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The Block Museum of Art: January 26 - July 10, 2022 Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Montgomery, Alabama: August 13 - November 6, 2022

Originating at Northwestern's Block Museum of Art A Site of Struggle explored how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100 + year period.

Images of African American suffering and death have constituted an enduring part of the nation’s cultural landscape, and the development of creative counterpoints to these images has been an ongoing concern for American artists. A Site of Struggle took a new approach to looking at the intersection of race, violence, and art by investigating the varied strategies American artists have used to grapple with anti-Black violence, ranging from representation to abstraction and from literal to metaphorical. The exhibition focused on works created between the 1890s and 2013—situating contemporary artistic practice within a longer history of American art and visual culture. It foregrounded African Americans as active shapers of visual culture and highlights how art has been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-Black violence.

A Site of Struggle was organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, and curated by Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, with the assistance of Alisa Swindell, Curatorial Research Associate.

Lead support for the exhibition was generously provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The project was also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bernstein Family Contemporary Art Fund, the Myers Foundations, the Block DEAI Fund, and the Block Board of Advisors. Generous support was contributed by William Spiegel and Lisa Kadin, the Alumnae of Northwestern University, the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, and by Lynne Jacobs. The related publication was co-published by The Block Museum of Art and Princeton University Press and is supported by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the Sandra L. Riggs Publication Fund.

Art can provide a moment of pause, an opportunity for us to sit with the complex and deep-rooted nature of anti-Black violence, and contemplate how it impacts us individually and as a society. In these works, we may find recognition of our own suffering— which is important in and of itself— as well as a provocation to continue, or begin for the first time, striving to eliminate this suffering through concrete actions.

This year opportunities all museum perspective and independent This work from presentations to brochures, strategies, consider and interpretation.

— Janet Dees

year our students have had opportunities to work with staff across museum departments, gaining rich perspective into both collaborative independent curatorial work. work now takes many shapespresentations and installation, brochures, blogs and other digital strategies, as our students help us consider new approaches to research interpretation.