Curatorial Assistant Linnea Hodge (WCAS, Art History 2017), led an afternoon gallery discussion of the works of Lovis Corinth (German, 1858-1925). A display of late self-portraits from the Block Museum collection showed an artist intensely examining or perhaps even resisting his own mortality. Corinth was among the best-known artists working in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany and an influential member of the Berlin Secession, a group of artists formed to challenge the official artists’ association.

Elizabeth & Todd Warnock Lecture Series: Alessandra Russo May 24, 5 PM Alessandra Russo (Columbia University) is a leading scholar of Latin American colonial art, visual culture, and literary studies. She is author of the books The Untranslatable Image (2014) and El realismo circular (2005), and co-editor of Images Take Flight (2015; best book award in “theory of art” and Grand Prix du Jury at FILAF, 2016), an exhibition catalog on Mexican indigenous feather painting.

This program was organized by the Department of Art History

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On October 6, 2016 just before sunset, visitors to the Block Museum joined Kitundu for an artist-led walk to see and hear the sounds of the lake at the museum’s doorstep. As the sky darkened, the artist and guests returned to the museum to “draw” together with light and shadow on the walls of the Block Museum lobby and the surrounding areas. Visitors used light projectors and constructions that Kitundu had crafted. Kitundu’s creations were inspired by the bronze sculpture installed permanently in the Block Museum lobby, Neil Goodman’s Subjects-Objects (2000) Tracing the Building was an event presented in conjunction with The Big Draw Evanston, a month-long festival of informal drawing programs.

ART +

ENGINEERING In 2016-2017, the Block Museum joined with the McCormick School of Engineering to inaugurate an ongoing series of Art + Engineering lectures addressing the intersections of creativity and scientific inquiry. During weeklong visits, the artists met with faculty throughout Northwestern to discuss parallels and alignments between areas of research. The visiting artists also conducted public lectures at both McCormick and the Block – underscoring the importance of creative modes of inquiry across disciplines and exemplifying the “whole-brain” thinking process that unites artistic and scientific research.

Hasan Elahi: Art and Surveillance Saturday, October 29 “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up.” —Hasan Elahi, The New York Times How do our lives translate to data? After 9/11, American interdisciplinary artist Hasan Elahi (b. 1972, Bangladesh) was the subject of an intensive, erroneous FBI investigation. He responded by putting his entire life online, from his financial data to transportation logs. The artist spoke about the resulting project, “Tracking Transience,” which explores the relationship between location, repetition, technology, and surveillance in the media age. Elahi’s visit was presented in partnership with the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Pedro Reyes

Hasan Elahi

Jen Bervin

Dario Robleto

Jen Bervin: Silk Poems Monday, February 13 Jen Bervin is an interdisciplinary artist and poet whose works weave together art, writing, science, and her own life. Bervin discussed her project Silk Poems, poems written in nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor. Consulting nanotechnology and biomedical labs, she fabricated a silk film with poems written in a six-character chain that corresponds to human DNA.

Dario Robleto: The Pulse Armed with a Pen: An Unknown History of the Human Heart Wednesday, May 10 Dario Robleto is a transdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and “citizen-scientist” whose research-driven practice results in intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, popular culture, science, war, and American history. Part storytelling, original research and rare sound performance, Robleto’s The Pulse Armed With a Pen wove together topics as diverse as the earliest attempts to record the heartbeat as sound and image, the heartbeat and brainwave recordings currently on a probe heading for the edge of the Solar System, pre-Edison sound recordings, and recent developments in the history of the artificial heart.

Art + Engineering: Pedro Reyes Wednesday, May 17, 2017 Pedro Reyes (b. 1972, Mexico City) has won international attention for large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. The artist’s works integrate elements of theater, psychology and activism and take on a variety of forms. In 2008, Reyes commenced Palas por Pistolas, a project that collected over 1,500 guns from donors throughout Mexico and melted them down into shovels. With those shovels, Reyes and his studio planted 1,500 trees. The program’s success garnered attention from the Mexican Army, which donated 6,700 weapons to the artist. These became the basis for Disarm (2013), which converted the donated military weapons into self-playing musical instruments.

VISUAL

VANGUARD In 2016-2017, the Block Museum inaugurated the Visual Vanguard speaker series. The series presents conversations with a new generation of global arts leaders working internationally who are transforming the way we experience and think about art today

The Barnes: A Singular Museum’s Past, Present, and Future Wednesday, November 2 Northwestern alumnus Thom Collins, an innovative museum director and accomplished art historian and educator, is the executive director and president of The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The Barnes is a renowned collection of post-impressionist and early modernist art that was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of fine arts and horticulture.” It has gone through significant transformation in its service to contemporary audiences since its move to Center City Philadelphia in 2012. Collins shared his perspective on the past, present, and future of the Barnes and the museum field more broadly.

Presented in partnership with the Northwestern University Department of Art History and supported by the Block Leadership Circle in memory of Phyllis Weil Ellis and her dedication to the Block Museum.

Bisi Silva [center] with Northwestern staff, faculty, and students.

Abdellah Karroum on Generation 00: Artists as Citizens Thursday, February 23 Abdellah Karroum spoke to his work as the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar and as the founder and artistic director of L’appartement 22, an experimental collaborative space for exhibitions and artists’ residencies in Rabat, Morocco. The museum director also discussed his recent research examining artistic production during the decade preceding the uprisings in Tunisia and the Arab world.

Karroum’s research focuses on the years between 1999 and 2011, highlighting a long decade of disruptive artistic initiatives that preceded the “revolutions” and political actions of the Arab Spring.

Presented in partnership with the Department of Art History and the Program in Middle East and North African Studies and with the support of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Bisi Silva, Director of Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos Wednesday, April 5 Bisi Silva is an independent curator and the founder and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, an innovative independent arts organization which opened in 2007 to provide a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. In 2012, CCA launched the ASIKO Art School, an intensive training program focused on the​critical theory, research​methodologies, and conceptual strategies​that underpin curatorial and ​artistic practice intended to address a gap in visual arts higher education for many artists, curators, and cultural practitioners across Africa. In her presentation, Silva discussed her practice through these institutions and shared future directions for her work.

Presented in partnership with the Northwestern Libraries and the Department of Art History with the support of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Program of African Studies, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Abdellah Karroum

Thom Collins

THE BLOCK AND

Y.O.U. In recent years, the Block Museum’s Engagement Department renewed its commitment to making community engagement a priority and instigating partner-driven work. From that point, the Block and Evanston’s Y.O.U. (Youth Opportunity United) began working together, co-hosting family nights at the Museum, organizing visits from elementary, middle, and high-school groups, connecting at Y.O.U.’s community schools, and, most substantially, collaborating on the Leadership Project—a program for Y.O.U. high-school students that fosters youth development through critical dialogue around issues of social justice.

In 2017, Y.O.U. and the Block interlaced the Leadership Project’s theme of “Defiance with Purpose” with the Block’s exhibition, If You Remember, I’ll Remember, which featured work by seven contemporary artists exploring themes of love, mourning, war, relocation, internment, resistance, and civil rights in 19th and 20th-century North America. Through visits with artists and ongoing dialogue in the galleries at the Block and back at Y.O.U. headquarters we are asking: Where do you see injustice in the world? What is the relationship between art and activism? What forms can resistance take?

Students of Y.O.U. participate in The Nail That Sticks Up the Farthest …” (2017), by artist Kristine Aono.

The 48-foot installation memorializes and draws attention to the internment during World War II of 120,313 Japanese-American residents, two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born American citizens. The Block Museum preparators and registrar team worked closely with the artist to execute her vision for the participatory work, which included 120,313 holes and 120,313 nails.

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BLOCK CINEMA Keep the Shadow September 29­–September 30 Two films, Listen To This: Videos by Tom Rubnitz and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), screened in conjunction with the Block exhibition Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis.

Iranian Cinephilia: From Filmfarsi to Art House Cinema October 6–November 18 This series featured ten discrete programs (and over 14 films) focusing on tough guy movies; new wave and art house films; post-revolutionary women’s films; and films made in exile. Many of these films highlighted the cinephilic culture and cinema inside Iran, including the earliest extant Iranian silent fiction movie by Ovanes Ohanians, Mr. Haji the Movie Actor (1933), which will be screened with live piano accompaniment. Filmmakers Noureddin Zarrinkelk, Rakhshan Banietemad, and Ahmad Kiarostami presented their films in person and engaged in conversation with Northwestern University students, faculty, visiting scholars, and the community.

Gordon Parks Jr., Three the Hard Way [still], 1974

Exploiting Who? Fred Williamson’s Revolutionary Heroes in 1970s Blaxploitation Film October 13–October 14 This program highlighted the work of Northwestern alumnus Fred Williamson, who was in attendance to introduce and discuss two of his greatest starring roles. A professional football player-turned-actor/filmmaker, Williamson is one of the most iconic directors and stars of 1970s black action films (commonly referred to as “Blaxploitation”— a term which Williamson amongst others believes was coined to discredit the films). Williamson created and preserved his onscreen persona from the ghettoized roles for black men that plagued Hollywood pre-1970. These films presented social issues to a mainstream audience by following black heroes who overcome symbolic oppression.

Karl Wirsum (1973) November 4 Digitally restored by Pentimenti Productions, Suzanne Simpson’s Karl Wirsum is a little-known 1973 film that peeks into the sun-dappled California studio of a young artist as he embarks on an extraordinary career. Wirsum’s psychedelic marionette sculptures still dazzle today, while his narration and a newly composed mind-bending soundtrack (performed live) draw viewers into his process and personality. Live musical accompaniment by Alex Inglizian and Marc Riordan.

A post-screening discussion was moderated by John Corbett featured Karl Wirsum, filmmaker Suzanne Simpson, Alex Inglizian, and Marc Riordan

Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation 2016 November 11–November 12 The Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation returned to the Block Cinema for its seventh annual festival. Founded in Chicago in 2010 by filmmakers Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré, Eyeworks is a curated annual festival that exhibits classic and contemporary experimental animation. The 2016 Eyeworks screenings at the Block featured two programs of short films, with classic and contemporary films programmed side-by-side. In addition, this year the festival included Habfürdő, a dazzling 1979 Hungarian feature by by György Kovásznay. Festival directors Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré introduced the programs in person.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Salaam Cinema [still], 1995

BLOCK CINEMA

WINTER

“The Gay Left”: Homosexuality in the Era of Late Socialism February 3–March 3 The series The Gay Left considered the complex ways in which the ideologies of communism, socialism, and capitalism affect sexual minorities. Including work from both sides of the Iron Curtain the series brought multiple perspectives and historical moments into conversation in order to fight against forgetting. First in the series was the Yugoslavian cult classic WR : Mysteries of the Organism (1971) which was banned for sixteen years in the country for “deriding the Socialist Federal Republic.” In It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971) director Rosa von Praunheim carefully dissects the landscape and codes of gay West Germany. It was after a screening of this film in 1971 that the first gay rights organization formed in West Berlin, heralding a new era of public visibility and political agitation among gays and lesbians. Another Way (1982), the first mainstream Hungarian film to deal with lesbianism, gained a dedicated cult following among the GBLTQ youth during the cold war. Finally Bruce LaBuce’s 2002 satirical and sexy The Raspberry Reich posits a political dystopia where residents are invited to liberate themselves from their heterosexuality and “join the homosexual intifada.”

Japanese Experimental Cinema—Between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975 February 16–February 17 Presented as a cinematic compliment to the Art Institute of Chicago’s contemporaneous exhibition, Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960–1975, these three screenings provided an opportunity to explore the historical intersection of experimental filmmaking with documentary cinema traditions in a period of radical social and political change. These programs offered a glimpse into how Japanese filmmakers working in the late 1960s linked experimentation with cinema – the materiality of film, multiple projection, and genre conventions – to the political upheavals of this moment. Interventions in the aesthetics and the institution of cinema parallel, in many of these films, challenges to cultural conventions and social institutions of the period. Scholar and curator Hirasawa Gō, and director

Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2014) February 28 Arthur Jafa and Kahlil Joseph’s 2014 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death, explores the question of what it means to be black in America in the 21st century through a series of interviews with individuals including visual artist Kara Walker, author Hortense Spillers, filmmaker Charles Burnett, and ex–Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver. The film was presented by the Northwestern University Black Arts Initiative which hosted a post screening conversation around race and identity.

Dušan Makavejev, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism [still], 1971

The Cinema Of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics April 6–April 28 Chantal Akerman died in October 2015 at the age of sixty-five, leaving behind a body of work that spans five decades and stands as one of the most significant contributions to modern cinema. Positioned in between fiction and documentary, Akerman’s films give visibility to those people and places that our culture overlooks or relegates to the margins because of gender, race, or age; or simply because they have found themselves on the wrong side of history. This series culminated in a one-day symposium, The Cinema of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics, organized by the Northwestern Image Lab and the Department of French and Italian. The symposium brought together renowned scholars from the fields of film and media studies, art history, and political theory, and took place on Friday, April 28, 2017.

Los Muertos (2004) April 7 Acclaimed filmmaker Lisandro Alonso presented his film, Los Muertos, at the Block. Los Muertos, Alonso’s first feature, is a key film of the New Argentine Cinema, a loose movement of filmmakers that directly and obliquely deal with Argentina’s troubled history and its place in the modern world. Los Muertos is a haunting, quiet film about the physical and psychic journey of a man recently released from prison. Already on the fringes of society, Vargas moves further into the untamed jungle and waterways as he travels to find his adult daughter.

Sponsored by Northwestern University Department of Radio/Television/Film, The Alumnae of Northwestern University, Northwestern University Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University MFA in Documentary Media.

Nancy Buirski, The Loving Story [still], 2011

SPRING

BLOCK CINEMA

The Loving Story (2011) Lisandro Alonso, Los Muertos [still], 2004

May 11 Janet Dees, curator of If You Remember, I’ll Remember, selected Nancy Buirski’s film The Loving Story to screen in conjunction with the exhibition. The exhibition featured McCallum & Tarry’s Exchange (2007) which resonates with this film’s subjects, Richard and Mildred Loving. This documentary, through interviews and historical documentation, illuminates the story of the Lovings, who were taken into custody and imprisoned in 1958 for illegally co-habitating as a mixed race couple- their miscegenation represented a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act.

2017 NU Student Film Festival May 19 Attendees explored the next wave of independent short films at the 2017 Northwestern University Student Film Festival. The Block screened a wide variety of documentaries, fiction shorts, music videos, experimental films and animated pieces created by students from across the NU community. The festival also featured a live, multimedia music performance by Leo Galbraith-Paul, Justin Enoch, and Brock Stuessi.

Organized by the Radio/Television/Film Department’s RTVF 398: Curatorial Practices class.

NU DOCS June 6–June 9 Northwestern University’s MFA in Documentary Media proudly presented the thesis films of its second graduating class. Audiences watched a great selection of new short documentaries, engaged in dialogue with the filmmakers, and celebrated their accomplishments.

Organized by the Radio/Television/Film Department’s RTVF 398: Curatorial Practices class.

BLOG POSTS 1. Art + Engineering: Dario Robleto on the shared quest of art and science Aug 29, 2017

26. Collection Spotlight: Night Shift 3 (Gece Vardlyasi 3), Vahap Avşar Mar 8, 2017 27. Meet Veronica L.S. Robinson, Block Museum Assistant Registrar Mar 1, 2017 28. “Generation 00: Cultural Practices before the Middle East Uprisings” colloquium with Abdellah

2. Poets Respond to the art of Romare Bearden at the Block Aug 23, 2017

Karroum Feb 21, 2017

3. Northern Trust to Donate Artwork to Block Museum at EXPO CHICAGO 2017 Aug 16, 2017

29. Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory – Exhibition Opening Day Feb 15, 2017

4. Bisi Silva on building sustainable contemporary arts organizations in Nigeria Aug 9, 2017

30. Themes of protest and dissent unite a season of cinema Feb 8, 2017

5. Art + Engineering: Pedro Reyes on the beauty of non-directed research Aug 1, 2017

31. ‘If You Remember, I’ll Remember’ poses timely questions Feb 2, 2017

6. Tananbaums Endow Curator Position at Block Museum of Art Jul 26, 2017

32. Collection Spotlight: Project Diaspora, Omar Victor Diop Jan 25, 2017

7. Block Museum to explore ‘William Blake and the Age of Aquarius’ Jul 19, 2017

33. Announcing Winter 2017 Program Lineup Jan 18, 2017

8. Collection Spotlight: Berlin (traced and painted), First, Louise Lawler - Jul 12, 2017

34. Scholars of Iranian Film Speak at Lucid Figurations Symposium Jan 11, 2017

9. Block Museum Named Among Terra Foundation Grantees for Art Design Chicago 2018 Jul 5,

35. Acclaimed artist Kader Attia to unveil solo exhibition at Block Museum Jan 3, 2017

2017

36. Collection Spotlight: Peace I: Life of Tolstoy, Komar & Melamid Dec 20, 2016

10. Scholars and artists on the complex history of Chicago’s public art Jun 28, 2017

37. The New York Times Names Block Exhibition to list of “The Best Art of 2016” Dec 14, 2016

11. Block Museum’s Engagement Program Featured in “Next Practices in Partnership” Jun 21, 2017

38. Meet Lauren Cochard Watkins, Block Museum Engagement Manager Dec 7, 2016

12. Collection Spotlight: Untitled from International Nickel series, W. Eugene Smith Jun 14, 2017

39. The Block Announces NEH Support for 2019 Exhibition on the Global History of Trans-Saharan

13. Art + Engineering: Jen Bervin on her poetic and material influences Jun 7, 2017 14. Marie Watt takes on Ferocious Mothers and Wild Legacies in new Block Museum Commission May 31, 2017

Trade Nov 30, 2016 40.

Thom Collins talks new strategies for the Barnes Foundation Nov 23, 2016

41. Collection Spotlight: Manguera Dormida (Sleeping Hose), Gabriel Orozco Nov 16, 2016

15. If You Remember, I’ll Remember – Opening Day Conversation May 24, 2017

42. Hasan Elahi Examines the Intersection of Technology and Art Nov 9, 2016

16. Collection Spotlight: Death and the Artist (Tod und Künstler), Lovis Corinth May 16, 2017

43. Artists and Scholars Give Their “Five Takes” on Tseng Kwong Chi during exhibition opening

17. 120,313 Nails Illustrate a Weighty American History May 10, 2017

celebration Nov 2, 2016

18. Block acquires 1967 study portrait for Wall of Respect by Jeff Donaldson May 2, 2017

44.

19. Exhibition, Website, and Symposium trace colorful legacy of the Wall of Respect Apr 25, 2017

45. Meet the Block Museum 2016-2017 Graduate Curatorial Fellow, Talia Shabtay Oct 19, 2016

20. Block Museum and University Libraries collaborate on installation of Félix González-Torres

46. Block Collection Spotlight: Untitled (Venice Biennale), Fred Wilson Oct 12, 2016

work Apr 19, 2017 21. Block Museum receives major gift of photography by Edward Steichen Apr 11, 2017

Tracing the Building with Walter Kitundu Oct 26, 2016

47. Materiality in Art: Weinberg and McCormick Students Collaborate to Uncover the Material Science of Art at the Block Museum Sep 29, 2016

22. Block Student Docents – Learning and Leading in the Gallery Apr 5, 2017

48. Fall 2016 Block Cinema Lineup Released Sep 21, 2016

23. Block Museum staff proud to be ‘Readers of Evanston’ Mar 29, 2017

49. Block Collection Spotlight: Untitled (Milk Strainer), Mona Hatoum Sep 14, 2016

24. Announcing Spring 2017 Program Lineup Mar 21, 2017

50. Announcing Fall 2016 Program Lineup Sep 7, 2016

25. Northwestern’s Charlotte Moorman exhibition crosses Atlantic Mar 15, 2017

AC Q U I S I T I O N S Halsman, Philippe, (American, 1906 –1979) Marilyn Monroe, “Life” Cover, 1952 Printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 x 7 3/4 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.12.1

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Isadora Duncan, c. 1901 Platinum print 13 x 10 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.1

Winogrand, Garry (American, 1928–1984) Untitled from the series “Women are Beautiful”, c. 1970 Gelatin silver print Gift of the Keller Family 2016.12.2

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Professor Carl Mark, 1902 Gum bichromate print 9 5/8 x 4 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.2

Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) Building Studio, 1956 Oil crayon on paper 16 1/4 x 21 1/2 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.1 Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) Masons, 1955 Oil crayon on paper 9 x 11 5/8 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.2 Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) Newburgh Farm Series #71, Graphite on Paper 15 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.3a‑c Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) War Hero, 1958 Watercolor and ink on paper 30 x 22 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.4 Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) Resting, 1962 Pastel on paper 30 3/8 x 24 3/8 x 3/8 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.5 Keller, Charles (American, 1914–1978) We Demand Work, Lithograph crayon on paper 20 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches Gift of the Keller Family 2016.13.6 Snider, Larry (American, born 1938) Sadhu on Kedara Kenda Steps, [Varanasi], India 2008, 2008 Inkjet print 29 x 38 1/2 inches Gift of Larry K. Snider 2016.14

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Maria & Jean Pierre Steichen, 1902 Gum bichromate over platinum print 7 7/8 x 6 1/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.3 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Eleanor Duse, New York, 1903 Platinum print 9 1/2 x 5 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.4 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Mary & Her Mother, France, 1904 Gum bichromate over platinum print 6 7/8 x 5 1/2 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.5 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Stieglitz and Daughter Kitty, 1905 (Printed before 1958) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Hollander Family in hon‑ or of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.6 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Steeplechase Day, Paris; After the Races, 1906 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.7

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Steeplechase Day, Paris; After the Races, 1906 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 10 3/4 x 11 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.8 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Mrs. Eugene Meyer, 1910 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 x 7 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.9 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Untitled, c.1910 Platinum print 7 3/4 x 5 13/16 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.10 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Isadora Duncan (woman holding knee up) c. 1913 Platinum print 10 x 8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.11 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Meyer Child, 1915 Platinum print 9 3/4 x 7 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.12 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Epiphylium, c. 1920 Gelatin silver print 9 ½ x 7 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.13 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Grasshopper, 1920 Gelatin silver print 13 x 10 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.14

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) An Apple, a Boulder, a Mountain, France 1921 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.16 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Diagram of Doom, c. 1921 (Printed 1950s) Gelatin silver print 10 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.17 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) The Grand Canal, Venice, 1921 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 10 ¾ x 12 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.18 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Harmonica Riddle, 1921 (Printed c.1950) Gelatin silver print 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.19 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Self‑portrait, 1921 Gelatin silver print 10 x 7 15/16 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.20 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Three Pears and an Apple, France, c.1921 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 16 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.21 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Constantin Brancusi, c. 1922 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.22 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Dana Steichen (in robe), 1923 Bromide print 13 5/8 x 10 1/2 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.23

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Mr. and Mrs/ Sandburg, Elmhurst, Illinois (Vanity Fair) November 1923, 1923 Gelatin silver print Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.24 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Untitled (flower and butterfly), 1925 Gelatin silver print 8 x 9 7/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.25 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Stars on Sixth Avenue, 1925 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 5/8 x 10 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.26 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Sunday Night on Fortieth Street, New York 1925 Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.27

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Design for Steihl Silks, 1926 (Printed c.1960) Gelatin silver print 13 5/8 x 10 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.28 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Avocadoes, 1930 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.29 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Hat Trick-Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1931 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 6 1/4 x 13 3/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.30 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Martha Graham, New York, 1931 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.31

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Sunflower in Seed, 1920, Gelatin silver print, 7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.15

AC Q U I S I T I O N S Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Martha Graham, New York, 1931 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.32

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) W.B. Yeats, c. 1932, 1932, (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.39

Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Vikki + Her Mom Carol + Brother Dereck, Pittsburgh Shelter for Battered Women, 1984 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.2

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Martha Graham, New York, 1931 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.33

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Cannon Towels, Dixie Ray, c. 1934 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.40

Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) AMEND Batterers Program, Denver, Colorado, 1985 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.3

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Thomas Mann, New York, 1934 Gelatin silver print 9 ¾ x 7 ½ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.41

Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Battered Woman + Cop Philadelphia, 1986 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.4

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Martha Graham, New York, 1931 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.34 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Alfred Stieglitz, Photographed against a Window at “251” Fifth Avenue, 1932 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 x 10 1/2 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.35 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Radio City, New York, 1932 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.36 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Self‑Portrait (smoking), 1932 Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.37 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Singing Wires and Buzzing Bees (Nell and Joan Martin), 1932 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 16 ½ x 13 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.38

Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Vogue, 1934 (Printed 1950s) Gelatin silver print 13 ½ x 10 ½ inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.42 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Edward Steichen Self‑Portrait, 1935 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.43 Steichen, Edward (American, 1879–1973) Birds on Telephone Wires, c. 1935 (Printed 1960s) Gelatin silver print 13 5/8 x 16 5/8 inches Gift of the Hollander Family in hon‑ or of Alissa Schapiro 2016.15.44 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Mold Jello Not Women Protest, California 1984 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.1

Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Women’s Advocates St. Paul, 1986 Inkjet Print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88, 2016.16.5 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Diamond, the boy who said “NO,” for hit‑ ting his Mom, Minneapolis, 1987 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.6 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Diana Tire Marks, Minneapolis, 1988 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.7 Donna Ferrato, (American, b.1949) Meredith + her dog, Lucky, Santa Cruz, CA, 1998 Pigment print Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.9 Donna Ferrato, (American, b.1949) Women Who Kill in Self Defense serve 3 times longer than the Men who Killed their Wives, 1989 Pigment print Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.10

Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Gabriel the Wife Killer, Sacramento, CA 1988 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.8 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Meredith + her dog, Lucky, Santa Cruz, CA 1998 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.9 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Women Who Kill in Self Defense serve 3 times longer than the Men Who Kill Their Wives, 1989 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.10 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Mother + Daughter Murdered by an Abusive Boyfriend, Washington, DC, 1993 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.11 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Children Who Witness Violence, Ernie + Brianna’s Doll, Vermont, 1995 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88 2016.16.12 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Diamond, Age 27, became a hairdresser and chose to live free from all forms of Abuse, Minneapolis, 2007 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88, 2016.16.13 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Vikki + Her Mom, Pittsburgh, Holding a LWTE Book shows the way they were in 1984, 2007 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88, 2016.16.14 Ferrato, Donna (American, b.1949) Margo, Mt. Tamalpias, 2010 Inkjet print 20 x 24 inches Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ‘88, 2016.16.15

Ledgerwood, Judy (American, b. 1959) Study for Doha Painting AP, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.1 Ledgerwood, Judy (American, born 1959) Study for Doha Painting, #1, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.2 Ledgerwood, Judy (American, born 1959) Study for Doha Painting #2, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.3 Ledgerwood, Judy (American, born 1959) Study for Doha Painting #3, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.4 Ledgerwood, Judy (American, born 1959) Study for Doha Painting #4, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.5 Ledgerwood, Judy (American, born 1959) Study for Doha Painting #6, 2013 Acrylic on paper 10 x 30 inches Gift of the artist, 2017.1.6 Donaldson, Jeff (American, 1932 - 2004) Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis), 1967 Oil on heavy cream wove paper with mixed media 24 x 18 inches Purchase with funds from Block Friends of Art 2017.2 Goshorn, Shan (Eastern Band of Cherokee, b. Baltimore 1957) Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance, 2012 Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks, acrylic paint Purchase with a gift from Sandra Lynn Riggs and members of the Block Leadership Circle 2017.3 Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Wisconsin, 1987 (tractors), 1987 Gelatin silver print, Selenium-toned 20 x 16 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive 2017.4.2

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Adele Simpson and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3a Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Arnold Scaasi, Louise Nevelson and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the Portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3b Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Gladys Solomon, Tseng Kwong Chi and Jean Tailer, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3c Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Jaqueline, de Ribes and Tseng Kwong Chi 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3d Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Monique van Vooren, Andy Warhol, his entourage and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3e

AC Q U I S I T I O N S

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Nancy Kissinger and Tseng Kwong Chi 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3f

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Unidentified Woman, Karen Björnson, Halston and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3k

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Paloma Picasso and Tseng Kwong Chi 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3g

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Yve Saint Laurent and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3l-n

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Tseng Kwong Chi and Fran Lebowitz, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3h

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Unidentified Metropolitan Museum of Art guard and Tseng Kwong Chi, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met (Printed 2014) Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive 2017.4.4

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Tseng Kwong Chi and Mary Martz, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3i

“The Block is committed not only to maintaining a global perspective but to promoting interdisciplinary discussions, both of which are brought out by Tseng’s humorously critical and satirical photographs.”

-Janet Dees, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Mt Rushmore, North Dakota (from the series East Meets West a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series), 1986 Gelatin silver print, selenium-toned 36 x 36 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.1

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Tseng Kwong Chi and Pauline Trigère, 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Purchased by the Block Museum Board Advisors in honor of Provost Daniel Linzer for his dedication to the arts at Northwestern and to the Block Museum of Art 2017.4.3j

Tseng, Kwong Chi, (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Tseng Kwong Chi posing with mannequins 1980 From the portfolio Costumes at the Met (Printed 2014) Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive 2017.4.5 Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Tseng Kwong Chi with Daniel Fore, 1981 From the series Moral Majority (Printed 2014) Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive 2017.4.6

Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Jerry Falwell with Jeanne Gianas and Bruno Schmidt, 1981 From the series Moral Majority Printed 2014 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive 2017.4.7 Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) John “Terry” Dolan, 1981 From the series Moral Majority Printed 2014 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive, 2017.4.8 Tseng, Kwong Chi (Chinese, American, 1950–1990) Alfonso D’Amato, 1981 From the series Moral Majority Printed 2014 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 inches Gift of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc./ Tseng Kwong Chi Archive, 2017.4.9 Sango, Brighton (Zimbabwean, 1958– 1995) Remembering Old Times, c. 1981 Green serpentine stone 31 x 22 x 20 inches In memory of Philip Pearlman, Gift of Kevin Stein 2017.5 Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Barbie, 1997 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.1 Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.2 Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.3

AC Q U I S I T I O N S AC Q U I S I T I O N S Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Barbie, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.4

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Mein Kampf, 1994 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.13

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Wild West, 1988 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.17

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Barbie, 1997 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.5

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Mein Kampf, 1994 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.14

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Wild West, 1988 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.18

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Blackface, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.6

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Mein Kampf, 1994 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.15

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Wild West, 1988 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.19

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Blackface, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.7

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Wild West, 1988 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.16

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Wild West, 1988 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.20

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Blackface, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.8 Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Blackface, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.9

“This is a relatively early work by Donaldson, and it shows a fresh and immediate approach to representation. It’s exciting to see how the work also hints at a fracturing of the background space, a practice that became a signature of the artist’s later work.”

-Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Blackface, 1998 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor, 2017.6.10

The exhibition We Are Revolutionaries: The Wall of Respect and Chicago’s Mural Movement ran April 21 to June 18, 2017. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Block Museum was pleased to announce an important acquisition for the Museum’s permanent collection. The Museum purchased a 1967 study portrait of trumpet player and band leader Miles Davis by artist Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004). The work is one of the rare remaining sketches for The Wall of Respect and provides valuable documentation of Donaldson’s process in thinking about his portion of the mural. In the final version of the Wall, Donaldson included his portrait of Miles Davis among other portraits of African-American musicians, including John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins. The painting also has significance for Northwestern University, as Donaldson earned a Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern in 1974, the first African American to do so.

Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Mein Kampf, 1994 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.11 Levinthal, David (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Mein Kampf, 1994 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches Gift of an anonymous donor 2017.6.12

The collection in use for teaching in the Eloise W. Martin Study Center.

After its presentation at the Block Museum, the painted sketch traveled to London’s Tate Modern to be part of the exhibition The Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was on view from July to October 2017. The Soul of a Nation will also travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was also part of the exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, which originated at the MCA in Chicago in 2016.

L OA N S ON SPACE AND PLACE: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM CHICAGO, VANCOUVER, LOS ANGELES AND MEXICO CITY DePaul Art Museum September 15, 2016–December 18, 2016 Douglas, Stan Michigan Theater 3 from The Renaissance Society Photographic Portfolio, 1998/2011 Inkjet print 21 3/4 x 17 5/8 inches Purchase funds contributed by Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross 2014.1f IN HER OWN RIGHT: MARION MAHONY GRIFFIN Elmhurst History Museum October 2, 2016–March 12, 2017 Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) Fireplace Design for H.M. Mess Dwelling, Winnetka, Illinois, 1912 Pen and black ink on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.26 Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) G.B. Cooley Dwelling, Monroe, Louisiana 1910 (built 1926) Pen and black ink over graphite on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.32 Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) Walter Burley Griffin’s Own House, Winnetka, Illinois, 1912 (not built) Pen and black ink on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.108 Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) H.M. Mess Dwelling, Winnetka, Illinois 1912 Pen and black ink over graphite on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.109

F RO M T H E M U S E U M COLLECTION

Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) Ralph D. Griffin Dwelling, Edwardsville, Illinois, 1909 Pen and black ink on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.111

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Quelle sale représentation, mon Dieu!

(What a disgusting company, my God!) 1835 Lithograph on white wove paper 13 3/8 x 21 1/2 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.15

Griffin, Walter Burley (American, 1876– 1937) Griffin, Marion Mahony (American, 1871–1961) J.G. Melson Dwelling, Mason City, Iowa 1912 Pen and black ink on drafting linen Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin 1985.1.120

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Lascours (Lascours), 1835 Lithograph on sur blanc 13 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.17

“WHAT A FRIGHTFUL SPECTACLE!”: LITHOGRAPHS OF HONORE DAUMIER Northern Illinois University Art Museum March 28–May 20, 2017 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Très humbles, très soumis, très obéis‑ sans............... et surtout très voraces Sujets (Very humble, very obedient, very submissive, and most of all, very vora‑ cious subjects), 1832 Lithograph on white wove paper 10 1/4 x 13 11/16 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.1 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Masques de 1831 (Masks of 1831), 1832 Lithograph on white wove paper 10 1/4 x 4 1/16 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.2 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) D’Arg.... (D’Arg....), 1832 Lithograph with hand-colored additions on white wove paper 13 3/8 x 10 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.3 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Mr. Keratr (Mr. Keratr), 1833 Lithograph on white wove paper 14 1/4 x 10 5/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.5 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Ah! tu veux te frotter à la presse!! (So, you want to meddle with the press!), 1833 Lithograph on white wove paper 13 15/16 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.6

L OA N S Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Je ne te dirai pas vas te faire..... sucre! je te dirai vas te faire cuire! (I won’t tell you to go and get lost, sugar.... I’ll tell you: go and get cooked), 1839 Lithograph on newsprint 14 1/8 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.67 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) L’élection (The election), 1843 Lithograph on newsprint 14 3/4 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.120

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Soul en enfant de coeur (Soul as a choir boy), 1833 Lithograph on newsprint 11 7/8 x 9 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.19

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Une révolte a bord (A revolt on board), 1843 Lithograph on sur blanc 14 1/4 x 9 11/16 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.123

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Un propriétaire (A landlord), 1837 Lithograph on newsprint 10 x 14 1/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.29

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) L’hôtel des haricots (In jail), 1843 Lithograph on newsprint 15 x 9 13/16 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.130

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Monsieur Bertrand, la confiance de mes concitoyens m’a placé à la tête de cette administration... (Mr. Bertrand, my fellow citizens have entrusted me with the running of this administration...), 1838 Lithograph on newsprint 9 13/16 x 14 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.35

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Un amour propre satisfait (A vanity suitably gratified), 1844 Lithograph on newsprint 14 x 9 1/2 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.133

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Orchestre en plein vent (Mois de Fevrier) (An open air orchestra (Month of Febru‑ ary)), 1839 Lithograph on newsprint 9 5/8 x 14 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan, 2002.3.43 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Parade du Charivari (Parade of Le Charivari), 1839 Lithograph on newsprint 14 1/2 x 10 3/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.44

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Guerriers Chinois (Chinese warriors), 1844 Lithograph on sur blanc paper 13 3/8 x 10 1/2 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.143 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) La présidente criant a tue- tête (The president shouting at the top of her voice) 1844 Lithograph 13 x 9 1/2 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.154 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Oui, on veut dépouiler cet orphélin... (Yes, they would plunder this orphan...), 1845 Lithograph on newsprint 10 x 14 3/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.158

F RO M T H E M U S E U M C O L L E CT I O N

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Le dortoir d’un pensionnat bien tenu (The dormitory of a distinguished boarding school), 1845 Lithograph on sur blanc wove paper 10 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.174

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Belle dame, voulez-vous bien accepter mon bras? (Fair lady, will you accept my arm?), 1851 Lithograph on white wove paper 14 3/4 x 10 1/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.221

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Un père qui fait sucer à son fils le lait des bons principes (A father who makes his son suck in the ambrosia of sound principles from an early age on) 1847 Lithograph on newsprint 13 7/8 x 9 5/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.189

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Le Sire de Berryer se fesant recevoir che‑ valier dans l’ordre philantropico-militaire du Dix-Décembre (Lord Berryer is being knighted in the philanthropic-mili‑ tary order of December 10), 1851 Lithograph on newsprint 14 x 10 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.222

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Vue d’une antichambre ministérielle, sous n’importe quel gouvernement (Lobby of a minister of any government), 1849 Lithograph on newsprint 14 3/4 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.204

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Dans un jardin D’Auteuil (In a garden at Auteuil), 1852 Lithograph on surblanc wove paper 10 7/8 x 14 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.226

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Sarrans Jeune (Sarrans, der Jüngere), 1848 Lithograph on newsprint 14 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.208 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Gambon (Peupin), 1849 Lithograph on newsprint 14 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.209 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Seul costume réellement approprié à ce personnage qui a été qualifié à tort du titre de Burgrave (This is the only really appropriate costume for this person who inappropriately received the title of Burgrave), 1850 Lithograph on newsprint 14 7/8 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.215 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Un Replatrage (Road repair work), 1851 Lithograph on newsprint 9 3/8 x 13 3/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.219

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Une leçon de botanique (A lesson in botanics), 1852 Lithograph on surblanc wove paper 14 5/16 x 10 3/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.235 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Faut pas vous désoler comme ça, ma pauv’ grappe, nous vous portons dans un hôpital où il y a des savans... (Don’t get upset like that, my poor grapes, we are taking you to the hospital, where there are experts...)

1853 Lithograph on newsprint 9 3/4 x 13 3/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.240 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Ah! bourgeois..... que trois francs pour une course, vous n’êtes guère généreux!......

(Ah, bourgeois... only three francs for this trip... you are not very generous!)

1855 Lithograph on newsprint 7 3/4 x 10 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.256

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Les Boursicotières (Ladies from the Stock Exchange), 1856 Lithograph on newsprint 8 x 9 5/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.260

SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER Tate Modern, London, England July 12, 2017–October 22, 2017 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas February 2, 2018–April 23, 2018

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) L’astronome allemand lâchant un fameux canard (The German astronomer releasing a famous duck ), 1857 Lithograph on newsprint 8 3/4 x 10 1/8 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.274

Donaldson, Jeff (American, 1932–2004) Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis), 1967 Oil on heavy cream wove paper with mixed media 24 x 18 inches Purchased with funds from Block Friends of Art 2017.2

“This innovative work builds upon the Block collection’s traditional strengths in works on paper and bolsters the number of works by contemporary Native American artists in the collection, which also includes works by Frank Big Bear, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dylan Miner, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.”

- Janet Dees, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Parisiens prenant déjà leurs précautions pour ne pas être rôtis par la comète (Pari‑ sians already taking their precautions to avoid being roasted by the comet), 1857 Lithograph on newsprint 9 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.276 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Galilée très-surpris du nouvel aspect qu’offre la surface de la terre (Galileo, amazed at the new aspect of the earth’s surface), 1867 Lithograph on newsprint 13 x 11 inches Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.322 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Lanterne magique!!! (The Magic Lantern) 1869 Lithograph on newsprint Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.336 Daumier, Honoré (French, 1808–1879) Ceci a tué cela (These are responsible for those!), 1871 12 1/2 x 9 3/8 inches Lithograph Gift of Sidney and Vivian Kaplan 2002.3.345

Shan Goshorn’s Cherokee Burden Basket: Singing a Song for Balance (2012) was acquired by the Block Museum in 2017 after being featured in the group exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember, along with several other works by the artist. Goshorn’s conceptual baskets combine Cherokee aesthetics with thought-provoking content—including historical photographs and texts—to address the links between historical events and ongoing struggles for Native American sovereignty and selfdetermination. The paper splints from which the basket is woven are printed with excerpts from historical documents, including the Carlisle Indian Boarding School mission, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Treaty of New Echota—an 1835 treaty in which the Cherokee purportedly agreed to leave their territory in North Carolina for land in Oklahoma.

DEPARTMENT

REPORTS BLOCK CINEMA

C O M M U N I CAT I O N S

In keeping with the Museum’s commitment to presenting art across time, culture, and media, Block Cinema’s 2016-17 screenings and special events highlighted the diversity of voices in and around Northwestern, as well as the exciting changes taking place in the cinematic arts. We continue to emphasize bringing filmmakers to campus to introduce and discuss their work. Providing this unique opportunity for our audiences to gain valuable insights into the creative process has carved out a unique niche for our program within. Guests this year included the Iranian filmmakers Ahmad Kiarostami, Rakhshān Banietemad, and Noureddin Zarrinkelk, as well as Masanori Oe, Arthur Jafa, Lisandro Alonso, Fred Williamson, and Suzanne Simpson among many others. Our most engaging programs emphasized the strengths of the Museum and its commitment to global and cross-cultural art, and drew attention to underrepresented films and filmmakers.

2016-2017 has been a year of extraordinary growth for the Block Museum’s communication goals. Committing to weekly updates to our 14,000 newsletter subscribers, we sent 45 email newsletters over the course of the year with a 25% open rate – much higher than the industry average. Our social media engagement on all channels has grown more than 150% in the last year, particularly within Facebook–with the number of followers moving from 3,200 on September 1, 2016, to 8,165 on September 1, 2017.

In the fall of 2016, Block Cinema partnered with Northwestern University Archives to present a short tribute to Northwestern alumnus Fred Williamson. Block Cinema also partnered with artists and curators Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carr to bring the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation to campus for its second year. In conjunction with the Block Museum’s exhibition Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Movie Posters, we hosted an extensive screening series surveying over 70 years of Iranian film history, including a symposium with leading scholars and filmmakers in Iranian film.

In Winter 2016, we were fortunate to have scholar/film curator Hirasawa Gō and filmmaker Masanori Oe in person for a series of Japanese experimental cinema focusing on the 1960s and 1970s. We also invited Art History Ph.D. student Thomas Love to program a series based on his research on how the ideologies of communism, socialism, and capitalism address sexual minorities, which he titled The Gay Left: Homosexuality in the Era of Late Socialism.

Spring 2016 featured a collaboration with Professor Domietta Torlasco from the Department of French and Italian who curated a film series and symposium in tribute to the recently deceased filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Spring 2016 also marked the graduation of the second class of MFA graduate students in Northwestern University’s Documentary Media program. Block Cinema hosted an extremely popular (and engaging) showcase of the students’ final thesis projects in June over three consecutive evenings.

With the hiring of Caroline Claflin, Communications Coordinator, whose professional focus is media production, we have had great success in growing our video strategy. Throughout the year, we began regularly covering the Museum’s activity with long-form video documentation, audio edits shared as podcasts, and short-form web videos that garner high audience engagement. We also inaugurated a series of one-on-one video interviews that allow for behind-the-scenes conversations with the Museum’s wealth of visiting artists and scholars.

In October 2017, we contracted with NeonCRM to host and maintain the Museum’s member database, and we look forward to the ongoing development of this customer relationship management tool. Throughout the year, we continued to develop and extend our usage of a free RSVP system for all museum engagement events – leading to increased metrics and improved audience communication.

The hiring of a new Fine Arts Editor, Stephanie Kulke, within the Office of Global Marketing and Communications has been a great support to the Museum’s earned media strategy, as evidenced by the extensive press listings at the end of this report. The Block put forward 14 formal press releases during this fiscal year and authored 50 blog posts on its Wordpress site. These posts boasted a readership of over 100,000 visitors, embodying the museum’s more comprehensive, narrative, and integrated content strategy. 2016-17 saw an increased focus on sharing stories of the work that we do, the people who we collaborate with, and the ideas that drive us, and we look forward to extending these narratives in the year ahead.

Lindsay Bosch, Communications Manager

Block Cinema connected with the multitude of resources on campus through interdisciplinary collaborations with the Departments of Radio-TV-Film, French and Italian, the Middle East and North African Studies Program, the Documentary Media Program, Art History, Black Arts Initiative, University Archives, the Alumnae of Northwestern University, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Justin Lintelman, Associate Film Programmer

D E PA RT M E N T R E P O RT S

E N G AG E M E N T 2016–2017 marked a depth of new partnerships and initiatives for the Engagement Department, in collaboration with colleagues across the museum, campus, Evanston, and Chicago.

CAMPUS CONVENER Last year, we embarked on a partnership with the McCormick School of Engineering, recognizing our shared emphases on learning through making and the value of risk and invention. We brought four contemporary artists to campus to explore what it would look like to embed an artist into the School of Engineering. Each of these artists is an inventor and an educator and has deep experience working in laboratories and research sites nationally and internationally. During the artists’ visits, we met with faculty and students from Astrophysics, Art Theory and Practice, Bioethics, Computer Science, the Center for the Writing Arts, Material Science, Medical Anthropology, Robotics, Poetry and Poetics, the Segal Design Institute, and Sound Studies, among others. These visits resulted in new relationships and plans for future residencies.

Over the course of the year, we also hosted three global museum leaders for public programs and conversations with faculty and students. Bisi Silva’s visit was particularly rich. It included a public lecture focused on curatorial practice and pedagogy on the continent, an interdisciplinary seminar at the Program of African Studies on Developing a History of Women Artists in Nigeria, a cross-disciplinary gathering at Northwestern University Libraries focused on the CCA Library, and one-on-one meetings with Herskovits Library curator Esmerelda Kale, and individual Northwestern faculty members, and studio visits with scholars and artists from across Chicago.

COMMUNITY BRIDGE-BUILDER Just as those visits focused on our role as a convener and resource, another series of visits focused on our ongoing work as a bridge-builder between campus and community. The exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember gave us the opportunity to partner with the artists Kristine Aono and Marie Watt in bringing their community-based practices to Northwestern, Evanston, and Chicago. In the fall, we hosted Aono and Watt for intensive site visits that included meetings with faculty from the Native and Indigenous Steering Committee, undergraduate student representatives of the Asian American Student Group, graduate students from the Colloquium for Ethnicity and Diaspora, and representatives from the American Indian Center, Japanese-American Citizens League, and Youth and Opportunity United (Y.O.U.), among many others.

The exhibition inspired further connections between the museum and a wide range of our constituencies, including student-organized dialogues in the galleries, docent training with colleagues from Social Justice Education, visits with high-school students from Students Organized Against Racism, and a “Poetry of Witness” writing workshop inspired by the exhibition in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

ONGOING PARTNERSHIPS In these projects and a host of programs, workshops, and convenings we offered throughout the year, we connected with new and ongoing partners. Last fall, as part of an Evanston-wide drawing festival, we worked with artist Walter Kitindu, a MacArthur Fellow, to develop a project in which participants could draw with light and shadow, responding to shapes mirroring those from Neil Goodman’s sculpture in the Block’s vestibule. We hosted Asian Languages and Studies for their fall gathering, in conjunction with Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera.

In the winter, we convened colleagues and students from across campus in conversation with Kader Attia and his work. His visit included a graduate-student organized program at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies in which students responded to Attia’s exhibition using their own research and materials from library. In the spring, as part of the conference Open Engagement, we served as an Open House site, welcoming colleagues from around the world.

Susy Bielak, Stephen and Susan Wilson Associate Director of Engagement/Curator of Public Practice

D E PA RT M E N T R E P O RT S

In February 2017, Northwestern students, faculty, and staff joined with Evanston community members for an Equity Sewing Circle. Participants met the artist Marie Watt, connected with neighbors, added stitches to a new collaborative work of art, and took part in conversations around social justice and equity.

DEPARTMENT

REPORTS C U R ATO R I A L The Block Museum’s curatorial initiatives focus on creating unique opportunities for the direct experience of art and on providing avenues for thinking with and through art about issues of relevance to our lives today. In the academic year 2016-17, the Block Museum’s activities have included the presentation of innovative exhibitions and the expansion of the Museum’s permanent collection. We have also worked with students, through class visits and the Block’s Graduate Curatorial Fellowship and Summer Internship programs.

INNOVATIVE EXHIBITIONS Block Museum exhibitions included If You Remember, I’ll Remember (Jan.–May 2017) the first major exhibition curated at the museum by Janet Dees, the Block’s Stephen and Lisa Munster Tannenbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Dees conceived the exhibition as an invitation to reflect on the past while contemplating the present through works of art exploring themes of love, mourning, war, relocation, internment, resistance, and civil rights in 19th and 20th-century North America.

The exhibition Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory (Jan.–Apr. 2017) was the culmination of a series of research trips to Northwestern University by the internationally acclaimed French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970). The exhibition featured newly commissioned work based in part on the artist’s research in the collections of the university’s Herskovits Library of African Studies and interviews with faculty across disciplines. Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Cinema Posters (Sept.–Dec. 2016) was guest curated by Dr. Hamid Naficy, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the School of Communication, in collaboration with the Block Museum’s Curator of Media Arts, Michelle Puetz.

STUDENT COLLABORATIONS The work of Block Curatorial Graduate Fellows was featured in two original exhibitions; Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis, curated by C. C.McKee, and Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground, curated by Talia Shabtay, both doctoral candidates in the Department of Art History. Additionally, undergraduates in the Department of Art History first-year seminar taught by Rebecca Zorach, Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History, collectively curated We Are Revolutionaries: Wall of Respect and Chicago’s Mural Movement, while Linnea Hodge (WCAS, B.A.2017) curated The Block Collects: Lovis Corinth, a rotation of works from the Museum’s permanent collection. Rising sophomores Isbella Ko and Nicholas Liou were awarded 2017 Block Summer Undergraduate Curatorial Internships, during which they produced a Campus Art Walk featuring 16 sculptures from the Block’s collection located around the Arts Green and sculpture garden.

EXPANDING THE COLLECTION The Block Museum’s permanent collection was enriched by the acquisition of important artworks through gifts and purchases. These included works by Jeff Donaldson, Shan Goshorn, and Tseng Kwong Chi, each of which expands the Museum’s collection in new directions and provides a lasting documentation of of recent exhibitions. The Museum also received critical donations to the collection, including 44 silver gelatin prints by the acclaimed photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973), the second major gift of photographs by Steichen to the Museum from Richard and Jackie Hollander.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs In 2016-2017 the Museum released a new map and audio guide to the 16 sculptures that make up the Block Museum Campus Art Walk. The outdoor sculptures serve as active sights for tours, classes, and activities for visitors of all ages.

DEPARTMENT

REPORTS

FY 2017 Revenue $3,315,850 Earned Income 4%

FY 2017 Revenue $3,315,850

FINANCIAL

Endowment Earned Income 4% 16%

The Block’s income and expenses for operations decreased slightly in 2016-2017.

Grants Endowment 16%8%

The Museum was successful in securing grants but required less grant support for 2016-2017 projects.

Some annual giving by the Block Board of Advisors was redirected towards a special initiative connected to the Block’s goal in We Will. The Campaign for Northwestern. The Block received generous commitments to endow two staff positions and a Block Board of Advisors endowment for exhibitions, collections, and programs. Another endowment was expanded to support the Block’s permanent collection. As these involve multi-year pledges for endowment support, they are not reflected in the revenue chart.

The Block’s increase in endowment income of 1.5% was due to a small additional endowment and growth of the principal.

The Block is grateful to Northwestern’s Office of the Provost for its non-recurring support of special projects taking place during 2017-2020. This increase in non-recurring appropriation is indicated on the revenue chart.

GRANTS $50,000 AND ABOVE

Terra Foundation of American Art National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Arts

$25,000–$49,999

Myers Foundations Northwestern University Department of Art History David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation

Individual Gifts 8%

NU Appropriations 61%

NU Appropriations 61%

Individual Gifts Special Projects8% * 3% Grants 8%

*NU non-recurring special projects support

* NU non-recurring special projects support

Special Projects * 3%

FY 2017 Expenditures $3,269,628

Operations Engagement (Educational and 8% * NU non-recurring special Communications) 6%projects support

FY 2017 Expenditures $3,269,628

Collections Management 3%

$10,000–$24,999

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Illinois Arts Council Agency Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation Warnock Publications Fund

$5,000–$9,900

The Alumnae of Northwestern University Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation

Engagement (Educational and Communications) 6% Exhibitions and Block Cinema 13% Collections Management 3%

Exhibitions and Block Cinema 13%

Operations 8%

Payroll 70%

Payroll 70%

BLOCK BY THE NUMBERS: 2016–2017

$20 MILLION ENDOWMENT

$3 MILLION

OPERATING BUDGET

OPEN 36 WEEKS OF THE YEAR

40,000 TOTAL VISITORS INCLUDING

6,800 PUBLIC PROGRAM ATTENDEES AND 2,250 CINEMA ATTENDEES

400 ANNUAL EVENTS INCLUDING

99 152 105 40 TOURS & RESEARCH VISITS

CLASSES

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

CINEMA SCREENINGS

6,000 WORKS IN THE COLLECTION 32 BOARD OF ADVISORS MEMBERS 25 FULL-TIME STAFF 30 STUDENT DOCENTS 15 STUDENT WORKERS 2 GRADUATE FELLOWS

90,000 15K 14K

150

EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS

ANNUAL PRESS MENTIONS

A N N UA L W E B V I S I TO RS

FOLLOWERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

60 CAMPUS COLLABORATORS 18 PARTNER DEPARTMENTS 14 NATIONAL AND REGIONAL FOUNDATIONS FUNDERS: National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Terra Foundation for American Art, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, Myers Foundations, The Alumnae of Northwestern University, Illinois Arts Council Agency, The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, Hulda B. & Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Romenesa Foundation, Rubens Family Foundation

2016–2017

ENDOWMENTS

We were pleased to announce the establishment of three extraordinary endowments during the 2016-2017 year. Surpassing its original $15 million fundraising goal, the Block Museum raised $18.8 million in funds and artworks through December 31, 2017, for We Will. The Campaign for Northwestern. The Block Museum’s fundraising goal will be extended in 2017-2018, continuing the Museum’s commitment to We Will, the University-wide fundraising effort to realize the bold ambitions set forth in Northwestern’s strategic plan.

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Fund

The Block received a major endowment from Lisa (WCAS ’86) and Steven Tananbaum in support of its modern and contemporary art program. The $1 million gift permanently establishes the position of the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Janet Dees will be the inaugural Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The Tananbaums’ gift will help advance the Block’s capacity to present major exhibitions and to commission new work by artists working internationally, who will be invited to campus to interact with faculty and students and be nourished by the extraordinary resources of Northwestern.

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum

“We are thrilled to support the Block Museum of Art in its commitment to serve as a dynamic, imaginative, and innovative teaching and learning resource for Northwestern University. It is our hope that students from every discipline will have the opportunity to interact and learn more about contemporary art and artists as this reflects different views and the culture of our times.” - Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum

Susan and Stephen Wilson Block Museum Engagement Fund

A new endowed gift from Northwestern University Trustee Stephen R. Wilson ’70, ’74 MBA and Susan K. Wilson ’70 will support the outreach efforts of the Block Museum of Art. The $1.5 million gift will permanently establish the Susan and Stephen Wilson Block Museum Engagement Fund. The Block is honored by the Wilson’s recognition of the Museum as a site of innovative teaching and learning experiences for both students and our community. This visionary gift will help ensure meaningful engagement with art through partnerships and will expand the reach and impact of our programming.”

“As Northwestern alumni, we have been excited by the work of the Block Museum in recent years to engage campus and community in teaching and learning experiences. Free and open to all, the Museum is uniquely poised as a resource to serve wide audiences and bring diverse communities together through art and conversation.” - Sue Wilson

Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund

The Block Museum of Art announced that members of its board of advisors have contributed more than $1 million to establish the Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund at Northwestern. Income from the fund will support collections, exhibitions, publications, and programs that engage students, faculty, and the broader community with global art and artists at the Block Museum and elsewhere on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. The idea for the creation of a combined group endowment came from Block Museum board of advisors member Diane Solomon.

“The Block Board of Advisors is energized by the global reach and local impact of the museum’s exhibitions and programs. We are proud to work collectively to build this lasting resource that will help sustain the continuation and growth of the Block Museum’s vision.” - Diane Solomon Stephen and Susan Wilson

“I love docent work! As a theatre major, a lot of my work on this campus revolves around facilitating emotional and intellectual experiences for others. Art can be so intimidating sometimes, and yet so rewarding when we truly engage with it, and it’s a joy to help people with that process.”

- Cammy Harris (WCAS ‘19)

DOCENTS About the Docent Program Block Museum docents contribute to the Block’s mission to be a “teaching and learning resource” within and beyond the Northwestern community. As tour guides, they engage the full breadth of the Museum’s audiences, including university students and faculty, elementary and high-school students, and adult visitors. Their work thus requires deep knowledge of exhibition content and gallery teaching methods. They engage in conversations with curators about current exhibitions and read texts that highlight a variety of perspectives on works of art. They also participate in a paid training course and work closely with the Engagement team to develop strategies for making the galleries spaces for meaningful dialogue.

This year, docents participated in a workshop through Social Justice Education in order to consider how factors outside of the walls of the Museum might shape visitors’ experiences. Student docents also come from a variety of academic disciplines—from Economics to Journalism to Performance Studies—and are encouraged to bring their individual perspectives to tours while encouraging visitors to forge their own connections with works of art. Through their work at the Block, docents reach a wide range of constituencies. They assist in Museum programming for students, families, and adults of all ages. Along with the Block Student Advisory Board, docents also serve as ambassadors to the University and the surrounding communities in Evanston, Chicago, and the North Shore. In all aspects of their work, docents spread awareness of the Block as a resource, a space for art and dialogue, and a free and public museum where all are welcome.

Kelsey Allen-Niesen, 2019 (Asian Language and Culture / Art History) Yiran Chi, 2019 (Philosophy and Art History) Florence Fu, 2018 (Journalism and Art History) Vanessa (Shuang) Gao, 2017 (Art History) Rachel Gradone, 2019 (Manufacturing & Design Engineering) Marisa Guo, 2019 (Economics and Mathematical Methods in Social Science) Matthew Guzman, 2018 (Middle Eastern and North African Studies) Cameron (Cammy) Harris, 2019 (Theater and International Studies) Paul (Young Hoon) Kim, 2017 (Radio/Television/Film) Nina Matti, 2018 (Journalism) Allison Miller, 2017 (Radio/Television/Film) Emma Montgomery, 2017 (Comp Lit and Psychology) Montgomery Nelson, 2019 (Art History and International Studies) Julia Poppy, 2017 (Art History) Cindy (Xinying) Qian, 2019 (Journalism and Art History) James Tsui, 2019 (Biomedical Engineering, Art Theory and Practice) Yiran (Anna) Wang, 2017 (History) Jiaming Wu, 2019 (Journalism and Art History)

S U P P O RT E RS $50,000 AND ABOVE

Carla Harriet Esch* National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Humanities Andra S. and Irwin Press Lisa Munster Tananbaum and Steven Tananbaum Terra Foundation for American Art Susan and Stephen R. Wilson

$10,000–$49,999 The Alumnae of Northwestern University Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Hanna and Sidney Block* Stacey and Lowell Cantor Amy and James Geier Illinois Arts Council Agency Ellen Philips Katz Susan G. and Richard M. Rieser Jr. Sandra L. Riggs

$5,000–$9,999 Anu and Arjun Aggarwal Lorinda Ash Nicole and James N. Druckman Kristin Peterson Edwards The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation Barbara N. Fuldner Hulda B. & Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation Sari and James A. Klein Dianne and Stephen Loeb Christine and William Robb III The Robert Lehman Foundation Lynn E. Hauser and Neil L. Ross Jean E. Shedd

$1,000–$4,999 555 International, Inc. Kim and Keith Allen-Niesen Christine and Armyan Bernstein Sarah M. Pritchard and Neal E. Blair Amy Pope Brock Kay Deaux Janet Sally Dumas Edith C. Eisner Lisa Corrin and Peter B. Erickson Judith Rachel Freeman Susan Fuller Cassie and Steven J. Gavin Carol and Jerome J. Ginsburg Mary Ann and David L. Grumman

Denise Gunter Jean and Robert Guritz Margaret Hastings Steven P. Henry Gail and Tom Hodges Ruth Lasky Nancy and R. Hugh Magill Graciela and Neal D. Meltzer Janis and John K. Notz Jr. Carol J. Narup and Warren G. Petersen Romenesa Foundation Rubens Family Foundation Angela Himsel and Selig Sacks Margaret Holland Schmitz Elizabeth Ellrodt and Scott C. Schweighauser Fabiola Delgado and Kenneth N. Thompson Arete Swartz Warren

$500–$999 Acrobat Marketing Solutions, Inc. Ronald L. Marmer Diane More Ronnie K. Pirovino Susan B. Rubnitz Ingrid and William Stafford Patricia Stratton

$250-$499 Kathleen Roy Cummings Robert O. Delaney Sally and Bernard J. Dobroski Gloria Fogler-Mancini Bryna and Edward P. Gamson Edwin G. Goldstein Phyllis J. and Chester S. Handelman Christopher P. Huisinga Debora Hunter Susan Wascher-Kumar and Prem Kumar Ronna Stamm and Paul Lehman William R. Levin Vicki L. Sauter and Joseph S. Martinich Kimberly Moy Jane and Lloyd J. Peterson James R. Putt Margaret Lynn Hughitt and James R. Shaeffer Sanford N. Singer* Elizabeth G. Stout William S. Susman Marilyn McCoy and Charles R. Thomas John G. Waterbury Janet and Ned P. Zachar

GIFTS OF ART

Jackie and Richard Hollander Martha Keller, Daniel Keller and Kathryn Keller Rule Jennifer and David Kieselstein Judy Ledgerwood Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Dawn Clark Netsch* Gwen and Peter Norton Sheila S. and Bill G. Lambert John A. Silberman Larry Snider Terra Foundation for American Art Vicki Tlusty

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Buffett Institute for Global Studies Center for the Writing Arts Department of Art History Department of Art History/Warnock Publication Fund Department of Art Theory and Practice Department of History Department of Neurobiology Department of Performance Studies Department of Theatre McCormick School of Engineering Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Middle East & North African Studies Northwestern University Libraries Office of the Provost Program of African Studies Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Crowds gathere in the Block Museum lobby before the opening of the symposium Lucid Figurations.

PRESS

New City Art: Art 50 2017: Chicago’s Visual Vanguard (August 31, 2017) “Who makes art work in Chicago? Behind every painting, photograph and sculpture are curators, collectors, gallerists, foundations and untold legions of cultural workers who give shape to the art world as we know it. This year’s Art 50 pays tribute to those who toil behind the scenes to make it all happen and those whose fortunes fund it.” -Elliot J. Reichert, Kerry Cardoza, Nicole Mauser and Lee Ann Norman

New City Art: Art Top 5: September 2017 (August 31, 2017) “William Blake and the Age of Aquarius: Block Museum of Art. Fifty years after the summer of love, this show explores the influences of the quintessential English artist and poet on the psychedelic counterculture of 1960s America.”

Art in America: 2017-2018 Preview (August 2017) “’William Blake and the Age of Aquarius,’ exploring the maverick’s impact on American art between the 1950s and the 1970s, contains more than 130 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, films and posters. Original prints and illuminated books by Blake are juxtaposed with works from artists such as Diane Arbus, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson, and Clyfford Still.”

Crain’s: Editor’s Picks: Fall Cultural Preview (August 26, 2017) “The museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love with the first exhibition to examine the impact of eccentric British poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) on the mid-20th-century counterculture artists he inspired.” -Thomas Connors

Big Ten Network: Five things to know about Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (August 26, 2017) “The Block contains three galleries with changing exhibitions in keeping with its roots in the German kunsthalle tradition. This fall’s exhibitions range from the impact of British poet William Blake to the exploration of social justice in the art of Carrie Mae Weems. Its permanent collections cover various forms: prints, drawings and sculpture.”

Northwestern Magazine: Honoring the Wall of Respect (August 25, 2017) “The exhibit also marked the first presentation of a recent Block Museum acquisition: a 1967 study portrait of trumpet player and bandleader Miles Davis by artist Jeff Donaldson (‘74 PhD). The sketch is one of the rare remaining traces of the Wall and the process of its creation. Donaldson, who died in 2004, was the first African American to earn a doctorate in art history at Northwestern.”

Time Out Chicago: 56 exciting openings in Chicago in September (August 24, 2017) “Sept 23–Mar 11: The Block Museum celebrates the lasting influence of poet and painter William Blake, displaying ‘60s art inspired by his work in ‘Age of Aquarius.’” -Grace Perry

Chicago Life Magazine: Gates of Perception (August 20, 2017) “On September 23rd, the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University will open an exhibition entitled, William Blake and the Age of Aquarius. It will consider the parallels between Blake’s era and the mid 20th century U.S., including political repression, social transformation, and the struggle for civil rights, and also look at the protests against the conventions of his day and how they inspired many Americans disillusioned by social uniformity, materialism, racial and gender discrimination, and environmental degradation.” -Sigalit Zetouni

Chicago Sun-Times: MCA’s 50th anniversary celebrates the now and the next (August 16, 2017) “’I think Chicago is enjoying a golden age in all the arts right now,’ said Grynsztejn. ‘Many great artists are working here because they can find jobs at the city’s universities, and because there are now many places that show their work, from galleries, to the Smart Museum, the Mary & Leigh Block Museum, the Art Institute and, of course, the MCA.’” -Madeleine Grynsztejn in conversation with Hedy Weiss

Artforum: Block Museum of Art Receives $1 Million Gift (August 15, 2017) “The Chicago Tribune reports that Lisa and Steven Tananbaum have given Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art a $1 million gift. This will allow the institution to expand its programming and permanently establish the position of the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.”

Chicago Gallery News: News From Around the Art World (August 14, 2017) “The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has announced the receipt of a major endowment from Lisa (WCAS ’86) and Steven Tananbaum in support of its modern and contemporary art program.”

Artnet: Art Industry News (August 10, 2017) “The Northern Trust Purchase Prize, which funds a local museum’s acquisition at the fair, will go to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. The museum will select a work from the fair’s Exposure section, dedicated to young galleries.”

Fayetteville Flyer: Crystal Bridges announces diverse trio of temporary exhibits for 2018 (August 9, 2017) “The first of the three will be the U.S. debut and only one of two American stops for “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” The collection, organized by the Tate Modern, is currently on display at the London museum and will debut in Bentonville on Feb. 3. After its run at Crystal Bridges, the collection’s final U.S. stop will be at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.” -Kevin Kinder

Art News: Block Museum of Art Wins Prize to Acquire Work From Expo Chicago (August 9, 2017) “Expo Chicago’s annual Northern Trust Purchase Prize, which allows a museum in the Windy City to acquire a work from the annual fair, will go to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.” -Carolyn Twersky

Business Wire: Northern Trust to Donate Artwork to Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art at EXPO CHICAGO 2017 (August 8, 2017) “’Northern Trust is proud to continue supporting arts and culture in our communities,’ said Mac MacLellan, Central Region President of Northern Trust Wealth Management. ‘The Northern Trust Purchase Prize is a valuable aspect in our company’s ongoing tradition to build a solid, forward-looking foundation on which future generations can continue to achieve a higher excellence, and in a way specifically directed at the captivating world of art. We are pleased to share this tradition with such a worthy institution like the Block Museum.’”

Financial Times: Northern Trust to Donate Artwork to Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art at EXPO CHICAGO 2017 (August 8, 2017) “As presenting sponsor of EXPO CHICAGO and a long-time supporter of arts and culture, Northern Trust will purchase a work of art to be added to the Block Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Lisa Graziose Corrin, the Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Block Museum of Art, will be joined by Christine O. Robb, Chair of the Block Museum Board of Advisors and Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Block Museum Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, in selecting the artwork from one of the exhibiting EXPOSURE galleries, curated for the first time by Director of Exhibitions and Senior Curator at Dallas Contemporary Justine Ludwig, at EXPO CHICAGO.”

Evanston Review: Tananbaums endow curator position at Block Museum of Art (August 2, 2017) “Janet Dees will be the inaugural Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Dees joined the Block team in 2015 from SITE Santa Fe, where she served as the Eugene Thaw Curatorial Fellow, assistant curator and curator of contemporary art. Earlier this year, she curated the Block’s ‘If You Remember, I’ll Remember’ exhibition. She is currently preparing the 2018 exhibition ‘Experiments in Form: Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, Frank Stella.’”

Chicago Tribune: Tananbaums endow curator position at Block Museum of Art (August 2, 2017) “Million-dollar gift will support Northwestern’s modern and contemporary art program.”

Evanston Now: Block Exhibit inspires Black Lives Matter Quilt (August 1, 2017) “’Marie Watt was definitely an influence on my project,’ Blount said. ‘She helped put the puzzle together for me.

And while participating in her sewing circle, I got to experience how quickly participants bonded with one another.’”

-Stephanie Kulke

Hyperallergic: Art Movements (July 14, 2017) “Lisa and Steven Tananbaum donated $1 million to the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. The gift will endow a curatorial position in modern and contemporary art.” -Tiernan Morgan

Art Daily: Tananbaums endow curator position at Block Museum of Art (July 12, 2017) “’Lisa and Steven Tananbaum are deeply devoted to public appreciation of the art of our time and are dedicated supporters of Northwestern and its commitment to making the arts part of the educational experience of all of its students,’ said Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philip Katz Director. ‘We are extraordinarily grateful to them for this visionary gift.’”

P R E SS

Art & Education: Curatorial Position Endowed at Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (July 11, 2017) “’The Tananbaums’ gift will help advance our capacity to present major exhibitions and to commission new work by artists working internationally who will be invited to campus to interact with faculty and students and be nourished by the extraordinary resources of Northwestern,’ said Block Museum director Lisa Corrin.”

Breuerpress: Tananbaums endow curator position at Block Museum of Art (July 10, 2017) “The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has announced the receipt of a $1 million endowment from Lisa and Steven Tananbaum to endow a curator position in the museum’s modern and contemporary art program

Evanston Now: Modern art curator position endowed (July 10, 2017) “The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has announced the receipt of a $1 million endowment from Lisa and Steven Tananbaum to endow a curator position in the museum’s modern and contemporary art program.”

Blouin Art Info: ‘William Blake and the Age of Aquarius’ at Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Illinois (July 7, 2017) “The exhibition brings together artists who used Blake’s lyrics as titles, experimented with printing techniques and innovative combinations of image and text and cited Blake’s worldview in letters, diaries and essays. The exhibition will feature American artists for whom Blake was an important inspiration and will include more than 130 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, films, and posters, as well as original Blake prints and illuminated books from collections throughout the United States.”

Chicago Tribune: 40 local museum treasures you need to see now (July 6, 2017) “In addition to its galleries in a Dirk Lohan-designed building on Northwestern’s Evanston campus, the Block Museum has a vibrant sculpture collection both in the museum and about the campus featuring works by the likes of Hans (Jean) Arp, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. One of the highlights is the 1971 work ‘Constellation,’ by the Spanish artist Joan Miro. Constructed of cast bronze, and “likely sculpted by the artist’s hands,” the museum says, its round shape and “organic lines” suggest the celestial theme referred to in the piece’s title. But there is whimsy here, too: Is that golden globe meant to suggest a nose on a face? Decide for yourself. The Miro now resides inside, in the lobby of the Ryan Center of the Bienen School of Music. If that is a face, it has a gorgeous view of Lake Michigan. If it is a heavenly body of some sort, it watches over the lake.” -Steve Johnson

Art in America: All Together (June/July 2017) Corinne Granof, the Block’s Curator of Academic Programs, reviews the Merce Cunningham exhibition jointly produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Northwestern Now: Scholars gather to discuss counterculture, Summer of Love (June 28, 2017) “Northwestern University scholars will be among a great many revelers flocking to San Francisco this summer to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Three prominent Northwestern scholars will be among several dozen historians and journalism, arts and gender studies experts from around the country to offer lectures and discussion on a wide range of topics, from the Beats to hippies, the Black Panthers, the media, music and more.” -Erin Karter

Curbed: Meet Marion Mahony Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s best frenemy (June 8, 2017) “In 1918, [Griffin] and some female friends traveled to Tasmania, which resulted in some breathtaking nature paintings, including a deep-red depiction of a gum tree against a sunset that now lives at Northwestern University’s Block Museum.” -Claire Zulkey

Northwestern Footnotes: Moorman exhibition opens in Salzburg (June 2017) “The traveling exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s opened at Salzburg’s Museum der Moderne in March, bringing with it staff from University Libraries and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.”

Splash Magazine: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art Review - an Asset to Northwestern University and the Evanston Community (June 6, 2017) “Recently the museum received a gift of 44 Edward Steichen photographs given by art collectors Richard and Jackie Hollander. These images range from Charlie Chaplin and W.B. Yeats to self-portraits and botanical studies.” -Barbara Keer

North by Northwestern: NEH @ NU (June 2, 2017) “Berzock and the Block received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a federal agency that provides money for research and artistic projects along with educational and community engagement programs, to fund the exhibition’s development....Berzock says the Block plans to go forward in applying for an NEH implementation grant for the exhibition, a project which she has worked on for years of her career. But the issue of NEH and NEA funding is much bigger to her – it’s a decision about the future of the country.” As a society, do we want our government to be supporting art and culture?” Berzock asks. “Is that part of what makes us great? My answer to that is yes. I want to live in a country that invests in art and culture.” -Justin Curto

North by Northwestern on “The Nail That Sticks Up the Farthest” (June 1, 2017) “Kristine Aono’s American flag is not made up of nylon, polyester and cotton, but 65,000 rusty nails. Part of the Block Museum exhibition If you remember, I’ll remember, Aono, a Japanese American artist, created the installation ‘The Nail That Sticks up the Farthest...’ to honor each Japanese American displaced by internment during World War II.” -Isabella Jiao

Chicago North Shore: Graduation at Northwestern: A Visitor’s Guide to Evanston (June 1, 2017) Block Museum of Art makes the “What to Do” short list for graduation weekend!

Northwestern Now: Art history major finds a home base at the Block Museum (May 24, 2017) “The talk provides a behind the scenes look at the exhibition of prints by German expressionist Lovis Corinth that the undergraduate curated at the Block Museum. Hodge is one of few undergraduate students granted the opportunity to curate works from the Block’s permanent collection.” -Stephanie Kulke

North by Northwestern: RTVF course plans student film festival (May 19, 2017) “’A lot of the documentaries were based on Chicago issues,’ Spierer said. ‘Some of them are about political issues or activist issues that may inspire students to get involved in these issues. For the other entries, we looked for pieces that we felt were well-done and would be exciting to watch in the Block Museum with a large audience.’” -Marco Cartolano

Art in America: Reviews: Kader Attia (May 18, 2017) “Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory” began when Northwestern University’s Block Museum extended an invitation to the French-Algerian artist to use the resources of the school’s Herskovits Library of African Studies in the spring of 2015.

The result was a spare and scholastic exhibition that rewarded the patient viewer with startlingly emotional content. “ -Lauren DeLand

The Daily Northwestern: RTVF class creates student film festival (May 17, 2017) “’I think people would enjoy coming to this event because they’ll see, still in a short amount of time, a more diverse range of works than they might necessarily see at another screening or event on campus,’ Levy said. ‘This is an opportunity for students on campus to see animated work, fiction films, music videos, documentaries and more that are made by their peers.’” -Emily Chaiet

Art 21 Blog: This Week in Art 5.15-5.21 (May 15, 2017) Pedro Reyes’ Block Museum Art + Engineering lectures at Northwestern included in Art 21 Weekly roundup.

Northwestern Research News: Art That Sees the Big Picture (May 15, 2017) “’We’re small but mighty. We are a window to the University’s diverse brain trust — our faculty and students,’ says Lisa Corrin, an award-winning scholar who joined Northwestern in 2012, after more than three decades in curatorial leadership at various cultural institutions. Throughout her illustrious career, she has radically reimagined the museum.

In doing so, she has helped create spaces for art that encourage people to ask urgent questions about history and the world, while also providing a place for reflection and learning that connect campus and surrounding communities.”

-Matt Golosinski

Northwestern Creative Sector News: Block Museum Hosts Conference About Socially Engaged Art (May 5, 2017) “During the conference panel, Block Museum Curator Janet Dees and Associate Director of Engagement Suzy Bielak both mentioned that the focus of the museum is to connect art to life, present a state of mind, and provide experiences of human activity that change the way of thinking. This broad and deep mission is the foundation for the Block to reach out to communities in Evanston, Chicago and beyond.” -Jacob Nelson

P R E SS

Northwestern Now: Embracing a culture of change (May 4, 2017) “Northwestern University’s efforts to create a highly innovative culture dependent upon collaboration were on display last week during a forum featuring several case studies illustrating what transformative change looks like at the University.” -Stephanie Kulke

The Architect’s Newspaper: Chicago Architecture Biennial announces over 100 Program Partners (May 2, 2017) “‘Chicago’s architectural history is embedded within every neighborhood and touches so many of our world-class cultural organizations and venues.’’” -Mark Kelly speaking with Matthew Messner

New City Art: Recapping Open Engagement 2017 (May 2, 2017) “‘There are all of these approaches in Chicago to creating more equity, building more just communities,’ Reyes says.

‘Creative pathways to justice are really exemplified here.’” -Jen Delos Reyes speaking with Kerry Cardoza

Sheridan Road: Past Meets Present (May 1, 2017) “For nearly four decades, Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art has staged exhibits that are as revelatory as they are relevant.” -Meg Mathis

Northwestern Digital Learning: Spotlight: Digital Humanities Summer Faculty Workshop Projects (April 28, 2017) “[Dr. Rebecca Zorach’s] project used student assistance to catalog public art, specifically murals from the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s, around the city of Chicago to create an interactive map that can be used for not only viewing mural images but also as a way to connect with other existing data sets like the CTA route map or census data to ask interesting questions about race, class, gentrification, and more.” -Dan Hoefler

Hell’s Printing Press: Block Museum Exhibition Q & A (April 26, 2017) “William Blake and the Age of Aquarius will explore the impact of Blake on a broad range of American artists and will be the first exhibition to consider how Blake’s art and ideas were absorbed and filtered through American visual artists from the end of World War II through the 1960s. Blake became for many a model of non-conformity and selfexpression, and was seen as an artist who engaged in social and political resistance in his time. The exhibition will consider parallels between Blake’s time and mid-twentieth-century America, touching on such issues as political repression, social transformation, and struggles for civil rights.” -Curator Corinne Granof in dialogue with Sarah Jones

Art Media Agency: Chicago Area Museums: Recent Acquisitions... (April 24, 2017) “Chicago area collectors Richard and Jackie Hollander recently gifted the museum more than 30 photographic prints by the renowned Luxembourgish-American photographer Edward Steichen. The acquisition includes items from Steichen’s series of botanical photographs as well as examples of his photographs of dancers.”

CNSCVB: Best Date Night Spots on Chicago’s North Shore (April 21, 2017) “Spend time together exploring everything this museum has to offer, whether with a docent-led tour or on your own.”

The Daily Northwestern: Block Museum receives gift of Edward Steichen photographs (April 12, 2017) “The museum now has a broad collection of Steichen’s work with pieces touching every area of the artist’s career, enabling Block to tell the full story of Steichen’s contribution to art history” -Lisa Corrin in conversation with Amelia Langas

Evanston Magazine: By the Block (April/May 2017) “Name a museum with exhibitions and events on par with those that you’d find at the Art Institute of Chicago or the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it’s free every day and open to everyone...The Block’s recent exhibitions have been reviewed by The New York Times, Financial Times, and The New Yorker, and with three gallery spaces that are always rotating, you’re guaranteed to see something new on almost any visit. “ -Elizabeth Hope

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Hundert Arten, ein Cello zu spielen [A Hundred Ways to Play a Cello] (April 12, 2017) “It is time for this exhibition…[Moorman] finally has a place in art history of the 1960s and 1970s, as an artist but also as the founder of the New York Avant Garde Festivals. How could she ever have fallen into oblivion? … Instead of selfpromotion, Moorman pursued the idea of a multidisciplinary connected avant-garde.” -Brita Sachs

Hyperallergic: Art Movements (April 6, 2017) “Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world…. Richard and Jackie Hollander donated 44 photographs by Edward Steichen to Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum.”

-Tiernan Morgan

Modern Luxury NS: Readers’ Choice: Arts & Culture (April 2017) “On the campus of Northwestern University, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art remains an acclaimed resource with frequently changing exhibits that present art across time, culture and medium.”

True Africa: Kader Attia, between Dakar, Algeria, and La Colonie in Paris (March 29, 2017) “For his current solo show at Northwestern University’s Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art in Illinois, USA, Attia has created a film, a sculptural piece and installation. He has delved into the university’s Herskovits Library of African Studies, one of the most extensive collections covering the continent that exists today.” -Emmanuel Balogun

Chicago Magazine: 67 Things to Do in Chicago in April (March 29, 2017) “What does contemporary art in Nigeria look like? The artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos gives a presentation on global and local trends in the country.”

Chicago Mag: Five Great Things to Do This Week in Chicago (March 29, 2017) “A new book of poetry co-published by Northwestern University celebrates the art of Romare Bearden, whose colorful and jazzy cut-paper collages exemplified 20th-century African American life.”

Diptyk: Kader Attia Reflecting Memory (Feb-March 2017) Northwestern News: Research, Art Merge In Block Museum Exhibit (March 13, 2017) “‘Hopefully attendees left the event realizing that a collection of this breadth and depth can inspire artists, researchers, and scholars in a variety of ways,’ says Esmeralda Kale, Herskovits curator. ‘Despite the differences in disciplines, there are commonalities in the themes running through the work of the graduate student presenters and that of Attia’s work on display.’”

Chicago Sun Times: ‘Whistler’s Mother,’ Darger, among arts highlights for Spring (March 2, 2017) “The Wall of Respect, a now-lost mural depicting such notable African-American figures as John Coltrane, Ossie Davis and Sarah Vaughan, was unveiled in 1967 on the side of a building at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue. These three exhibitions mark the 50th anniversary of this important milestone in Chicago’s public-art history.” - Kyle MacMillan

Picture This Post: Block Museum Mounts IF YOU REMEMBER, I’LL REMEMBER Exhibit Review -– Marathon of Mourning and Hope (February 25, 2017) “All the works in the exhibition ask the viewer to consider our troubled collective past, yet these crushing histories are interrupted by moments of beauty and hope. Don’t miss this timely and poignant show.” - Julia Poppy

Chicago Tribune: Arab Museum of Modern Art director will discuss role of artists in Arab Spring (February 24, 2017) “’Abdellah Karroum has not only exceptional taste in artistic production by creators working in many different media, but a transnational vision of global trends in the arts and how they intersect with geopolitics,’ said Brian Edwards, Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and director of Northwestern’s MENA Program.”

WBEZ: Weekend Passport: The Artist’s Role in the Arab Spring [Audio] (February 24, 2017) “A symposium at Northwestern University examines the art scene before the Arab Spring uprising, when artists were creating works calling for change and challenging the political establishment.”

North by Northwestern: Block Museum sewing circle brings community together [Video] (February 8, 2017) “To kick off the exhibit, Watt, who is Seneca and whose art is influenced by her Native American heritage, hosted a community sewing circle, an event she will use for inspiration to create a new piece the museum has commissioned from her.” - Alejandra Fernandez

Mining Industry Today: Block Museum exhibit digs into photos of 1960s miners (February 8, 2017) “The new photo-centered Block Museum of Art exhibit, ‘Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground,’ explores the visual representation of industrialization and the plight of the common laborer.”

P R E SS

Chicago Tribune: Block Museum exhibit digs into photos of 1960s miners (February 8, 2017) “Taken together, the work of these two photographers offers an appraisal of the relationship between pictures and industry, the juxtapositions between scientific progress and human sentiment, which has shaped this endeavor since the advent of photography.” -Gina Grillo

Digital Learning Northwestern: Innovating Materials Science for Art’s Sake (January 31, 2017) “Says Dr. Walton, ‘It’s a project-based class where the students invest themselves in understanding how art and artifacts are created, a burgeoning field called ‘Technical Art History,’ where science, technology, and art merge.’”

Sixty Inches From Center: February Art Picks (January 30, 2017)

Brit+Co: 10 Museums That Will Cure a Broken Heart (February 7, 2017)

If You Remember, I’ll Remember and Dreams are Colder than Death are highlighted as February art picks.

“In this exhibit, contemporary artists explore the pain and heartbreak caused by major national events, like the Japanese internment camps and bloody conflicts between Native Americans and the US government.” -Angela Velez

Art Daily: Artist Kader Attia unveils new solo exhibition at the Block Museum (January 30, 2017)

Chicago Now: Year of Public Art in Chicago: What’s ahead for 2017 (February 7, 2017) “The Wall of Respect, guest curated by Romi Crawford, Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach will be the subject of many events and exhibitions throughout Chicago and Evanston. The original wall–-a collection of 14 designers, photographers, painters and others--resulted in a seminal mural for and within Chicago’s Black South Side communities. “ -Carole Kuhrt Brewer

North by Northwestern: Block exhibit remembers what government seems to forget (February 7, 2017) “However, it is these histories – told by people often relegated to the margins – which constitute this country’s past, in all its glory and grotesque. If You Remember, I’ll Remember, the Block Museum’s main exhibit for the season, is an exploration of these forgotten histories, rooted deeply in the personal.” -Stacy Tsai

The Lisa D Show: The Lisa D Show with Kristine Aono [Audio Interview] (February 3, 2017) “Aono’s ‘sculpture and installations are narrative in nature, reflecting [Aono’s] identity as a Sansei, a third generation Japanese-American. [She] examines this hybrid cultural identity through topics such as acculturation, racial and sexual stereotyping, the WWII internment camps, and the history of [her] family in America.’”

Chicago Tribune: See it Now: Block Museum exhibit explores art and memory (February 2, 2017) “The exhibit includes sculptures, installations, videos and other works created by seven contemporary artists. Their work serves as an invitation to reflect on our nation’s past while contemplating the present, through objects, sounds and images that unlock memories.” - Louise Burton

Chicago Reader: Block Museum kicks off a season of urgent art with Kader Attia’s ‘Reflecting Memory’ (February 2, 2017) “’Reflecting Memory’ explores similar themes of heritage and the impact of relationships among various versions of history—the ways we remember events separately and together, and how those memories might shift over time.” - Lee Ann Norman

The Daily Northwestern: Block Museum exhibition connects past to present, emphasizes necessity of remembrance (February 2, 2017) “(Robleto’s essay) ends with this larger call for the necessity of all of us to remember the stories of the people who come before us because, if that process of engaging with the past isn’t active, then there’s this possibility of things being completely forgotten.” - Janet Dees, speaking to Hayley Krolik

Bad at Sports: Top V. Weekend Picks (February 2, 2017) Founded in 2005 by Duncan MacKenzie, Richard Holland, and Amanda Browder, Bad at Sports (B@S) now features over 20 principal collaborators and is a weekly podcast, a series of objects, events, and a daily blog produced in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and New York City

NS Magazine: Starving Artists (February 1, 2017) “Six artists examine the United States’ struggles with xenophobia, racism, and immigration at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibit, If You Remember, I’ll Remember.”

NS Magazine: Fab 5: Thoughtful Winter (February 1, 2017) “From the Congo to Paris, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia mesmerizes audiences with exhibitions exploring the clash of cultures from colonialism to our modern world.”

Make it Better: 5 Things to Do: Feb 3-5 (January 31, 2017) “The latest exhibit at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art features pieces examining love, war, resistance, civil rights and more in the 19th and 20th centuries.” - Anna Carlson

“In his Block Museum installation, Attia expands on his long-term exploration of repair, both of the body and of society, and probes the legacies of colonialism, slavery and xenophobia.”

Artnet: Kader Attia Argues for Reparations and “Repair” at Lehmann Maupin (January 27, 2017) “It’s fair to say that Kader Attia is having a moment. The Paris-born artist, who is known for his work on the legacy of colonialism, was awarded the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp last October. His second exhibition at Lehmann Maupin coincides with his work being on view at Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou, as well as with a solo show this month at the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois.” - Christian Viveros-Fauné

Time Out: 48 exciting openings in Chicago in February (January 25, 2017) “Reflect on the past and its tendency to echo through the present via works displayed in the Block Museum’s group exhibition, ’If You Remember, I’ll Remember.’” - Grace Perry

Crain’s: Where to go this week, what to plan for later (January 18, 2017) “Attia cooked up new pieces for the exhibition using resources all across Northwestern University, from the predictable, such as the collections of the library of African studies, to the surprising, like interviews with faculty at the Rehabilitation Institute.” - Graham Meyer

The Daily Northwestern: Block Museum exhibition explores loss, trauma (January 18, 2017) “Overall, this narrative forces us to think about the repair and healing after different sorts of trauma over time and the similarities and differences in the responses that (global tragedies) generate” - Antawan Bird, speaking to Gabby Grossman

Blouin ArtInfo: Contradictory Truths: Kader Attia’s Video Dialogues at Lehmann Maupin (January 18, 2017) “I have always been working on a process of repair — the word we are living in is full of material and immaterial injuries — that the economic and political order of power endlessly denies.” - Kader Attia in interview with Juliet Helmke

Asia Art Archive: Resonances: Japanese/Korean Fluxus Artists and Charlotte Moorman (January 3, 2017) “That was about the time she was introduced to avant-garde music and fell madly and passionately head over heels in love with the avant-garde experiments of the time. From that point on, it became her mission to bring avant-garde art to the people. She wanted to make it accessible to all.” -Lynn Gumpert

Artforum: Good Charlotte (January 10, 2017) “In the exhibition’s catalogue, musicologist Jason Rosenholtz-Witt details how Moorman listed multiple solutions for each of the composition’s many technical challenges. This palimpsest of possibilities helped Moorman tailor her renditions to specific contexts, whether Carnegie Hall or Johnny Carson.” - Colby Chamberlain

Time Out: 28 exciting openings in Chicago in January (December 29, 2016) “The Block Museum presents newly-commissioned work by “Kader Attia,” which compares Western and non-Western approaches to history and tradition.” - Grace Perry

Chicago Tribune: Winter preview: 10 art shows not to miss (December 28, 2016) “The largest collection of Africana in existence is sure to generate a provocative response from Attia, who in past installations has used materials ranging from couscous to foil and carved wood in response to histories of slavery and xenophobia.” - Lori Waxman

Chicago Reader: Where progress was made in 2016: in Chicago’s museums (December 28, 2016) “Tseng’s work would probably be categorized as pop art, but he isn’t particularly well-known, and his output, mostly pictures of himself dressed in a Maoist uniform, is far more radical than what was in the Art Institute or MCA surveys.”

-Tal Rosenberg

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El Pais: Moorman, chelista camuflaga (December 9, 2016) “La exposición arrancó en la North­Western University, en cuya biblioteca se conserva buena parte del archivo de Moorman, y a través de las partituras de Cage o Morton Feldman anotadas por la artista, de fotos, artefactos, programas…, el espectador puede reconstruir la trayectoria de este personaje asombroso y de la escena neoyorquina de los sesenta. [The exhibition started at Northwestern University, in whose library a large part of the Moorman archive is preserved, and through Cage or Morton Feldman scores annotated by the artist, of photos, artefacts, programs ... the viewer can reconstruct the trajectory of this amazing character and the New York scene of the sixties.]” -Estrella de Diego

Artnews: Breaking the Sound Barrier: Cellist Chalotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Actions Remain Provocative (December 8, 2016) “A Feast of Astonishments” offers Moorman the spotlight she has so long deserved.” -Alex Greenberger

New York Times: The Best Art of 2016 (December 7, 2016) “Many of the year’s best shows were of art by women, including this one devoted to Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery.” -Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith

Footnotes Magazine: The Artist in Africana (December 5, 2016) “In a library reception after his second visit, Attia shared his enthusiasm for the Northwestern collaboration before a crowd of about 40 faculty, staff, alumni, and arts supporters. ‘For an artist there is nothing more exciting than being in a library,’ he said. “On your way to the location of one book, you look around and find books that are even more useful.’”

Chicago Tribune: Artist photographed in Mao suit proved to be a cultural standout (November 30, 2016) “These photographs have nothing to do with the selfies of today, which are all about branding oneself. They are performances for the camera that make knowing use of the world around it, a world of cultural and political meaning nearly impossible for any single person to change — but always available to make art with.” -Lori Waxman

Northwestern Magazine: Poster Collection Celebrates 50 Years of Iranian Film (November 29, 2016) “The exhibition also includes posters for nationalist films expressing the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War; films directed by and starring women that critically explore their representation on screen; and more contemporary films that examine post-revolutionary Iranian society.”

artnet: The 50 Most Exciting Artists in Europe Right Now: Part I (November 23, 2016) “Attia’s explorations of the impact of Western culture and colonialism this year nabbed him the Marcel Duchamp Award and a show (alongside the final four nominees) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Next year sees solo outings at MCA Sydney, and The Block Museum in Illinois, and gallery shows in NY and San Gimignano.” –Hettie Judah

The Arkansas Times: Don’t throw anything out - The Legacy of Charlotte Moorman (November 17, 2016) “This was missionary work. Her art and, arguably, her beauty allowed her to move through the world like a double agent, someone who satisfied people’s strict expectations and also messed with them, someone who understood that her effect on people was the best card in a crummy hand. Which is to say, a woman. And especially a woman then.

Performance was perfect for her. Metaphors, props, masks, roles: All these exploded the limited range of a proper Southern lady.” –Lauren Puchowski

Guernica: Charlotte Moorman Exposed (November 15, 2016) “There are so many parts and so many details in each piece, coming at one another from different directions, clashing and smashing. This is art intended for everyone, not just for the elite…Through videos and films, black and white photography, scores, costumes, objects, and music, the exhibit conveys the sprawling scope of Moorman’s work and the Avant Garde Festivals.” -Roslyn Bernstein

Crains Chicago Business: The 52 Must-Do Events in Chicago This Season (November 7, 2016) “War, racism, xenophobia and acts of remembering are poetically explored in this group show, which re-examines historical events—such as Japanese-American internment camps, Native American boarding school experiences and violence against African-Americans—that resonate with current concerns.”

Daily Northwestern: Artist exposes his life to resist FBI, talks intersection between art, engineering (November 1, 2016) “Susy Bielak, Block’s associate director of engagement and curator of public practice, said Elahi was a great first speaker for the series to explore art in the context of engineering. ‘Part of the work that we do at the museum is build connective tissue around the University and between the campus and civic life,’ she said. ‘The artists who we’ve selected to come here have the kind of curiosity, vision, insight that again is that point of simultaneity between artistic practice and engineering.’” -Yvonne Kim

New City: Best of Chicago 2016 - Best Avant-Garde Resurrection (October 27, 2016) “Famously displaced by the influences of neoliberalism that made anything-goes the watchword of today’s art world and its markets, the strain of performative avant-gardism that Moorman championed, and helped create, is enjoying a long-overdue reexamination. At a tipping point in its historical back-and-forth between art and commerce, the art community’s current self-reflection owes much of its newly rediscovered conscience to the Moorman exhibit.” - Brian Hey

Chicago Reader: Karl Wirsum, a film about one of the founding members of the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, has been restored (October 21, 2016) “Often we see artwork as a finished product in the form of an object shielded behind museum glass...but it’s uncommon that we get the opportunity to peek inside an artist’s laboratory and witness work being forged in the present tense.

Suzanne gives us that rare window into Karl’s practice and process.” - Leah Pickett

Chicago Tribune: East Meets West in Tseng Kwong Chi’s early selfies exhibit (October 20, 2016) “Is he a visiting Chinese dignitary, or merely a sly, teasing social commentator? A major exhibit of Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art invites viewers to make up their own minds about his status and motives.” - Louise Burton

The Log Journal: Sound and Vision - Charlotte Moorman’s New York (October 17, 2016) “The show, concise and smartly organized, is crammed with brash artworks, sophisticated scores amended extensively in Moorman’s hand, vintage television footage, and copious images of Moorman and her extended community – most by the celebrated photographer Peter Moore. You get the sense of a serious artist on a mission, as well as a woman bursting with life, humor, and joy, all of which makes the show’s more somber turns – a cello sculpture Moorman fashioned out of her used syringes; a video of a late, private performance of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which anguish and serenity seem to play in impossible counterpoint on Moorman’s face – all the more gripping.” - Steve Smith

Village Voice: Charlotte Moorman’s Electrifying Avant Garde Cello (October 12, 2016) “The greatest performers are those with not only the sharpest chops, but also the openness, the generosity, to give themselves over to the vision of another. Far from being a selfless act, however, performance requires an abiding selfpossession as that self receives, and imparts, ideas as a spirit medium would: into the mind, and through the body.”

-Jennifer Krasinski

Art Daily: Block Museum presents first major retrospective of artist Tseng Kwong Chi (October 12, 2016) “Though recognition for Tseng’s work in the west may have been eclipsed by his early death from AIDSrelated causes at the age of 39, his work has played an important role in the development of contemporary Chinese art. In the 1980s artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, and Song Dong, learned about Tseng’s photographs through American art magazines, and his photographs have been and continue to be significant touchstones for a new generation of contemporary Chinese art photographers.”

FNews Magazine: ‘Keeping the Shadow’ of the AIDS Crisis at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum (October 10, 2016) “It seems that the goal of “Keep the Shadow” is to feel the heaviness of death and the light celebration of life, as communicated at the beginning of the exhibition in a quote by David Wojnarowicz: “I have loved the way memorials take the absence of a human being and make them somehow physical.” It may be up to the individual as to whether or not “Keep the Shadow” is a memorial according to Wojnarowicz’s definition, however, the show is successful at bringing together, and juxtaposing, a collection of important and aesthetically rich works of art.” - Ally Pockrass

Daily Northwestern: Block Museum exhibit, film series look at Iranian history (October 6, 2016) “The exhibit and film series should leave the audience the lasting impression of the attention Iranian filmmakers give to the art of filmmaking and production, Naficy said. He added the art house genre put Iran on “the map of world cinema” and presents the nation in a way that is not typically portrayed by the U.S.” -Hayley Krolik

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Medill Reports Chicago: Newly Opened Tseng Kwong Chi Retrospective Highlights The Power Of The Selfie (October 5, 2016) “Tseng Kwong Chi’s brief career illustrated the disruptive power of the portrait, and the work featured in Performing for the Camera is the summation of that vision. Whether you find yourself smirking at the image of Tseng leaping in front of the Brooklyn Bridge or posing with a perplexed Nancy Kissinger, or whether you angrily scan the faces of the men who had just filled out their draft information, the exhibit proves one thing. A portrait is far more than just documentation of a moment in time.” - Grant Rindner

North by Northwestern: Tseng Kwong Chi Exhibit opens at the Block Museum (October 5, 2016) “The Block Museum’s decision to feature Tseng is a conscious effort to resist mainstream invisibility of Asian American artists, and to insert Tseng’s distinctive wit and perspective into larger discourse of race and American-ness.” - Stacy Tsai

Art Newspaper: Fluxus is alive and well at New York university galleries (September 30, 2016) “The career survey comprises interviews, photographs, rare footage from the avant-garde festival that she founded in 1963, and a film lent by Yoko Ono that shows Moorman performing Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) in 1982 from the roof of her Manhattan loft after she was diagnosed with cancer.” -Gabriella Angeleti

Bad at Sports: Top V Weekend Pick (September 29, 2016)

Art F City: The Topless Cellist Finally Gets Her Due At The Grey Art Gallery (September 14, 2016) “A Feast of Astonishments puts Moorman into her rightful spot in Fluxus art history as a powerful collaborator and bold avant-garde performance artist. The hope is that subsequent exhibitions on this era of performance art will follow suit.” - Emily Colucci

Financial Times: Charlotte Moorman New York exhibition: a spirit of unruly innovation (September 14, 2016) “Her cheery manner belied the grit of a prizefighter; her spectacular performances heralded an age of women’s defiant freedom. Moorman made no such claims for herself. She was far more interested in exploding artistic conventions than in political struggle. She was an equivocal figure, poised at the precipice of feminism. While some women were burning bras, she made one sing.” - Ariella Budick

Musical America: Avant-gardist Charlotte Moorman Celebrated in Style in NYU Exhibition (September 12, 2016) At the Block, A Feast of Astonishments, which filled most of the museum’s two-story gallery space, was exhilaratingly immersive. Though logically organized into •• four sections-The Early Years, Repertoire, Moorman Abroad, and The Avant Garde Festivals-its 330-some items offered a dizzying mix of video, photos, posters, costumes, letters, and musical instruments. - Wynne Delacoma

“Let’s consider our relationship with the recent past as it changes into something to ask about, something that’s reducible, relatable, and metaphorical. Let’s consider how it can be found so easily on the walls of a space that has been designed just for the purpose of its understanding. Let’s also consider the objects that we share in time and the ephemeral whimsy that transforms them into something more and different than what they once were. Let’s consider the Top V.”

New Yorker: The Legacy of the “Topless Cellist: (September 12, 2016)

WBEZ Worldview: Weekend Passport (September 20, 2016)

“After her death in 1991, at 58, the mainstream art world largely forgot her, or pegged her as a decorative accessory to the work of Nam June Paik, with whom she often collaborated. But with the arrival of a superb biography, by Joan Rothfuss, in 2014, and now these two shows — which come from the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, where a vast Moorman archive resides — the days of forgetting and misperceiving are over, and a foundational 20th-century art figure is revealed.” - Holland Cotter

“I was surprised at the depth and the breadth of what was going on at the Block Museum of Art this Fall.... There are people who think of Iran as a conservative, religious society. They get shocked when they see the vivid posters of the ‘50s, ‘60s and 70s.” -Nari Safavi and Jerome McDonnell. Conversation starts at 01:00.

Chicago Reader: Tseng Kwong Chi, downtown New York’s photographic ambassador (September 29, 2016)

“Her vast influence on contemporary performance, not to mention the epoch she helped to define, has found a home in the necessary exhibition “A Feast of Astonishments.” - Hilton Als

New York Times: Charlotte Moorman, Tradition Disrupter, Is the Focus of Two Shows (September 9, 2016)

Artforum Online: Must See New York (September 9, 2016)

“Performing for the Camera” is in some respects a companion piece to “A Feast of Astonishments,” an overview of avant-garde performance artist and cellist Charlotte Moorman that ran at the Block during the first half of 2016. Both exhibits address the work of relatively overlooked 20th-century New York City artists (and NYC transplants). Both are single-subject shows that furtively incorporate the work of significant collaborators: in Moorman’s case, video-art pioneer Nam June Paik; in Tseng’s, Keith Haring.” - Tal Rosenberg

“A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s,” a long overdue retrospective of this Julliard-trained radical’s vision through documents, objects, and so much more—which opened at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and draws on materials from the school’s Charlotte Moorman Archive—will only aid in cementing this major artist’s contributions to history.”

Shadow and Act: The Ultimate Blaxploitation Film “Three the Hard Way” at Northwestern University (September 26, 2016)

“Blaxploitation fans, take note: the Block Museum of Art will welcome venerable football great and movie badass Fred Williamson to talk about his screen career and introduce his 70s action flicks Bucktown and Three the Hard Way.” —J.R. Jones

“And when it comes to Blaxploitation films, I’ve always strongly believed that the ultimate, most ambitious and most perfect example of the genre, was Gordon Parks Jr’s 1974 film “Three The Hard Way”. It’s a wild, loopy, illogical, James Bondian action adventure, with a great premise, that no Hollywood studio would have the guts to make again today.” Sergio Mims

The Art Newspaper: Three to See New York (September 15, 2016) “Last week, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University opened A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-80s (until 10 December), a look at the work of this musician and performance artist. New York is an appropriate place for the show, which travelled from the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (its organiser), since many of the 15 avant-garde festivals Moorman organised between 1963 and 1980 were held in the city. The importance of these festivals and Moorman’s own work is explored through sculptures, videos, photographs, costumes, musical scores and other archival materials.”

Chicago Magazine: Five Great Things to Do This Week in Chicago (September 15, 2016) “This relentlessly inquisitive photographer died young at 39, but left a body of over 100,000 images—mostly of New York’s hip downtown scene, including portraits of Warhol, Haring, and Basquiat in their studios. Not just a documentarian, the artist also showed his identity on film as a gay Asian immigrant adapting to the tumultuous 1980s.”

Chicago Reader: 10 Best Bets for Fall Movies (September 7, 2016)

ArtNews: 9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week (September 6, 2016) “But more than simply being an expert collaborator, Moorman was an original, and this show rightfully gives her the spotlight she deserves. On view here will be sculptures, videos, documentation, and scores related to Moorman’s performances.”

Artsy: Charlotte Moorman Is Finally Remembered as More Than “The Topless Cellist” (September 4, 2016) “Moorman’s endless experimentation with sound and the body pushed not only avant-garde art, but also feminism, into new, generative places.” - Alexxa Gotthardt

Chicago Reader: 10 Best Bets for Fall Visual Arts (September 2, 2016) “Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong and participated in the downtown Manhattan art scene during the 1980s. This biographical information is reflected in his work, primarily photographs he took of himself in a Maoist uniform standing in front of such famous landmarks as the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The first major solo exhibition of his output includes rare archival material.” – Tal Roseberg

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