The Block Museum

06/10/2026

Collection Spotlight: Hiratsuka Un’ichi, Stone Bridge, Katsuya, Kyoto, 1966

Artist: Hiratsuka Un’ichi 平塚運一 (Japanese, 1895–1997) Title: Stone Bridge, Katsura, Kyoto Date: 1966 Medium: Woodblock print on paper…...

Artist: Hiratsuka Un’ichi 平塚運一 (Japanese, 1895–1997) Title: Stone Bridge, Katsura, Kyoto Date: 1966 Medium: Woodblock print on paper Dimensions: 33 ½ x 25 in. Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Van Zelst, 1985.109 As i...

06/09/2026

🎥 Bodies of Work / Bodies of Time gathers the cinematic explorations of the 2026 Documentary Media MFA Cohort—Maya Castronovo, Alan Medina, Victor Ramos, Fan Wang—into two nights of screen- ings. The films observe and spend time with bodies across geographical borders, ecological entanglements and disentanglements, memory, timescales, and labor.

📆 Night 1 - Wed, 6/10 at 7PM
📆 Night 2 - Thurs, 6/11 at 7PM

✨Each night will be preceded by a reception at 6PM and followed by Q&A with the filmmakers.

This year, the four filmmaker cohort, shares short films made across the course of the two-year program in Night 1 and their thesis films in Night 2.

Co-presented by Northwestern’s School of Communication, The Department of Radio-TV-Film, Jane Steiner Hoffman and Michael Hoffman, and The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

06/03/2026

Teresa Montoya delivers annual Feinberg School of Medicine Carlos Montezuma Lecture on Native Health

On May 14, the Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine hosted artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984) for its 5th Annual Carlos Montezuma Native Health Lecture, co-sponsored by The Block and the…...

On May 14, the Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine hosted artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984) for its 5th Annual Carlos Montezuma Native Health Lecture, co-sponsored by The Block and the Center for Native ...

06/03/2026

Collection Spotlight: Gillian Wearing, Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face), 1995-96

Artist: Gillian Wearing (British, born 1963) Title: Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face)...

Artist: Gillian Wearing (British, born 1963) Title: Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face) Date: 1995‒96 Medium: Reversal film dye coupler print Dimensions: 16 3/4 in x 23 1/4 in Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.60....

05/28/2026

At, Through, & Back At You: Student Reflections on The Art of Encounter Symposium at Raclin Murphy Museum of Art

In Spring 2026, Northwestern senior Maggie Munday Odom (Theatre, English Creative Writing, Environmental Policy and Culture, and Religious Studies) traveled with Erin Northington, The Block Museum’s Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Campus and Community Education and Engagement, to attend The Art of Encounter: Exploring Spiritual Engagement with Art Objects, a symposium hosted by the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame....

In Spring 2026, Northwestern senior Maggie Munday Odom (Theatre, English Creative Writing, Environmental Policy and Culture, and Religious Studies) traveled with Erin Northington, The Block Museum’s Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Campus and Community Education and Engagement, to at...

05/27/2026

“An Arc and a Not-Straight Line”: Erica DiBenedetto on Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing [Video]

In May 2026, the Block Museum hosted an online conversation about Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #215 (1973). Erica DiBenedetto, curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a scholar of LeWitt's work, joined Block Academic Curator Corinne Granof to discuss the wall drawings as a practice: how they are made, why LeWitt began making them in 1968, and what's involved in making and viewing them....

In May 2026, the Block Museum hosted an online conversation about Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #215 (1973). Erica DiBenedetto, curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a scholar of LeWitt’s work, joined Block Academic Curator Corinne Granof to discuss the w...

05/21/2026

“What Can You See? What Can’t You See?”: Medill Students Test Emerging 3D Technology at The Block

This spring, Associate Professor Carolyn Tang Kmet brought her Medill Integrated Marketing Communications graduate students to the Block Museum for an experiential learning module exploring how consumers engage with physical, digital, and spatial representations of the same object. The project, led by Kmet and developed in partnership with Sony XYN and Northwestern Emerging Technologies Lab, gave students early access to a Sony prototype rarely seen outside professional design and visualization settings: the Spatial Reality Display, a screen that produces realistic 3D images without glasses or a headset....

This spring, Associate Professor Carolyn Tang Kmet brought her Medill Integrated Marketing Communications graduate students to the Block Museum for an experiential learning module exploring how consumers engage with physical, digital, and spatial representations of the same object. The project, led....

05/20/2026

In her new BFI Film Classics book, Elena Gorfinkel writes: “Barbara Loden’s WANDA is a single and singular film. Her only feature, the film is unlike any other, transcendent in its clarity of spirit, its harmony of form and idea. Loden herself summarised WANDA as a film about a woman who leaves her life as she knows it, ‘not knowing what she wants, but knowing what she doesn’t want.’ The titular character drifts across little-seen landscapes of deprivation in an unforgettable, grittily lensed America.”

Born in rural North Carolina in 1932, Loden fled to New York City at age 16, where she worked her way from model to comedienne to dramatic actor; she delivered a string of celebrated stage and screen performances while working to develop the script that would become her first and only feature film as a director. Inspired by a real-life crime story reported in a newspaper article and her own upbringing and acute sense of women’s economic and emotional desperation, Loden created the titular character of Wanda Goronski, who Gorfinkel describes as “unmoor[ed] from motherhood, from family life, from law.”

🎞️Join us this Thursday, May 21 at 7PM for a rare screening of the only known 16mm Kodachrome original print of WANDA (1971), now widely understood to be one of the most remarkable works of American independent cinema, with film scholar and critic Elena Gorfinkel whose research explores Loden’s rich live and cinematic legacy.

📽️A special companion program this Friday, May 22 at 7PM - “Pioneer Women: The Educational Films of Barbara Loden & Joan Micklin Silver in 16mm with Elena Gorfinkel”

05/15/2026

Diné in Focus Photography Collective: Artist Talk [Video]

On April 11, 2026, The Block Museum of Art hosted the Diné in Focus Photography Collective for a conversation on photography, representation, ethics, and contemporary life across the Navajo Nation. The event was held alongside Teresa Montoya's exhibition Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill and featured Teresa Montoya (Diné), Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago; …...

On April 11, 2026, The Block Museum of Art hosted the Diné in Focus Photography Collective for a conversation on photography, representation, ethics, and contemporary life across the Navajo Nation. The event was held alongside Teresa Montoya’s exhibition Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after...

05/14/2026

The Block Museum of Art Announces Gift of Fourteen Photographs by Fazal Sheikh Honoring Henry and Leigh Bienen

Spanning more than three decades, the gift brings works addressing displacement, human rights, and environmental justice to Northwestern's art collection The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a major gift of fourteen photographs by internationally acclaimed artist Fazal Sheikh, given by the artist in honor of Interim President and President Emeritus of Northwestern University Henry Bienen and Leigh Bienen, senior lecturer emerita at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law....

Spanning more than three decades, the gift brings works addressing displacement, human rights, and environmental justice to Northwestern’s art collection The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a major gift of fourteen photographs by internationally acclaimed...