Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection

WHO SAYS WHO SHOWS WHAT COUNTS

THINKING ABOUT HISTORY WITH THE BLOCK’S COLLECTION

Who Says Who Shows What Counts

Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection

THE BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

WHO SAYS WHO SHOWS WHAT COUNTS

THINKING ABOUT HISTORY WITH THE BLOCK’S COLLECTION

Edited by Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Director’s

Lisa G. Corrin

Acknowledgments

Lisa G. Corrin

Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

From Gallery to Museum: The Block’s Collecting History

Corinne Granof

The How and the Why: The Block’s Collection

Kathleen Bickford Berzock

INSTITUTIONS CRITIQUED

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Grandassa Models, Merton Simpson Gallery)

Rikki Byrd

Warrington Colescott, Picasso at Mougins: The Etchings

S. Hollis Clayson

Louise Lawler, Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts

Brian T. Leahy

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #49

Claudia Swan

Kerry James Marshall, Brownie

Meghan Clare Considine

Kerry James Marshall, May 15, 2001

Elliot J. Reichert

Edward Steichen, L'Oiseau dans L'Espace

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Thomas Struth, Museo del Prado 6

Jesús Escobar

CRITICAL PORTRAITS

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Vahap Avşar, Gece Vardíyasi 3 / Night Shift 3

Ayça Alemdaroğlu

Dawoud Bey, Untitled (Chicago)

Tamar Kharatishvili

Omar Victor Diop, Juan de Pareja

Natasha Trethewey, “Thrall”

Jeff Donaldson, Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis)

Benjamin Jones

Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, Gloria, Chicago, IL, 2016

Janet Dees

Rosalie Favell, Facing the Camera: Shan Goshorn, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2012

Janet Dees

Donna Ferrato, Margo, Unbeatable Woman, Mt. Tamalpais, San Francisco, CA

Sekile M. Nzinga

Marisol, Pocahontas

Alejandra Uslenghi

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith

Christine Froula

Catherine Opie, Skeeter

Sarah Estrela

Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp in a Blond Wig

Alissa Schapiro

Deborah Roberts, She's Mighty, Mighty

Brianna Heath

Cindy Sherman, Film Still Series #14

Michael Metzger

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space I, New York City, NY

John Corbett

Edward Steichen, Greta Garbo, Hollywood

Evelyn Kreutzer

PLACE AND MEMORY

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Dawoud Bey, Untitled #17 (Forest)

Natasha Trethewey

Alan Cohen, Now (Auschwitz-Birkenau) 13-2

Danny M. Cohen

Willie Doherty, Border Crossing

Matthew Johnson

LaToya Ruby Frazier, A Message in Nestle Water

Bottles from Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, Macana Roxie and LaToya Ruby Frazier at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint MI

Nnaemeka Ekwelum

Hai Bo, Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn

Kelsey Allen-Niesen

Sky Hopinka, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer

Michael Metzger

Mary Peck, Stadium

Taco Terpstra and Marc Walton

Pat Phillips, Yall Wanna See a Dead Body?

Janet Dees

Mark Ruwedel, Chocolate Mountains, Ancient Footpath toward Indian Pass

Eli Suzukovich III

Tseng Kwong Chi, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 1986

Joshua Chambers-Letson

REFRAMING THE PAST

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

David P. Bradley, The Married Woman

Kelly Wisecup

Enrique Chagoya, Return to Goya No. 9

Harris Feinsod

Emmanuel Bakary Daou, Le temps Ebola (Ebola Times)

Adia Benton

Shan Goshorn, Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance

Janet Dees

Edgar Heap of Birds, Public Enemy Care for Youth (The Brutality Which Is America)

Lois Biggs

Admire Kamudzengerere and Rachel Monosov, First Home, Aug. 21, 1972

Antawan I. Byrd

Rose Kgoete, 16 June 1976 Youth Day

Douglas Foster

Natalia Ludmila, The State of Affairs

Charles Whitaker

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Lazy Equation

Alisa Swindell

Adam Rolston, Untitled (Goodman’s Egg and Onion Matzos)

Corinne Granof

Lorna Simpson, Stack of Diaries

Huey Copeland

Federico Solmi, The Great Farce Portable Theater

Janet Dees

Hank Willis Thomas, Available in a Variety of Sizes and Colors, 1977/2007

Krista Thompson

Kara Walker, The Bush, Skinny, De-Boning

Leslie M. Harris

Fred Wilson, Untitled (Venice Biennale)

Peter Erickson

STUDENTS DISCUSS MUSEUM COLLECTING

Hannah Feldman, Essi Rönkkö, and Kate Hadley Toftness

Myra Greene, Undertone #17, #23, #51

Students enrolled in “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts,” spring 2020

Samantha Baldwin

Lois Biggs

Cooper Brovenick

Meghan Clare Considine

Ela Dayanikli

Zoe Detweiler

Kathleen Dewan

Vitoria Monteiro de Carvalho Faria

Brianna Heath

Wenke (Coco) Huang

Mina Pembe Malaz

Joely Simon

COLLECTING AND CRITIQUE: A STUDENT PERSPECTIVE

Students enrolled in “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts,” spring 2020

EDITORS’ NOTE

This book is intended to be accessible to the general reader as well as to provide a depth and breadth of knowledge that will be of interest to specialists. We acknowledge that the broad range of topics covered in this book moves across space and time, and that, for example, language related to identity is subject to change and reevaluation. We have attempted to express the complexity of the biographical information of each artist, privileging the preference of the artist when possible.

The Block Museum of Art capitalizes “Black” as well as other racial and ethnic identifiers such as “Indigenous,” though, currently, does not capitalize “white.” However, we recognize that authors have nuanced reasons to use lower case spelling in certain instances. In this book we respect each contributor’s intention and preference on this matter.

All professional titles that appear in the book represent Northwestern University affiliation at the time of publication, unless otherwise indicated.

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

Lisa G. Corrin

When I arrived at The Block Museum of Art in 2012, I seized the opportunity to ask questions. Regarding the collection, I asked: “Why should The Block continue to collect? How can the collection become essential to the education of every Northwestern student?” My colleagues and I saw in the answers to these questions an opportunity for The Block and its collection to evolve by reconceiving the museum’s focus from what art is to what art does.

The Block’s 40th anniversary was on the horizon when I met with members of The Block Board of Advisors in New York in 2018 to discuss whether we might mark this event with an art acquisition initiative. They shared our staff’s belief in the potential of the collection to support critical thinking in courses across disciplines and through experiential learning. We wanted the collection to amplify the museum’s capacity to forge new teaching and research partnerships amongst scholars from different departments. In search of a theme for a collecting initiative that would embody this multidisciplinary approach, one Board member asked, “What stories do we want to tell?” Others jumped in with ideas. When one member offered “history,” it set in motion a lively, extended exchange about how works of art enable us to connect the past to the present, thereby reimagining the future. When this idea was presented to the curatorial team for consideration, it quickly gained momentum; it clearly resonated with the collecting strategy and priorities that had coalesced in their own discussions over the past several years. Inspired by Thinking about History, a book by Northwestern faculty member Sarah Maza published in 2017, this theme became the focus of ongoing dialogue between staff and The Block Board of Advisors as we began seeking acquisition opportunities through gifts and purchases.

Between 2018 and 2020, The Block, with the generous support of its Board of Advisors and other Northwestern supporters, accessioned more than 550 works of art. Together we were motivated by a shared vision of expanding and diversifying the collection to spark

Bethany Collins, April 9, 1963, 2016, embossed paper. Purchase funds donated by Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund, Press Collection Endowment Fund, and Block Museum Special Projects Fund, 2020.3.1.

student-driven exhibitions, programs, and research and to catalyze innovative teaching strategies. These activities enact our mission of object-based teaching and learning, encouraging faculty and students to think in expansive ways about time, place, representation, the canon of art history, and about museums as shapers, holders, and disseminators of knowledge and cultural values. As we build this campus resource, we seek to give agency to many voices in shaping its evolution, its presentation, and its interpretation. Our process with this initiative demanded intentionality and rigor. Each object added to the whole individually and in conversation with other objects to ignite critical inquiry. The initiative resulted in a series of exhibitions, this publication, and the development of new artwork-based pedagogies.

Today, we cannot help but think differently about what is at stake in reimagining The Block’s collection and its purpose. The year 2020 will be remembered as one of disruptions, during which the COVID-19 pandemic converged with the largest mass protests for social justice in our nation’s history. These protests rightly demand we remake our society, which is toxic with systemic racism, inequities in health care, income, access to education, and the catastrophic effects of climate change. The enervated, extreme expressionist rendering of Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Anxious Man) (2015) aptly captures the traumatic impact of Black witnessing of ongoing police brutality, white supremacist activism, and political disenfranchisement [PAGE 14] .

In the midst of this reality, in spring 2020, students from eight different disciplines took part in an undergraduate seminar intended to bring student voices to The Block’s collecting practice [SEE PAGES 164–173] . One of two works purchased as a result of this project is an embossed print by Bethany Collins [PAGE 10] reproducing the front page of The Birmingham News on April 9, 1963, calling attention to the editorial board’s decision not to cover the Civil Rights protests happening in their city. The work offers an anchor for confronting anti-Black violence and underrepresentation of African American history in the United States.

When we conceived the “Thinking about History” initiative we sought works of art like this print by Collins capable of catalyzing conversations about these and other urgent issues. We saw the collection as a tool for helping students to make sense of where humankind has been, where we are, and where we might go in the future. We hope this initiative will reinforce our students’ sense of The Block as a place where they see themselves and their world, and as an arena where they embrace complexity, wrestle with difficult questions, and articulate their power to make change.

The Block’s collection will continue to evolve. We aspire for it to demonstrate our core values: in all we do, to strive for inclusivity; to listen to voices other than our own; to hold a space for individuals

to be heard and seen. We enthusiastically welcome the critical assessments and provocations of others as we continue to build it. The title of this book reflects this invitation. Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection and the accompanying exhibition are inspired by a work of art by Louise Lawler in The Block’s collection that poses three fundamental questions at the forefront of museum work today. The questions exemplify how our staff is looking inward—at structures of curating, collecting, and decision-making across our program. Rigorous engagement with these questions of power and representation also expresses some of the noblest goals of higher education—to nurture empathy, a respect for and valuing of difference, and an awareness of the biases we bring to all we do; in short, to provide the self-reflective tools necessary to have impact in the world as a responsible citizen. A productive disruptor, the academic museum provides exposure to works of art that complicate assumptions and reveal the limits of our individual ways of knowing. The collection of an academic art museum is a unique tool for this profound engagement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lisa G. Corrin

The Block’s 40th anniversary art acquisition initiative, “Thinking about History,” is multidimensional. It includes gifts of art and support for art purchases, this publication, and a series of exhibitions. It also coincides with the launch of The Block’s new online collection database and the culmination of a multi-year project to digitize the entire collection and make it widely accessible. Taken as a whole, these efforts will introduce Northwestern University and the broader regional community to a new direction for the museum’s collection as a teaching, learning, and research resource.

The Block’s collection has grown over forty years principally through gifts from Northwestern’s devoted supporters such as The Block’s Board of Advisors. I wish to particularly acknowledge with deep gratitude the extraordinary support of this group of forward-thinking alumni, parents, and regional community leaders. They are passionately committed to The Block’s educational mission and have themselves gifted numerous works of art and generous contributions towards purchases of art in support of the “Thinking about History” initiative. Because of their leadership, the museum now benefits from a new Block Board of Advisors Endowment in support of its collection, artistic program, research, and engagement activities. Other special funds created by Julie and Larry Bernstein, Andra and Irwin Press, Sandra L. Riggs, and Lisa Munster Tananbaum and Steve Tananbaum will support further acquisitions and publications.

Grants from the Alumnae of Northwestern University, the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Sandra L. Riggs Publication Fund are supporting the exhibitions, programming, and this book in conjunction with our anniversary, for which we are appreciative. The complex and multifaceted nature of this initiative required exemplary organization and communication skills as well as flexibility and a nimble response to opportunities. We could not have succeeded without the superb management and relationshipbuilding skills of Kate Hadley Toftness, Senior Advancement Manager,

Rashid Johnson, Untitled (Anxious Man), 2015. Black soap and wax on white ceramic tile. Gift of the Kruger Family, 2020.9.21.

Grants and Collection Council; Essi Rönkkö, Associate Curator of Collections; and Elisa Miller Quinlan ’98, Director of Development. Jeff Smith, Senior Business Administrator, and his colleague, Rita Shorts, Business Coordinator, expertly managed The Block’s resources for acquisitions and we thank them.

Gifts to the “Thinking about History” initiative took place during Northwestern’s “We Will” campaign, led by Northwestern President, Morton Schapiro, a champion of The Block. We thank him for believing in the value of our academic art museum to the educational experiences of our students. We are also grateful to the Northwestern Office of the Provost for its continued investment in The Block.

Former Provost Dan Linzer and former Associate Provost Jean Shedd provided critical early support of this initiative by building The Block’s capacity and enabling us to digitize the entire collection and make it available online.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, deserves special recognition for her exemplary leadership of a remarkable curatorial team. A path-breaking scholar of African art, she has written and taught about museums and their collecting practices. This background made her the ideal individual to oversee the development of The Block’s new collecting strategy, ensuring it reflected the museum’s mission and values. She shares this vision eloquently in a spirited essay in this volume. Kathleen and the curatorial team work closely on acquisitions with Dan Silverstein, Associate Director of Collections and Exhibition Management; Kristina Bottomley, Assistant Director of Collections and Exhibition Management and Senior Registrar; Joseph Scott, Collections and Exhibitions Coordinator; and Mark Leonhart, Lead Preparator.

Dan and his team have expertly overseen essential aspects of the gift process as well as supported conservation, exhibition design, and installation, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Melanie Garcia Sympson, Curatorial Associate, and Madeline Hultquist ’21, Undergraduate Research Assistant, performed critical object research on incoming gifts. We also extend heartfelt appreciation to Jeff Smith, Senior Business Administrator; Aaron Chatman, Manager of Visitor Services; and James Stauber, Visitor Services Officer for coordinating with curatorial and collections management staff to ensure acquisitions could continue during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing access to the museum’s facility.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Northwestern student docents were unable to give gallery tours but instead turned their creativity and love of art to research specifically focused on recent additions to our collection. Their efforts, led by Lauren Cochard Watkins, former Engagement Manager, and América Salomón, Manager of Public Programs, are providing important resources for future students to

build upon as they share their knowledge of the collection with their peers and the public. We thank Erin Northington, Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director, Campus and Community Education and Engagement, for her contributions to the programming connected to this initiative and also for reimagining the central role of the collection in campus and community engagement including, in summer 2020, a pilot program in the Feinberg School of Medicine. Student docents who have contributed to the project through research, tours, or label writing, include Ayinoluwa Abegunde ’22, Fiona Asokacitta ’21, Lois Biggs ’20, Alexis Bullock ’20, Erin Claeys ’21, Meghan Clare Considine ’20, Claire Corridon ’21, Karan Gowda ’22, Chayda Harding ’22, Brianna Heath ’21, Hyohee Kim ’22, Isabella Ko ’20, Janet Lee ’20, Kristine Liao ’20, Nicholas Liou ’20, Brooke Lummis ’20, Mina Malaz ’21, Lennart Nielsen ’21, Giboom Joyce Park ’22, Margeaux Rocco ’23, Ella Rubenstein ’20, Joely Simon ’21, Rory Kahiya Tsapayi ’21, and Maria Valencia ’20. This book and the exhibition, Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection , have been imaginatively co-curated by Essi Rönkkö, Associate Curator of Collections, and Kate Hadley Toftness, Senior Advancement Manager, Grants and Collection Council. Over the past three years they conceived of an exhibition that knitted together existing works from the collection with recent acquisitions. Their sustained, rigorous dialogue has yielded a thoughtfully composed exhibition showcasing The Block’s new collecting direction. Their partnership also yielded the first course inspired by the collection, “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts?,” co-taught by Essi, Kate, and Associate Professor of Art History, Hannah Feldman. The students’ final project was an acquisition tied to the initiative’s theme and supported by a generous gift from Richard and Susan Rieser. A co-authored text representing their process and final acquisition appears in this book. The Block intends to continue working with students on an annual acquisition. We thank Hannah Feldman and students in Art History 395 Collecting|Critique for inspiring us: Samantha Baldwin ’21, Lois Biggs ’20, Cooper Brovenick ’20, Meghan Clare Considine ’20, Ela Dayanikli ’20, Zoe Detweiler ’20, Kathleen Dewan ’20, Vitoria Monteiro de Carvalho Faria ’23, Brianna Heath ’21, Wenke (Coco) Huang ’22, Mina Pembe Malaz ’21, and Joely Simon ’21. This “Thinking about History” initiative owes its name to a book by Sarah Maza, Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of History. We thank Sarah for guiding our board members through an overview of her book and for allowing us to follow her lead with our exhibition subtitle. We also thank artist Louise Lawler for her agreement to the adaptation of the title of her work Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts (1990) [PAGE 57] for the title of this book and the related exhibition.

A second exhibition associated with this initiative, For One and All, is co-curated by Caitlin DiMartino ’22 PhD, 2019–20 Block Graduate Fellow in Art History, and Corinne Granof, the museum’s Academic Curator. Like Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts, it integrates recent acquisitions with examples of prints from the collection acquired over four decades, providing continuity between the foundation of The Block’s collection in “reproducible media” and its new direction. We are fortunate to have Corinne’s extensive experience on the curatorial team, and also reflected in her overview of the museum’s collecting history published here. We thank Corinne for her commitment to mentoring our students and Caitlin for bringing her art historical expertise to the collection.

In recent years, the museum has made a commitment to selectively adding media art works to its collection. This builds upon foundational works by Paul Chan, Terence Gower, and Carrie Mae Weems gifted by Peter Norton. I wish to recognize Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts, for his leadership of this new commitment that serves the growth of our media arts program, and our colleagues with whom he works closely, Malia Haines-Stewart, Associate Film Programmer, and Rebecca Lyon, Projectionist. We thank Michael and artist Sky Hopinka for enabling The Block to present Hopinka’s Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019) [PAGE 119] alongside Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts. This two-channel video work also represents a significant addition to The Block’s growing collection of works created by Native American and Indigenous artists.

The “Thinking about History” initiative likewise includes Federico Solmi’s The Great Farce (2017–18), a video installation, combining drawing and painting with gaming and digital technology. The full-scale version of this pioneering work has been postponed due to the pandemic, but we are instead able to include a single-channel version of the monumental original in the artist’s stunning mixed-media frame in Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts [PAGE 157] . The work is a gift from the artist to The Block. We thank him for this magnanimous gesture of support and show of confidence in the museum’s ambitious media arts program. We are grateful to Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, for leading this acquisition and working with the artist on a future presentation of this innovative work.

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Block, we also commemorate the 20th anniversary of our Dirk Lohan designed building. The Block is grateful to artist Neil Goodman, and to both Dan Silverstein and Kristina Bottomley, for working to restore the beautiful green patina of Subjects-Objects (2000). This sculpture was commissioned from Goodman in honor of Block supporter

Phyllis Weil Ellis in appreciation of her devotion and dedication to the growth of the museum when the building opened. Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness shared a vision for their exhibition and this publication: to invite the voices of faculty, students, staff, and alumni of Northwestern University to the interpretation of the collection. Their commitment to giving agency to others inspired broad participation and also resulted in fifty-one contributions representing twenty-one academic units. We extend appreciation to this book’s contributors who hail from across our campus and community: Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Kelsey Allen-Niesen ’19, Adia Benton, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Lois Biggs ’20, Antawan Byrd ’21 PhD, Rikki Byrd ’23 PhD, Joshua Chambers-Letson, S. Hollis Clayson, Danny M. Cohen, Meghan Clare Considine ’20, Huey Copeland, John Corbett ’94 PhD, Janet Dees, Nnaemeka Ekwelum ’23 PhD, Peter Erickson, Jesús Escobar, Sarah Estrela, Harris Feinsod, Hannah Feldman, Douglas Foster, Christine Froula, Corinne Granof, Leslie Harris, Brianna Heath ’21, Matthew Johnson, Benjamin Jones ’23 PhD, Tamar Kharatishvili ’22 PhD, Evelyn Kreutzer ’20 PhD, Brian T. Leahy, PhD candidate, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Michael Metzger, Sekile M. Nzinga, Elliot J. Reichert ’10, Alissa Schapiro ’22 PhD, Eli Suzukovich III, Claudia Swan, Alisa Swindell, Taco Terpstra, Krista Thompson, Natasha Trethewey, Alejandra Uslenghi, Marc Walton, Charles Whitaker, Kelly Wisecup, and the students of Art History 395: Collecting|Critique. We are abundantly grateful to US Poet Laureate and Northwestern professor, Natasha Trethewey, for permission to reprint her poem “Thrall.” We thank Joanna Ahlberg and Peter Ahlberg of AHL&CO for the copy editing and the design of this book; Northwestern University Press, its distributor; Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, who served as an invaluable additional reader and sounding board for all phases of the publication project; Jenna Robertson, Assistant to the Director, who deftly cleared rights and permissions; Bailey Pekar ’22, Curatorial Intern, and Amelia Mylvaganam ’23, Curatorial Research Aide, who assisted with copy editing; and Lindsay Bosch ’04, Senior Communications Manager, who, in addition to helping to publicly launch this multi-year initiative, negotiated a relationship with the publication distributor.

The “Thinking about History” initiative marks a turning point for The Block Museum of Art not least because, as these acknowledgments demonstrate, it affirms the importance of academic art museums in higher education. The Block will honor this belief and the generosity of the individuals named in these acknowledgments through stewarding the collection and ensuring its impact on teaching, learning, and research across Northwestern University. Inspired by what we have achieved together, we embrace this responsibility with a renewed sense of the purpose and potential of our work.

Acknowledgments

WHO SAYS, WHO SHOWS, WHAT COUNTS: THINKING ABOUT HISTORY WITH THE BLOCK’S COLLECTION

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Art provides opportunities for reflecting on the past and confronting issues relevant today. In this book and the exhibition it accompanies, we have curated a selection of works from The Block Museum of Art’s collection that challenge us to think critically about history, foregrounding many recent acquisitions brought into the collection through an initiative inspired by this theme.

Louise Lawler’s Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts (1990) served as inspiration for the project’s title and for its framework [PAGE 57] . These words, posed as statements but also implying questions— etched onto a set of three wine glasses—are a reminder of barriers that exist within the art world. They point to the subtle messages about who and what matters encoded within the collections of art institutions. Lawler’s work draws our attention to the ways history is shaped and written, reflecting the priorities of those who lead, who fund, and who influence curatorial decisions.

In the first essay in this book, Corinne Granof charts the history of The Block’s collection, while the subsequent text provides a roadmap for its future, as envisioned by Kathleen Bickford Berzock. The four thematic sections that follow feature selections from the collection that raise questions about the past and its recounting as they are explored by artists: How do museums and galleries shape our view of history and of the past? How are the formal conventions of

Fiona Asokacitta, Block Student Docent, researches work by Dayanita Singh in the collection of The Block Museum of Art in preparation for authoring a label for the exhibition Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts

portraiture used by artists to explore who is represented in visual art, how, and by whom? How is history inscribed onto a landscape or erased from it? How can art help us to reflect upon or reimagine the past?

This selection of key acquisitions highlights The Block’s commitment to collecting works of art that connect to Northwestern’s curriculum and deepen its representation of global modern and contemporary art practices from multiple perspectives. We invited students, faculty, Block curators, and staff from across the university to contribute short essays that respond to specific artworks included in the exhibition, representing its major themes. The texts are written by individuals from twenty-one different academic units including Anthropology, African American Studies, Art History, Art Theory and Practice, Asian Languages and Cultures, Classics, Communication Studies, Comparative Literary Studies, Economics, Education and Social Policy, English, Environmental Policy and Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Journalism, History, Materials Science and Engineering, Performance Studies, Psychology, Radio/Television/ Film, Spanish and Portuguese, and Sociology. Together they reflect the range of expertise and the diversity of our campus community. Beyond these interpretive contributions, a group of twelve Northwestern undergraduates participated in a related spring 2020 seminar that reflected on museums as shapers of history. Students developed criteria for museum collecting practices, culminating in the recommendation of a purchase of a work of art by The Block. The students share their perspectives and an essay on their recommendation in the collaboratively authored final chapter of this book.

By including a multiplicity of voices and interdisciplinary perspectives, this project responds to Lawler’s charge to make transparent who says and what counts in the museum. This experimental model of multivocal curatorial practice fosters further discussion about the key role museums play in reevaluating narratives of the past, including their own.

Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Gift 2), 2001. Chromogenic print. Gift of the Kruger Family, 2020.9.2.

Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection

FROM GALLERY TO MUSEUM: THE BLOCK’S COLLECTING HISTORY

Corinne Granof

Long before the Block Gallery was established in 1980, there were faculty at Northwestern University who embraced the value of teaching with art. In 1963, the Chairman of Northwestern University’s Art Department, J. Carson Webster, wrote a memo to the University’s Information Services regarding a major gift of artwork: “We have received the collection of 263 prints, drawings, and reproductions from Mr. and Mrs. Norman H. Pritchard. The collection will be extremely useful for teaching, both in our courses on the history of prints and in our studio courses on the making of prints, due to the presence of various states and impressions of various qualities. Students will be able to handle actual prints and thus carry out more intensive study than would otherwise be possible.”1 As a practical note, Webster added, “These prints are at present kept in Room 201, Centennial Hall.”

Webster noted the educational value of works on paper, in part because they can be easily handled and circulated. While mid-century art history methods typically emphasized the study of materials, technique, and connoisseurship, the art world—and university art museums in particular—has changed radically over the past sixty years. The relevance of artworks is no longer limited to art history or studio art courses; artworks can spark vital discussions and bring a visualization of thoughts and ideas to diverse disciplines, offering ways of understanding the past and present.

In recent years, The Block’s collection has been a resource for faculty and students in various fields, including Journalism, African

1 Romare Bearden, Mother and Child, from the portfolio Conspiracy: The Artist as Witness, 1971. Color lithograph on paper. Gift of Evelyn Salk in memory of her husband, Erwin A. Salk, 2001.20d.

American Studies, Sociology, Materials Sciences, Sound Design, and Computer Science, to name a few. Each academic quarter, classes take place in the Eloise W. Martin Study Center, a former gallery space that now serves as a classroom and facilitates encounters with artworks for researchers, faculty, and students. With limited access to the museum because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–21, the curatorial department has shifted its work with students and classes primarily to online platforms, offering guided discussions virtually with works in The Block’s collection.

FROM KUNSTHALLE TO ACADEMIC MUSEUM: 1980–2000

Before the Block Gallery, as it was originally named, was founded, the art department organized modest exhibitions that took place in the corridors of campus buildings, and works of art were kept in department closets and brought out for use in classrooms. The Block was intended to provide a public-facing venue for the display of art. 2 A designated space for temporary exhibitions would be transformative for the campus, enhancing student experiences, while also drawing in members of the community who came to Northwestern’s Evanston campus for its renowned theatre and music performances. Chicago art collectors Mary and Leigh Block donated funds for a one-story building with a single gallery, designed by Loebl Schlossman & Hackl. 3 The Blocks’ own impressive collection of modern European art was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and as prominent collectors they were profiled in national publications. The Blocks amassed an impressive collection of major paintings by Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Georges Seurat, and others, some of which were eventually sold at auction while others were later gifted to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Leigh Block served as a trustee and Mary Block was a founding member of the Women’s Board. As Mary Block remarked in one interview, “It’s been a personal campaign of mine for years to get Chicago known for more than its winds or its gangsters.”4

Although the Block Gallery was not established as a collecting institution and had no designated storage at the time, it eventually became the home for a selection of artworks from across campus— from the art department to the law school.5 This included the Pritchard gift, as well as the Griffin collection of over a hundred architectural and botanical drawings given to Northwestern by architect Marion Mahony Griffin in 1951 [FIG 2] . 6 Toward the end of its first decade, the gallery’s collecting endeavor was solidified around the acquisition of ten sculptures.7 Monumental works by Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, among others, were shipped from the Block family’s Santa Barbara home and installed on the

From Gallery to Museum: The Block’s Collecting History

2 Marion Mahony Griffin, Eucalyptus Urnigera, Tasmania/Scarlet Bark, Sunset, Forest Portrait no. 11, 1918. Pen and black ink with brush and colored inks and dyes on red silk. Gift of Marion Mahony Griffin, 1985.1.117.

4

3 Mitchell Siporin, Workers Family, from the portfolio A Gift to Biro Bidjan, 1937. Linoleum cut on paper. Gift in part from Louise Dunn Yochim, 1997.30.15.

Ron Adams, Blackburn, ca. 2002. Color lithograph on paper. Purchase funds provided by Christine and William Robb III and Bill and Vicki Hood, 2010.11.

Evanston campus in 1988 in a new Sculpture Garden designed by Chicago-based architect John Vinci. 8

Another pivotal donation came to The Block through Louise Dunn Yochim, an artist who for many years led the arts curriculum for the Chicago Public Schools. On Yochim’s last day before retirement, she passed a garbage can in one of the public school buildings and noticed a bundle of discarded prints with themes of workers, labor, cities, and poverty. Created under the auspices of the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and distributed to public schools for instructional purposes, the works had gone unused for years.9 Yochim recovered the prints, and gave them to the Block Gallery in 1992.10 Two years later, The Block mounted the exhibition Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1994) with the Yochim gift as the anchor. Though at one time nearly destroyed and forgotten, since coming to The Block, the artworks have provided a lens to view the social, economic, and political issues of twentieth-century American life and history [FIG 3] . Most recently the exhibition The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940 (2014), curated by two Art History graduate students, explored the vast network of artists who were members of the John Reed Club, an organization of the Communist Party.11 The Yochim gift was foundational for these kinds of projects, and the museum is recognized for its strength in 1930s American printmaking.

According to the Block Gallery’s 1994–95 annual report, collections came to play a larger role in exhibitions: “As it changed from a kunsthalle to a museum with a small, but important collection of works on paper and outdoor sculpture, the Block Gallery has developed its collections so as to ensure their uniqueness and their utility in exhibitions and as resources for the university.”12 With several deeply researched projects, notably Graven Images: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540–1640 (1993), Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in Germany, 1918–1933 (1994), and Displacements: South African Works on Paper (1994), the Block Gallery gained a national reputation for exploring the unique roles prints have played across eras and cultures.13 In 2021, in honor of its 40th anniversary, The Block recognized this legacy with the exhibition For One and All: Prints from The Block’s Collection , co-curated with the 2019–20 Curatorial Graduate Fellow [FIG 4] . 14 Looking at three aspects of printmaking—circulation, communication, and collecting—the exhibition illustrated how the collection, though not on permanent view, is a tool for research and for training for the next generation of museum professionals and scholars of many disciplines.15

THE COLLECTION EXPANDS: 1990 s –ONWARD

Since the mid-1990s, The Block’s collection has grown slowly and steadily at times and with major, transformative gifts at others. At the time of writing, of the over 6,000 objects in the collection, approximately 4,500 are prints. While the majority of artists represented in the collection are white, male, and European or American, in recent years The Block’s current acquisition strategy emphasizes a global perspective that redresses the balance with works by women, artists of color, and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) artists as discussed in this volume by Kathleen Bickford Berzock.

Several early collections-based projects focused on American printmaking workshops—Universal Limited Art Editions, Tamarind Lithography Workshop, and Chicago’s Landfall Press, among others [FIG 5] 16 Enriching these holdings are recent gifts of artworks combining printmaking techniques with other media, such as a Deborah Kass’s Chairman Ma #21 (Gertrude) [FIG 6] , which borrows Andy Warhol’s well-known technique of combining silkscreen and paint. Chairman Ma #21 (Gertrude) also references Pablo Picasso’s iconic portrait of Gertrude Stein in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Works appropriating Western art history to critique its biases and the “masters” that dominate its narratives are another collection strength. Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Gift 2) is a recent acquisition complementing Kass’s work [PAGE 23] . In addition to critiquing the art historical canon, these artists challenge hetero-normative constructions of gender from their

5 Ed Paschke, Compassion, 1992. Color lithograph on paper. Gift of Marc and Sharon Paschke, 2019.20.5.

positions as queer artists by elevating cultural figures who have, themselves, been celebrated for their “otherness.” These works serve as catalysts for discussion of the role of representation in thinking about gender and identity.

In 2000, The Block reopened following a second-story expansion designed by Goettsch Partners’ principal architect Dirk Lohan, creating more space for a permanent collection.17 Soon after, in 2001, a donation of prints by sculptors enabled The Block to connect two vital areas in its collection.18

The Block’s objective of bringing artwork into the classroom and classes into the museum is central to its teaching mission. In addition to individual students, several full classes have worked with museum staff in curating exhibitions, notably Toulouse-Lautrec: Art at the Edge of Modernity (2015), organized by S. Hollis Clayson and her undergraduate seminar students working with a group of prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that will eventually become part of the museum collection.19

While prints have been a through-line in The Block’s collection, photography is also a strong part of its backbone. Photographs created under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information were early complements to 1930s prints made

From Gallery to Museum: The Block’s Collecting History

6 Deborah Kass, Chairman Ma #21 (Gertrude), 1993. Silkscreen and acrylic on canvas. Gift of Alice and Marvin Kosmin, 2020.5.

under the FAP and the collection has expanded with works by noted Chicago photographers like Dawoud Bey [PAGES 73 AND 109] , Alan Cohen [PAGE 111], and LaToya Ruby Frazier [PAGE 115] . Beginning in 2013, The Block received three major gifts of photographs by Edward Steichen [PAGES 65 AND 105] 20 Along with works by photojournalists W. Eugene Smith and Bruce Davidson, these groups offer windows into cultural themes that shaped twentieth-century American industry, advertising, consumerism, and celebrity. Perhaps the most persistent thematic thread in The Block’s collection, however, is printmaking and activism. Many of the

7 Peter Moore, George Maciunas performing Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo, Fluxhall, 359 Canal Street, New York City, 1964. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Barbara Moore/Bound & Unbound, 2019.24.1.

FAP artists used printmaking as a tool for social change, emphasizing economic disparities, social and racial injustice, labor issues, and political corruption. Other examples range from the seminal Rue Transnonain by Honoré Daumier, a foundational lithograph in the history of activist printmaking that combines theatricality with journalistic acuity, to the eclectic portfolio Conspiracy: The Artist as Witness (1971)21 that includes prints by thirteen artists, and was organized to raise funds to help with legal fees for the trial of the Chicago Seven in the aftermath of Chicago’s violent protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention [FIG 1] . 22

BREAKING CONVENTIONS

Its foundation in prints and photographs lends a distinct inflection to The Block collection. The idea that these media are more democratic and accessible than painting or sculpture is inscribed in their very form, as multiples to be experienced by people in different places and times. Given their inherent nature to circulate, prints and photographs have also been important vehicles for communication, often for social critique or raising awareness and as catalysts for change and breaking with the past.

A recently acquired photograph by Peter Moore represents another aspect of The Block’s aspirations [FIG 7] . In the image, Fluxus artist George Maciunas performs One for Violin Solo (1964), a score written by Nam June Paik. Formally dressed in a suit and tie, Maciunas holds a violin above his head in the moment before he smashes it on the table in front of him. 23 This radical gesture, privileging the action and the idea over the object, visualizes a rupture with convention. Maciunas’s rebellious action can also symbolize The Block’s history of breaking new ground.

A small but mighty institution, The Block has been dedicated to shattering old narratives in order to tell new stories, and its collection of works on paper plays a significant role in this reframing effort. The Block continues to collect prints and photographs, and to prioritize artworks that can strengthen teaching and learning across disciplines. The Block values artworks and projects that bring opportunities for rigorous research, interdisciplinarity, and new frameworks in order to shed light on the past and present. The collections have played, and will continue to play, a major role in these endeavors and are critical in sparking dialogues and fostering connections between the campus and the museum’s broader audience.

1 Memo from J. Carson Webster, Chairman, Department of Art, to “Information Services,” February 13, 1963. The gift included a list with the following breakdown of works: “18 drawings (16 to 19 centuries); 65 old master prints; 2 Japanese prints; 161 modern prints; 17 reproductions; 263 Total.”

2 Exhibitions took place in buildings such as Scott Hall, a 1940 Gothic-style building that served as the student union for thirty years. Since The Block was founded forty years ago, it has grown significantly. The full-time permanent staff, which began with three people, has increased almost ten times; the building has expanded from a one-story, one-gallery space to a two-story building with 5,600 square feet of display space. In 1998, the name was changed, by approval from the Northwestern Board of Trustees, from the Block Gallery to The Block Museum of Art. A decade later, in 2008, the museum was accredited by the Association of American Museums.

3 Leigh and Mary Block set up a trust fund for the university in the late 1960s that was later designated for construction of the gallery. See Alan G. Artner, “Adams, Bard in Block Gallery bow,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1980, D15.

4 Meryle Secrest, “Love of Great Art Builds Impressive Block Collection: Colors of Lifetime Span Marbles to Matisse,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959–1973), April 30, 1967.

5 Soon after the founding of the Block Gallery, its first director, Kathy Foley, hired a research assistant to create an inventory of works of art on campus and in the Northwestern collection. The researcher identified the locations and catalogued works on the Evanston and Chicago campuses, some of which were stored in closets in department offices. Many artworks, including the Pritchard gift and the Griffin drawings, were brought to The Block, although at the time there were no designated storage spaces or facilities.

6 The gift came into Northwestern’s collection as a matter of strategic diplomacy. Thomas M. Folds was Chairman of the Art Department at Northwestern at the time and also served on the Memorial and Arts Committee, overseeing art acquisitions on the occasion of the university’s centenary celebrations in 1951. Folds described making a visit with J. Carson Webster to Marion Mahony Griffin at her north side apartment in Chicago in the early 1950s, presumably to obtain a group of architectural drawings. Together they negotiated the plan for Griffin to give a substantial group of her and Walter Burley Griffin’s drawings to Northwestern. Parts of the collection were also given to the Art Institute of Chicago and Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. With their contribution of a rare and unique body of work from the Prairie School, the Griffins made the museum a destination for researchers and scholars from throughout the United States and abroad.

7 Leigh Block donated a group of indoor sculptures to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, while the outdoor sculpture was gifted to Northwestern.

8 While the original sculpture garden was designed by Chicago architect John Vinci, several works have since been moved or moved indoors, notably Joan Miro’s Constellation (1971) and Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Cilindro Costruito (Constructed Cylinder) (1969), now in the Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, where they are set against the striking vistas of Lake Michigan visible from the lobby.

9 Since the artists had received a weekly salary from the US government, the works were intended to be available to the public and were placed on loan or allocated to public agencies, especially schools, and nonprofit institutions throughout the country.

10 “Who Owns WPA Prints,” Transcript of a panel discussion held at the Print Fair (IFPDA), November 4, 2000. The panel was moderated by Grace Glueck, art critic for the New York Times, and included the following participants: Will Barnet, former WPA artist; Hersh Cohen, managing director, Smith Barney Asset Management, and print collector; Sylvan Cole, print dealer; Franklin Feldman, lecturer of art law, Columbia Law School; David Mickenberg, Director of The Block Museum of Art; and Francis O’Connor, art historian and WPA expert.

11 The exhibition was curated by John Murphy ’17 PhD, 2012–13 Block Curatorial Graduate Fellow, and Jill Bugajski, and traveled to the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

12 BlockPoints Volume II, 1995. Of the 138 acquisitions listed in the first issue of the Block Gallery’s annual report BlockPoints, 127 were prints.

13 Another important example was the exhibition Brücke: German Expressionist Prints from the Granvil and Marcia Specks Collection (1988), which combined a rigorous scholarly approach with an emphasis on accessibility. The exhibition was curated by Reinhold Heller and his graduate seminar at the University of Chicago, which also provided a model for working with faculty and students to create original research and excellent content.

14 Or “reproducible media,” as an earlier mission statement labeled it.

15 Caitlin DiMartino was the 2019–20 Block Curatorial Graduate Fellow and co-curated the exhibition with Corinne Granof, Academic Curator.

16 Printmaking in America (1995) was followed by the thematically related Second Sight: Printmaking in Chicago, 1935–1995 (1996).

17 Lohan redesigned The Block in a sleek modernist idiom of glass, steel, and limestone that connects the building with the work of his grandfather, Mies van der Rohe, and the great tradition of Chicago modernist architecture.

18 Starr Figura, “Pressing the Point: Twentieth Century Prints by Sculptors,” in Prints by Sculptors: The Rudolph H. and Fannia Weingartner Collection at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art (Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2001), 30. The collection was assembled by Rudolph and Fannia Weingartner. Rudolph Weingartner had been Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

19 The works in the exhibition, part of a bequest to The Block, are from the collection of Irwin and Andra Press. Over the course of the fall 2014 quarter, the students made several visits to their home in Chicago to research and organize the exhibition.

20 Collectors Richard and Jackie Hollander donated the Steichen photographs in honor of Morton and Mimi Schapiro in three major gifts: one of forty-nine prints in 2013; forty-four prints in 2017; and forty-one additional prints in 2020.

21 Rue Transnonain was given to The Block as part of a 2002 gift by Sidney and Vivian Kaplan of over three hundred prints by Daumier, many of which have been used in courses to reflect on the social history of nineteenth-century Europe.

22 The project was organized by Pearl Hirshfield, who had been involved in many activist-artist projects, including serving on the planning board of the Chicago Peace Museum. Her papers and correspondence regarding the portfolio are housed in the Northwestern University Archives.

23 The photograph was given to The Block in honor of the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s, the first major exhibition to explore the work of artist and cellist Charlotte Moorman. At the time of writing, the Peter Moore Photography Archive is in the process of being transferred from the Peter Moore Estate to the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University Libraries.

THE HOW AND THE WHY: THE BLOCK’S COLLECTION

Kathleen Bickford Berzock

Context matters. What does it mean to be Northwestern University’s art museum? A major research university, Northwestern foregrounds interdisciplinary study, global perspectives, and personal discovery as key tenets of its identity. Its curriculum merges theory and practice across twelve schools. From within Northwestern, The Block Museum of Art provides opportunities for exploring how art and visual culture operate in complex ways within human society. The Block’s exhibitions, publications, and growing collection each contribute to the museum as a forum where people from across cultures, backgrounds, experiences, and generations can experience works of art. We serve as an extended classroom for teaching and learning; a think tank for developing and sharing ideas; a laboratory for collaborative experimentation; and a workshop where graduate and undergraduate students from across fields of study are empowered by experiences that have impact beyond the classroom.

Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts showcases artworks that have been acquired by the museum as part of a three-year collecting initiative that was organized around the nuanced and resonant theme of “Thinking about History.” The initiative resulted in wide-ranging acquisitions that have enriched The Block’s ability to meet its core mission. These works invite us to question whose histories get told, who recites and interprets these histories, and which histories become archived through the museum’s collection. The reach of this theme is manifested, for instance, by Catherine Opie’s Skeeter (1993)

1 Rikki Byrd, 2020–21 Block Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, in front of Behold, Be Held, an outdoor exhibition she curated from the collection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

from her Portraits series, in which the artist applies the structures of European Old Master portrait painting to photographic portrayals of her LGBTQ friends in Los Angeles [PAGE 95] ; Shan Goshorn’s Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance (2012), which pulls from archival documents, including those related to the forced enrollment of Native American youth in abusive residential boarding schools as the medium for weaving a traditional basket form [PAGE 139] ; and Emmanuel Bakary Daou’s Le temps Ebola (Ebola Times) (2015), a series of six photographs that dramatize an imagined Ebola epidemic in Bamako, Mali [PAGE 137] . These works, and the many others that have come to The Block through this collecting initiative, provide unique points of entry for multidimensional and empathetic thinking.

THE BLOCK’S COLLECTING STRATEGY

The collecting initiative celebrated by this publication emerges from significant changes that have unfolded at The Block over the past decade. In 2012 The Block’s mission was revised to place art at the center of our engagement with the issues and ideas of our time, to approach these questions from global and interdisciplinary perspectives, and to support the curriculum and research strengths of Northwestern University. These changes likewise required a new collecting strategy, one that is necessarily forward looking, while also developed in reference to the past. As explored by The Block’s Academic Curator Corinne Granof in this book, from its earliest acquisitions The Block’s collection was tied to teaching and grounded in the conviction that students, faculty, staff, and community benefit from direct experiences with works of art. Works on paper, including prints, drawings, photography, and collage formed the foundation of The Block’s collection. Problematically, though not surprisingly for a museum collection formed in the twentieth century, Euro-American perspectives and specifically the work of white, male artists predominated. Using a twenty-first-century lens to examine the biases and limitations that underlie such collecting decisions was important in recognizing how The Block’s collection needed to be reshaped in order to represent wider and more diverse points of view.

The Block’s new collecting strategy reflects a mindful decentering of any one perspective and a deeper integration into the breadth of the university. It also encompasses a more capacious concept of what art is and what it does. In order to achieve this critical shift, Block curators actively follow contemporary trends by meeting with artists, visiting galleries and museums, attending conferences, and engaging with art as it is activated in communities. They also converse with faculty and students from across campus to learn about their diverse areas of interest and explore how art can intersect with

2 Walid Raad, Appendix 137_048, 2018. Inkjet print mounted on Sintra. Norton S. Walbridge Fund purchase, 2021.1.1.

teaching, learning, and research beyond the traditional focuses of art history and artistic practice. Works on paper are still a primary area of collecting at The Block, though the museum also acquires painting, sculpture, mixed media, and time-based media on a case-by-case basis. This last category intersects with the museum’s Block Cinema program, allowing us to showcase moving picture work across multiple contexts from auditorium to gallery. We collect primarily modern and contemporary works, eyeing a period that extends from the second half of the nineteenth century—with its accelerated introduction of technologies, such as electricity and photography, and global structures, such colonialism and capitalism, that have changed the way we see—to the present day. Two prints by multimedia conceptual artist Walid Raad from his Appendix 137 series, for instance, reference the history of twentieth-century war and colonialism, global modernism, and the slippery reliability of the archive [FIG 2]. We also selectively add to the museum’s collection of early modern prints and drawings, such as the mid-seventeenth century Head of a Bearded Man recently acquired through a gift from the Gray Collection Trust, placing them in dialogue with more recent work. We look for ways to expand categories and blur boundaries that compartmentalize visual aesthetic practices, such as the recent addition of 223 vernacular photographs that were given to the museum by Peter Cohen in 2019 [FIG 3] or the appliquéd and embroidered textile

16 June 1976 Youth Day by Rose Kgoete (1999/2007) [PAGE 145] . In addition to considering what kinds of stories the collection will tell from the long view, the artworks that we acquire must also resonate with teaching and research that is undertaken by Northwestern University faculty, students, programs, and research centers. Realizing this commitment in a new way, a recent course taught collaboratively by Associate Professor of Art History Hannah Feldman and Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness from The Block invited students to think critically about how museums make acquisitions and empowered them to select a work for purchase by The Block [PAGE 167] . This approach to student-led collecting is documented in the final section of this book.

We also look for ways to build the museum’s collection in dialogue with other Northwestern collections, particularly those of the Northwestern University Libraries. The Herskovits Library of African Studies, for instance, holds a collection of over 900 photographs from the African continent, many of them mounted in photo albums and scrapbooks that date from the 1860s through the 1960s. This collection provides an important context for The Block’s acquisition of contemporary photographs by artists based on the African continent, such as the twenty-two photographs and accompanying notecards that make up the installation work 1972 (2017) by Admire Kamudzengerere and Rachel Monosov, which casts a critical eye on the archival impulse of colonialism and its legacies today [PAGE 143] . Other works in The Block’s collection resonate with library holdings as

3 Unknown photographer, Untitled (museum staircase at the Louvre, Paris, with two soldiers), mid-twentieth century. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Peter J. Cohen, 2019.17.32.

diverse as the Charlotte Moorman Archive, 1968 Democratic National Convention Archive, Arabic manuscripts from West Africa, and the Michael McDowell Death Collection. In this way, The Block’s collection is nested within an ecosystem of written, auditory, and physical documents that provide a rich environment for integrative learning. Northwestern’s archives and collections—including The Block’s collection—offer direct experiences with primary sources that record, make tangible, and convey human thought and human experience. It is within this expanded definition of “art” that The Block does its work.

In 2016 The Block received a major gift of sixty-eight works of contemporary art from the collector, philanthropist, and software innovator Peter Norton that provided an important initial boost for reorienting the museum’s collection. The Norton gift was crafted through dialogue between the Norton collection’s curator and The Block’s director and curatorial staff to expand connections with university curriculum and to support teaching and learning on campus. The gift includes significant works that have added to The Block collection’s strengths, especially in prints and photographs, as well as new anchor works that have broadened our representation of media and of artists, thereby contributing to breaking down the collection’s historic white Euro-American bias. The Norton gift included notable prints such as the American artist Fred Wilson’s Untitled (Venice Biennale) (2003), a work related to his 2003 installation at the 50th Venice Biennale in which he highlighted the long history and the contributions of Africans to that city [PAGE 163] . The gift also challenged the conventional boundaries of prints and photography.

4 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (For Parkett), 1994. Billboard on Appleton coated stock. Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.14.

For instance, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (For Parkett) includes eight silkscreened panels that are intended to be pasted onto a billboard, or hung indoors using the same methods and materials [FIG 4] . With maximum dimensions of over twenty-two feet long and ten feet high when installed, it reveals a close-up photographic image of footprints in sand. Through this work Gonzalez-Torres presented a conundrum for museums that will one day be exciting to contemplate with students. While these panels sit unfulfilled within The Block’s storeroom, the work’s imagery of a shifting and unstable ground is held in stasis; however, once installed, the work will be exposed to the wear and tear of the elements and ultimately to destruction, as it is intended to be installed only once. By using photography to bring stillness to the ephemeral medium of sand and by interjecting precarity into the life of the artwork, “Untitled” (For Parkett) heightens our awareness of risk and constant change whether in the passage of time or the fleetingness of human life, a reality that Gonzalez-Torres experienced with the death of his partner from AIDS-related illness in 1991, as well as his own illness and ultimate death from the virus.

The Norton gift included nearly one dozen mixed-media installations, video, and sound works. Among these pivotal works are Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier), the first major artwork by the activist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan [FIG 5] and Ritual and Revolution , a room-sized installation by the photographer Carrie Mae Weems [FIG 6] . Within The Block’s collection, Weems’s work widens the notion of what photography can be. Sepia-toned photographs, some borrowed from books and others taken by the photographer, are silk-screened onto long diaphanous cloth panels. These are hung in a semi-architectural configuration, with an image of Weems herself in the guise of a classical caryatid, a female figure carved into a pillar, at center. The visitor weaves through the panels while listening to Weems recite a poetic text that draws attention to the human struggle for equality

5 Paul Chan, Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier), 2000–2003. Single-channel digital animation on mini-PC and screen, color, sound, 17:20 minutes, loop. Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.8.

and justice, the lines of which read in part, “I was with you when you stormed the Bastille & the Winter Palace. And I was with you for that great and hideous mise-en-scène they call the middle passage.” These works provided a starting point for The Block to acquire in these exciting arenas of contemporary practice. In 2020 the museum purchased the two-channel video work Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019) by Sky Hopinka [PAGE 119] . Hopinka’s work interweaves histories from the Castillo de San Marcos, also known as Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida, evoking its use as a prison that held Native Americans in the 1830s and 1880s; its association with Brigadier General Richard Pratt, who developed plans for the assimilation of Native American children through the system of residential boarding schools during his time there; and its use today as a historic site and museum. Also in 2020 the museum co-purchased with the National Portrait Gallery and The Hammer Museum the three channel video installation The Giverny Suite (2019) by Ja’Tovia Gary, which combines archival and artist-produced footage with installation props such as empty picture frames, a broken-legged settee, and fresh fruit. The installation, which responds to the murders of Black men at the hands of the police, offers a moving meditation on themes including safety and precarity, isolation and respite, and love and loss. As we expand The Block’s collection with acquisitions like these, we are committed to building upon its foundations in ways that widen its breadth and reorient its priorities while also recognizing its legacy.

6 Carrie Mae Weems, Ritual and Revolution, 1998 (installed at The Block Museum of Art in 2017). Digital photographs on muslin, with audio. Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.61.

7 Mona Hatoum, Birds of a Feather, 1997. Chromogenic print. Gift of Neal Meltzer, 2015.8.9.

THE BLOCK’S STRATEGY AT WORK

Northwestern University’s commitment to interdisciplinary study, global perspectives, and personal discovery provides rich terrain in which to anchor The Block’s approach to collecting. Interdisciplinary thinking entails joining diverse sets of knowledge and methodologies across fields of study while global perspectives and personal discovery establish a decentralized basis for this work, breaking down assumptions about point of view. Multifaceted inquiry is a common thread that runs between these approaches, a quality that is especially important at The Block. Works of art are themselves complex, combining visual, material, and conceptual elements that are experienced simultaneously and are open to multiple interpretations. Each object that enters The Block’s collection is examined for its capacity to be experienced through a range of lenses.

Take for instance the enigmatic photograph Birds of a Feather, a work by Mona Hatoum that juxtaposes a small wooden bird on an interior windowsill with a much larger seagull on the window’s exterior frame [FIG 7] . The work’s title, which conjures things that are alike, underscores the strangeness of these two very different birds coming together in a chance encounter. The scene, intentionally shot slightly out of focus and at just enough of an angle to be disorienting, looks onto a nondescript suburban subdivision. A mountain range can be seen low on the horizon, while the majority of the remaining picture plane is filled by a vast, sun-saturated blue sky. What kinds of discussions can be had about this object? Materially, there is the medium of the photograph itself, and the artist’s decision

to overexpose and poorly focus it. There is also the representation of wood, glass, feathers, and atmosphere. Visually, there is the ordinariness of the scene and its setting, the oddness of its haphazard staging, and the absurdity of the two birds, an absurdity heightened by the work’s title. Conceptually, Hatoum, who was born in Lebanon to a Palestinian family and now resides in London, has created an image that invokes binaries: real and fake, inside and outside, same and different, near and far, home and away, freedom and confinement. These are ideas that are familiar to many within our global society and easily connect with experiences of travel, migration, cultural hybridity, and, today, with the experiences of a global pandemic.

Anti-Retro, a screenprint by Andrea Carlson, a Chicago-based artist who works more frequently in drawing and painting, is an equally thought-provoking object [FIG 8] . The image is at once symmetrical and chaotic, raising an expectation of a logic that is quickly understood as self-defeating. The artist’s rendering has a cinematographic grandeur, and like cinema the image requires a suspension of disbelief. We see linear renderings of horses and cowboys, large tree trunks, mountains, a body of water, and a sun that is rising or setting. The words “Anti-Retro” are rendered across the lower center of the print in a serif font. Raised in Minnesota, Carlson is an Anishinaabe artist whose work addresses recurring themes including place, the continuing power dynamics of American settler colonialism, the role of institutions in perpetuating stereotypes, and the dynamics of

8 Andrea Carlson, Anti-Retro, 2018. Screenprint on paper. Purchase funds donated by Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund, Press Collection Endowment Fund, and Block Museum Special Projects Fund, 2020.2.

storytelling, whether through history, lore, or film. The words “Mondo Cane” (Doggish World) in the lower right of the print refer to an Italian documentary film released in 1962 that was intended to shock its Western viewers through a series of salacious glimpses into other societies, while “Anti-Retro” is a reference to an interview with the French theorist Michel Foucault in which he discusses the power of film to rewrite history.¹ Almost as if a projectionist has hit rewind on a classic Hollywood Western, with extended looking Carlson’s work invites reflection on the violent erasure of Native American history and its substitution with an invented, romanticized, and warped idea of masculinity and the American West.

A third example of a recent acquisition that rewards close scrutiny of its complex material and technical and conceptual elements is a portfolio of prints by multimedia artist Dario Robleto entitled The First Time, The Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854–1913). These delicate works on paper are part of an ongoing research project that has led the artist to formulate a painstaking technique inspired by the work of the mid-nineteenth-century physiologist Karl von Vierordt, who developed the first technology for making visible the pulse waves of the human heart. Each of the fifty prints in the portfolio is a memento mori, consisting of a single delicate light-colored line that is traced across paper darkened with candle soot, corresponding to an actual recorded pulse wave from the past. For instance, Young boy, dreaming, 1877, is part of Robleto’s quest to find the earliest recordings of this

9 Dario Robleto, Young boy, dreaming, 1877, plate 37 from the portfolio The First Time, The Heart (A Portrait of Life, 1854–1913), 2017. Photolithograph with transparent base ink on hand-flamed and sooted paper, brushed with lithotine and lifted from soot, fused with shellac and denatured alcohol. Gift of Northwestern Engineering, 2018.6.37.

kind [FIG 9] . Robleto’s portfolio is part of a larger project that reflects on the human capacity to love and the technical and ethical challenges of capturing that phenomenon. It emerged in part from conversations that have unfolded during the artist’s visits to Northwestern, where he has been an artist-at-large in the McCormick School of Engineering since 2018. Robleto’s endless curiosity has involved him in dialogues and collaborations with experts across Northwestern’s Evanston and Chicago campuses in fields including astrophysics, cardiology, and neuroscience.

MOVING FORWARD

As I write this in the summer of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage with devastating effect across local and global spheres. In the United States we cannot yet know what permanent changes the virus will instigate, but the phrase “a new normal” has become a familiar mantra that signals the expectation that such change is inevitable, including in museums, as evoked by photographer Vardi Kahana’s haunting image of a masked museum employee walking past a large Jeff Koons sculpture, an image that was taken inside the Tel Aviv Museum during Israel’s 2020 COVID-19 lockdown [FIG 10] . One urgent reality that must not be ignored is the The How and the Why: The Block’s Collection

10 Vardi Kahana, The Art of Social Distancing #10, Jeff Koons at the TLV Museum, 2020. Pigment inkjet print. Purchase funds provided by Lisa Munster Tananbaum and Steven Tananbaum, 2021.5.1.

pandemic’s unequal impact on Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who are experiencing the highest rates of infection and mortality. Simultaneously, demands for social justice in the United States have accelerated. The situation has also stimulated kitchen table conversations and a flurry of statements of support posted by CEOs of businesses and directors of cultural institutions. Viewed from within the United States, the task of “thinking about history” that The Block posed for itself three years ago now resonates at an urgent pitch. We cannot responsibly undertake a project devoted to history without looking squarely and closely at the long legacy of systemic racism in the United States, its continuing impact on individual lives, and its embeddedness in the structures of institutions, including universities and museums. Edgar Heap of Birds’s powerful triptych Public Enemy Care for Youth (The Brutality Which Is America), from 1992, sets the terms in stark white words on a black background, declaring “THE BRUTALITY OF AMERICA/RAISES MAD DOGS/THAT WERE ONCE BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN,” and below in smaller type, “PUBLIC/ ENEMY/CARE FOR YOUTH” [PAGE 141] . While this work is almost thirty years old, Heap of Birds’s words speak loudly to our present day situation. And yet, as Lois Biggs, a recent Northwestern graduate in comparative literature and art history, tells us in her exploration of the work, it also “suggests a parallel history, one in which our acts of care counteract this intergenerational trauma.”² Artworks like this are powerful resources for thinking about and through our current engagement with the present and the past of race and racism in this country. A more recent work, Lazy Equation (2019), one of five inkjet prints by artist and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed that were purchased by The Block in 2019, likewise asks us to think deeply about these issues [PAGE 151] . Like Heap of Birds’s triptych, the work is rendered in white writing on a black page. Rasheed poses a seemingly simple mathematical equation—“1+1”=2—below which is the phrase “we already human!” However, a notation leads the eye to a small qualifying footnote near the bottom of the page that reads “not yet.” This work takes the viewer on an emotional journey, moving from a mathematical fact, to the joy of its simple, irrefutable logic, to the crushing blow of the illogical but unarguable reality of racism. There is more work yet to be done in the world and at The Block to fulfill the promise of racial equity, and indeed of equity across all spheres. Much is made of our current image-saturated global society, and how its technologies require individuals to develop new competencies. Visual literacy, the ability to interpret and glean meaning from visual cues across multiple contexts, is a core competency that is more important today than perhaps ever before. The practice of close looking and critical analysis of artworks is an effective way to develop skills that are vital to excelling in our changing world. However, the

role of a university art museum stretches far beyond that. Artworks are the culminating product of complex processes by artists who are researching, problem-solving, and responding to the world around them. Engaging with a work of art is equally complex, which is why encounters with artworks, like those by Edgar Heap of Birds and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, stimulate both outward and inward looking. Art is among the most fundamental modes of human expression. It is for this reason that access to original works of art is essential to a truly interdisciplinary education. The Block offers a critical opportunity to experience art firsthand in its galleries, study center, and online through its recently launched collection database and associated resources. The works of art that are presented in Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts give us tools for thinking about the issues of our day. Each work that enters The Block’s collection becomes part of an expanding resource, building forward in anticipation of new encounters by members of our community.

NOTES

1 Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana, “Anti-Retro: Michel Foucault in interview,” trans. Annwyl Williams, Cahiers du Cinema 251-2 (July-August 1974), https://onscenes.weebly.com/ film/anti-retro-michel-foucault-ininterview.

2 See page 140 of this volume.

INSTITUTIONS CRITIQUED

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

Louise Lawler’s artwork Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts (1990) challenges the exclusivity of galleries and museums [LEFT AND PAGE 57] . This book takes Lawler’s provocative title as a starting point for exploring the ways museums and galleries create and reinforce narratives of history. Lawler is part of a group of artists associated with a movement known as “institutional critique” which interrogates how power circulates and is made visible and invisible in museums and galleries. Artists in this section comment on art historical traditions and display conventions to accentuate what has been missing from the canon—the artworks that have been deemed most essential or exemplary by a predominantly white Euro-American academic elite.

In his monumental Museo del Prado 6, photographer Thomas Struth draws our attention not only to the masterpieces of the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, but also to the throng of school children who are being shuttled past them on a tour of Spain’s most famous museum [PAGE 67] . The paintings and their audience are no more or less the subject of the photograph, instead they set each other into relief. As curators, the paintings we see through Struth’s lens also make us wonder about our own work. What does it mean to have access to great works of art? Who determines which works are considered “great”? And how does the idea of “greatness” shape our view of the past? Every decision we make as curators implies a judgment of value and worth.

In addition to thinking about what is on view in the museum and who determines this, Lawler’s provocative statements also encourage us to think beyond what is on display to who gets seen in the museum. These questions about accessibility, representation, and inclusion are part of a reexamination of the roles and power structures of museums and the art market.

Louise Lawler, Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts, 1990 (detail).

KWAME BRATHWAITE

American, born Brooklyn, NY, 1938

Untitled (Grandassa Models, Merton Simpson Gallery), ca. 1967, printed 2018

Inkjet print, 30 × 30 inches

Gift of the Allen-Niesen Family: Kim, Keith, Kelsey, and Kyle, 2019.13.2

who’s gonna take the words blk / is / beautiful and make more of it than blk / capitalism. u dig?

—Sonia Sanchez, “blk / rhetoric”¹

In 1966, Donyale Luna became the first Black woman to grace the cover of a mainstream fashion publication— British Vogue. In 1968 and 1969 Naomi Sims would become the first Black woman to appear on the cover of the popular US publications Ladies Home Journal and Life (the latter’s corresponding editorial feature of the month was titled “Black Models Take Center Stage”). However, as these Black women began to gain recognition by the international fashion public, artist Kwame Brathwaite was already centering the beauty of Black women in his work as a photographer.

Undergirded by mantras such as “Black is Beautiful” and “Thinking Black,” popularized during the Black Power era of the 1960s and 1970s, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe founded a modeling troupe they called Grandassa Models—named after “Grandassaland,” a term that Black nationalist Carlos Cooks created to refer to Africa—and launched a series of fashion-focused events that politically and aesthetically centered racial pride. Combining The Block’s “Thinking about History” concept with the mantras that guided Brathwaite’s work, I offer a meditation on “Thinking about Black History.” As I look at this image of Grandassa models, I ask what it means to note these women as “firsts” and to think about Black history, Black thought, Black beauty as the starting point.

According to historian and critic Tanisha Ford, Brathwaite’s photographs “never became a part of the [black freedom] movement’s visual canon” and have only recently emerged to take their place in popular culture, museum collections, and history.² Thus, I wonder if Brathwaite’s rich repository of images serves as a rejoinder to the inquiry posed by poet Sonia Sanchez in the epigraph above. Brathwaite’s visual tome of Black pride does not beg to be considered as an adjunct to the canon of Western art or rhetoric. Rather, it rightfully proclaims that it is a canon unto itself.

—Rikki Byrd ’23 PhD, African American Studies

Block Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, 2020–21

1 From Sonia Sanchez, We A BaddDDD People (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970).

2 Tanisha Ford, Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (New York: Aperture, 2019), 75.

WARRINGTON COLESCOTT

American, born Oakland, CA, 1921, died Hollandale, WI, 2018

Picasso at Mougins: The Etchings, 2002

Color etching and aquatint on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 inches

Gift of Kay Deaux (Class of 1963), 2012.8

“That bastard, he’s really good.” —Picasso on Delacroix¹

In his vivid print Picasso at Mougins, commissioned by the New York Print Club, Warrington Colescott presents lion of modern art Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The setting of the imagined scene is Picasso’s grand home and studio in Mougins on the Côte d’Azur, which he occupied from 1961 until his death. It was where Picasso produced his last major group of prints in 1968, when he was in his late eighties and at the height of his celebrity and wealth.

The arched-ceiling studio is a hectic space chockablock with jaggedly drawn things and people. Colescott shows his protagonist wearing ink-stained underwear and smoking a cigarette, surrounded by assistants, acolytes, hangers-on, and works of art. There is work underway at center where messy inking unfolds as Picasso elbows away eager assistants and ignores the elegant woman looking on. The printing press at far left is conspicuously not in use. Other figures range from nude models and sycophants to a neatly dressed man at far right, a dealer or critic interviewing a naked woman in a broad straw hat in absurdly close proximity—a swipe no doubt at Picasso’s reputation as a philanderer. Elsewhere there is a mix of semi-comic and risqué activities: a barely-clad pair descends the staircase, a naked woman lies awkwardly on the floor, and a shirtless man makes a frantic exit in the near foreground.

Colescott mirrors a key component of Picasso’s practice: the Spanish artist’s endless thinking about the history of art and his most inventive predecessors. Cubism, an influential artistic mode championed by Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) in the first decades of the twentieth century, was exemplary art about art. Later, Picasso created many series in response to works by predecessors like Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917). The language and tone of Colescott’s print are those of satire: it straddles the boundary between a fanciful homage to one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and a humorous cartoon parodying the machismo and hero-worship associated with the modernist canon.

—S. Hollis Clayson

Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities and Professor Emerita of Art History

1 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 187.

LOUISE LAWLER

American, born Bronxville, NY, 1947

Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts, 1990

Three printed wine glasses, glass shelf, and two brackets, 8 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches

Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.23

Since the late 1970s, Louise Lawler has questioned the professional practices of the contemporary art world in her exhibitions, photographs, books, posters, announcements, and drawings. Whether by displaying the work of her peers alongside her own in her first “solo” gallery exhibition in New York or by submitting a photograph of the actress Meryl Streep when asked for a headshot to be used as a magazine cover, Lawler has consistently undermined the norms of professional conduct for working artists and provided feminist critiques of those standards.

For Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts, Lawler uses wine glasses— a ubiquitous presence at exhibition openings—to emphasize the role of galleries and museums in constructing the history of art. In doing so, Lawler underscores the social rituals that support the celebration, sale, and canonization of particular artists. These ceremonies—which include the distribution of announcements, the opening party, and the notification of journalists and critics—are essential for making the art hanging on the walls legible as professional contemporary art, establishing cultural and economic values that collectors and museums appraise as higher than amateur or craft forms. In this work, Lawler makes the transparency of the wine glass into a potent metaphor: Were the glass to be filled with wine, its ghostly questions would come into clear relief, underscoring the absence of these critical interrogations during the majority of art world rites. Who has the power to speak about art and to determine its critical frameworks? Which artists get to exhibit their work in prestigious institutions and have the chance to make a living from their art? And how do the answers to these questions affect which communities and perspectives are counted by art historians? It is precisely at the moment of celebration, Lawler seems to say, that we must directly query the normative processes by which artists and artworks are celebrated and canonized or left by the wayside of historical accounting. Here it is wine—a beverage with significant class associations in the United States—that reveals the stakes of allowing the economic and social gears of the art world to turn unquestioned.

—Brian T. Leahy, PhD candidate, Art History

LAURA LETINSKY

Canadian, born Winnipeg, MB, 1962

Untitled #49, 2002

Inkjet print, 15 x 19 3/4 inches

Purchase funds contributed by Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross, 2014.1k

Untitled #49 tempers the time-honored tradition of representations of still life. From Roman mosaics and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to the art of the eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whose work Letinsky invokes explicitly, artists have presented laid tables such as Letinsky’s, capturing the passage of time by halting it.

Letinsky’s stunning depiction of an array of comestibles and their containers playfully calls out the fiction of still life and sets the formulaic genre on edge. The image revolves around a surface that functions as a table, precariously supporting an empty coffee cup and a bowl holding a bulging pyramid of overripe peaches. Lipstick on the emptied cup signals a past moment, as do smears and pits and wet, orange residue on the plastic cutting board. The image portends moments to come: an imminent tumble and rot. As potent as the forms are the formal elements: a milky palette and the passage of light across the scene. The wrinkled tablecloth and the powdery color are nearly the stuff of painting. The fact that this dense moment is a photograph forces us to confront the passage of time in a new way, shaking up our expectations of how images capture and compress change over time. In a saturated photographic print that is the result of a lengthy exposure time, Letinsky calls on the conventions of painted still life to push the fiction forward, to ripen it.

—Claudia Swan

Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, 1998–2020

The Inaugural Mark S. Weil Professor of Early Modern Art, Washington University in Saint Louis

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

American, born Birmingham, AL, 1955

Brownie, 1995

Color lithograph on paper, 19 3/4 x 15 1/8 inches 1996.5

For forty years, Kerry James Marshall has built an illustrious, media-spanning body of work celebrating Black life in the United States. With Brownie, Marshall offers a portrait of a young Girl Scout on the cusp of adolescence. Her contemplative visage is crowned with a burst of light resembling a halo, a symbol reserved for saints and deities in the Western art historical tradition. Here Marshall endows this venerative symbol upon a contemporary, everyday person. In her portrait, the young girl wears her uniform with a solemn sense of duty and pride and looks slightly upward toward someone or something out of the frame. The title Brownie is a double entendre: on the surface it is a designation of achievement, though it can also be read as a racist slur. The rich red of the title’s letters, coupled with the forest-green background and the sitter’s opaque jet-black skin, evoke Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag, a visual symbol that Marshall likely saw as a young person growing up in Watts, Los Angeles, mere blocks from the Black Panther Party’s headquarters.

Marshall’s reflection on the inherent optimism and majesty of youth and its attendant rituals, however mundane they might seem, brings a vital message that speaks to our Northwestern community today. In the spring of 2019, stickers were found in multiple public locations across the university’s Evanston campus with the white-supremacist slogan-cum-dog whistle, “It’s okay to be white,” one of many examples of the insurgent white nationalism and race-baiting that characterizes our contemporary moment. The United States may have progressed since the Civil Rights era into which Marshall was born, but the idea we are post-racial is a myth. Despite the historic and ongoing violent conditions of white supremacy in the United States, Marshall consistently and ardently demonstrates that Black life matters, Black lives matter, and asks us to reconsider not only our entrenched historical narratives, but our present actions, responsibilities, and possibilities for the future.

—Meghan Clare Considine ’20, Art History and Performance Studies Block Student Docent 2017–20 2020–21 O’Brien Curatorial Fellow, Weisman Art Museum

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

American, born Birmingham, AL, 1955

May 15, 2001, 2003

Color screenprint on paper, 27 × 22 1/2 inches

Gift of Kay Deaux, 2019.7

Kerry James Marshall has devoted much of his artistic practice to reimagining art history by incorporating Black subjects into the art historical canon. Marshall is best known for his bold, figurative approach to depicting scenes of everyday African American life on a grand scale— picnics, campouts, lively barbershops and beauty salons, urban housing, and domestic scenes.

May 15, 2001 is unusual for Marshall in both its subject matter and formal approach. The title refers to the date of an auction of modern and contemporary art. Adopting the visual vocabulary of a grocery store flyer, Marshall has arranged the names of famous artists alongside images of their work and sale prices. Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Jean-Michel Basquiat are fully legible, but the partial names of artists Ellen Gallag[h]er, Martin Puryear, Isamu Noguchi, and Gerhard Richter can be inferred by consulting Sotheby’s auction records from May 15, 2001. The artists and prices shown in the print correspond to the actual sales figures of that day. The works of the white male artists—Warhol, Pollock, Koons, Richter, and Lichtenstein—all fetched notably higher sums than the works by artists of color—Gallagher, Puryear, Noguchi, Basquiat. By simply including the actual sale prices, Marshall obliquely points to the rampant commercialization of the art world and its attendant racial and gender disparities. And yet, other subtleties abound. By including the Koons sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey Bubbles among the highest-grossing artworks on the print, Marshall alludes to the complexities of race and appropriation in creative practices. In fact, the entire composition refers to a Warhol trope of appropriating advertising copy to imply a critique of consumerism writ large. Ostensibly straightforward, Marshall’s assessment of the art market demands a closer look.

—Elliot J. Reichert ’10,

Art History

Curator of Special Projects, The Block Museum of Art, 2013–15

Curator of Contemporary Art, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University

EDWARD STEICHEN

American, born Bivange, Luxembourg, 1897, died Redding, CT, 1973

L’Oiseau dans L’Espace (Bird in Space), 1926

Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches

Gift of the Hollander Family in honor of Morton and Mimi Schapiro, 2012.10.13

Edward Steichen’s photograph L’Oiseau dans L’Espace (Bird in Space) features the modernist abstract sculpture of the same name by Constantin Brancusi. The photograph emphasizes the sculpture’s simplicity, sleekness, and majesty through its composition and dramatic lighting. In 1926 Brancusi shipped the sculpture to New York for an exhibit ion curated by his friend, artist Marcel Duchamp. While artwork was legally exempt from tariffs, Bird in Space was categorized by US Customs under “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies” and taxed at forty percent of its sale price. The sculpture was released on bond by US Customs subsequent to a court decision over its status as “art.” As the owner of the sculpture, Steichen filed an appeal over the decision, an appeal that lead to Brancusi v. U.S. In November of 1928, the court ruled in favor of the artwork: “The object … is beautiful and symmetrical in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental … it is the original production of a professional sculptor … and a work of art according to the authorities.”¹

This incident calls to mind the famous visit of Brancusi, Duchamp, and the painter Fernand Léger to the 1912 Paris Air Show where on seeing a propeller Brancusi is said to have exclaimed: “Now that is what I call sculpture! From now on, sculpture must be nothing less than that.” To which Léger claims Duchamp then turned to each of them and exclaimed: “It’s all over for painting. Who could better that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”²

After their visit to the Air Show, the work of these three artists was transformed almost as if in response to the wonder they experienced on seeing that aeronautic object. Sixteen years later the US courts would finally catch up with this pivotal moment of aesthetic evolution. Both episodes speak to the conceptual redefinition of art in the early twentieth century and the development and legitimization of abstraction in the art historical canon.

—Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Professor of Art Theory and Practice

1 54 Treas. Dec. 428 (Cust. Ct. 1928). For a discussion, see Stéphanie Giry, “An Odd Bird,” Legal Affairs (September/October 2002), http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/ September-October-2002/story_giry_sepoct2002.msp.

2 Pontus Hultén, Natalia Dumitresco, and Alexandre Istrati, Brancusi (New York: Abrams, 1987), 92.

THOMAS STRUTH

German, born Geldern, Germany, 1954

Museo del Prado 6, 2005

Chromogenic print, 64 3/4 x 80 1/4 inches

Promised gift of Ellen Philips Katz

Some paintings are like old friends that you never tire of seeing. This image makes me think of myself as a twenty-four-year-old graduate student exploring a city that would become a second home and meeting Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), seen at left, for the first time. I was lucky, as the crowd in the main gallery of the Prado Museum was smaller than the group of largely indifferent middle schoolers captured by Thomas Struth in this photograph. Eighteen years later, I stood in this same gallery with eight Northwestern graduate students and took joy in watching them meet Velázquez and his masterpiece in Madrid. As an art historian, I have been trained to question the idea of a masterpiece and to critique institutions that invest in its divinity, to paraphrase the artist Barbara Kruger. Yet, it is difficult not to give in to technical virtuosity such as that displayed by Velázquez. In this photograph, Struth keeps the viewer conscious of the great painting while also capturing the experience of the museum in which it is displayed.

Struth shoots his photograph at an angle, such that the crowd appears foreshortened, receding dramatically from foreground to background. He continues the play of perspective in Las Meninas and seems to affirm the often-observed remark that viewers feel they can walk into Velázquez’s painting. To the right, Struth draws our attention to Velázquez’s stunning portrait of the eighteen-year-old Mariana of Austria standing in a room of the Spanish royal palace. You might miss Mariana in Las Meninas, as she appears there somewhat blurred and reflected in a mirror. In history, too, Mariana has been overlooked as a person of significance until very recently. In my own research, she has emerged as a notable patron of architecture, and I like to think that the museum’s placement of the queen’s portrait in the vicinity of the masterpiece—she, like other friends in this museum, move around from time to time—is strategic. In this way, the museum complements the work of scholars in the ongoing project of writing history as well as the history of art.

—Jesús Escobar Professor of Art History

CRITICAL PORTRAITS

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

To make a portrait is to create a representation of a person in time, to display their likeness, personality, or mood. It is always more than a mere record of appearance. Artists can, through portraiture, make powerful statements about a subject’s status, importance, character, or beauty. They can use the conventions of the form to comment on themselves and on society.

Ranging in tone from action-packed snapshots like Ming Smith’s image of the musician Sun Ra [PAGE 103] , to Catherine Opie’s contemplative, yet grand photographic portrayal of her friend Skeeter [PAGE 95] , and Jeff Donaldson’s celebratory painted homage to Miles Davis [LEFT AND PAGE 81] , each portrait in this section is a critical historical intervention. Moreover, each portrait poses the question, “Who counts?” One powerful example is Omar Victor Diop’s Juan de Pareja (2014) [PAGE 74] in which the artist draws on the traditions of studio portrait photography to restage a famous seventeenth-century painting by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pareja, the sitter in the original painting, was born into slavery, bequeathed as property to Velázquez, freed by that artist in the year the painting was completed, and went on himself to pursue a career as a painter. Although Pareja was likely painted as an exercise in preparation for a client of high status, it is nonetheless historically significant that Velázquez chose him as a model.

Diop’s Juan de Pareja is part of a series titled Project Diaspora , in which the artist explores the complex histories of Africans and individuals of African descent who found fame in Europe and became subjects of portraits during the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Diop casts himself in the role of each sitter, drawing parallels between his own condition as a cosmopolitan artist moving through spaces in which he is simultaneously celebrated and unknown, and the lives of these historic figures. Soccer paraphernalia, such as the cleats in this image, are anachronistic additions to the compositions, connecting them to the contemporary moment in which athletes from Africa who join European teams occupy similarly ambiguous positions. In this way, Diop asserts “who counts,” both in Velázquez’s portrait of 1650, and in current discourse.

Jeff Donaldson, Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis), 1967 (detail).

VAHAP AVŞAR

Turkish, born Malatya, Turkey, 1965

Gece Vardíyasi 3 / Night Shift 3, 1988, printed 2015

Chromogenic print, 56 x 44 inches (frame)

Gift of Melih and Zeynep Keyman, 2015.4

Vahap Avşar’s Night Shift 3 depicts a sculpture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the military leader of the Turkish National Movement and the first president of Turkey. The sculpture is seen against a background of artist Cengiz Çekil’s (1945–2015) ramshackle studio, with scattered tools and dark curtains.

The image of Atatürk—“the father Turk”—is familiar, even for those who have little knowledge about Turkey. Laws and regulations were implemented to ensure that Atatürk would continue to be present not only in history books, museums, and monuments dedicated to his memory but also in places where people go about their everyday lives, such as schools, public offices, bridges, parks, airports, and police stations. First utilized in the 1930s and 1940s to consolidate the Republican regime, and to write its history on Turkey’s landscape, monuments and busts bearing Atatürk’s image became central to the restoration of state order following the brutal military coup in 1980. Capturing the centrality of his image and its omnipresence in Turkey, Night Shift 3 provides an allegory of the cult of Atatürk at the time.

Yet there is something unfamiliar about Atatürk in Avşar’s work: He is sitting down instead of standing up as the vanguard, as in most other statues of him; the photograph depicts his sculpture unfinished, out of focus, and dimly lit. These details hint at the irony embedded in the cult of one of the most, if not the most, portrayed statespersons in the history of the world. As a sociologist, I see two aspects to this irony. By turning his camera on the creation process of this image in the shadowy art studio, Avşar debunks the completeness of the Atatürk myth, hence, that of his historical cult. Night Shift 3 also testifies to the ideological and aesthetic rigidity of the political milieu of the 1980s when this photograph was taken, which required two conceptual artists, Cengiz Çekil—an artist known for his outstanding contemporary artwork in Turkey and abroad—and Avşar himself (as Çekil’s assistant at the time), to contribute to the dominant symbolic order in the country, to make ends meet.

—Ayça Alemdaroğlu

Assistant Professor of Research in Sociology, Northwestern University, 2015–19

Associate Director of the Program on Turkey, Stanford University

DAWOUD BEY

American, born New York, NY, 1953

Untitled (Chicago), 1993

Dye diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid) (diptych), 24 × 40 inches (overall)

Gift of Sari and James A. Klein in honor of Lisa Corrin and Peter Erickson, 2014.4.5

We are used to beginning the work of understanding images by looking at their centers. However, this double portrait engages the viewers at the margins of the images in an effort to transform their sense of center. This effect is highlighted by the presence of flame-like marks on the edges of the photographs—a vestige of Bey’s use of one of the Polaroid Corporation’s largest and rarest cameras. Made during Bey’s 1993 residence at Columbia College Chicago and Providence-St. Mel High School, the project was an educational experience he created for the students, getting to know them well and translating their likenesses into monumental portraits.

The scale of the two images invites slow contemplation, complicating typical understandings of “instant” photography. The two-panel composition or diptych draws upon a long history of religious art for church altarpieces across medieval and early modern Europe. Bey mobilizes the force and power of this mode of image-making to give prominence to the representation of persons of color typically excluded from monumental art. The large format of these lushly-colored Polaroids gives the sitters subjectivity, their direct eye contact with the camera signaling empowerment and highlighting Bey’s desire to insist on their right to look, a right largely denied in the history of photography. The multi-paneled structure shows the subjects at different moments and in slightly different poses, creating a sense of movement that sustains the viewer’s gaze as they negotiate the deliberate play between “part” and “whole.” Through his deep engagement with his subjects, Bey challenges the viewer to reconsider margins and centers across images and across society.

—Tamar Kharatishvili ’22 PhD, Art History Block Curatorial Graduate Fellow, 2017–18

VICTOR DIOP

Senegalese, born Dakar, Senegal, 1980

Juan de Pareja, 2014

Pigment inkjet print, 47 1/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Purchase with funds from the Irwin and Andra S. Press Collection Endowment, 2016.9.2

Thrall

Juan de Pareja, 1670

He was not my father though he might have been I came to him the mulatto son of a slave woman just that as if it took only my mother to make me a mulatto meaning any white man could be my father

In his shop bound to the muller I ground his colors my hands dusted black with fired bone stained blue and flecked with glass my nails edged vermilion as if my fingertips bled In this way just as I’d turned the pages of his books

OMAR

I meant to touch everything he did

With Velazquez in Rome a divination

At market I lingered to touch the bright hulls of lemons closed my eyes until the scent was oil and thinner yellow ocher in my head

And once the sudden taste of iron a glimpse of red like a wound opening the robes of the pope at portrait that bright shade of blood before it darkens purpling nearly to black



Because he said painting was not labor was the province of free men I could only watch Such beauty in the work of his hands his quick strokes a divine language I learned

over his shoulder my own hands tracing the air in his wake Forbidden to answer in paint

I kept my canvases secret hidden until Velazquez decreed unto me myself Free

I was apprentice he my master still

How intently at times could he fix his keen eye upon me though only once did he fix me in paint my color a study my eyes wide as I faced him a lace collar at my shoulders as though I’d been born noble the yoke of my birth gone from my neck In his hand a long brush to keep him far from the canvas far from it as I was

the distance between us doubled that he could observe me twice stand closer to what he made

For years I looked to it as one looks into a mirror

And so

in The Calling of Saint Matthew I painted my own likeness a freeman in the House of Customs waiting to pay my duty In my hand an answer a slip of paper my signature on it

Juan de Pareja 1661

Velazquez one year gone Behind me

upright on a shelf a forged platter luminous as an aureole just beyond my head my face turned to look out from the scene a self portrait To make it

I looked at how my master saw me then I narrowed my eyes

Now at the bright edge of sleep mother

She comes back to me as sound her voice in the echo of birdcall a single syllable again and again my name Juan Juan Juan or a bit of song that waking I cannot grasp

—Natasha Trethewey Board of Trustees Professor of English

JEFF DONALDSON

American, born Pine Bluff, AK, 1932, died Washington, DC, 2004

Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis), 1967

Oil on heavy cream wove paper with mixed media, 24 x 18 inches

Block Friends of Art Fund purchase, 2017.2

“The single most important factor in convincing the group to adopt the project was the fact that it would be a ‘guerrilla mural.’ …The unauthorized painting of the wall was to be a revolutionary act in and of itself even beyond the astounding effects the project would itself engender.”¹

—Jeff Donaldson, The People’s Art: Black Murals, 1967–1978

In 1967, during a climate of rising political fervor in Black America, the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) was established on Chicago’s South Side, with help from Jeff Donaldson. That same year, Aretha Franklin released a revamp of “Respect,” and artist William Walker proposed that OBAC create the Wall of Respect, a mural project on Chicago’s South Side. OBAC artists understood the urgent need to reflect the overall theme of “Black Heroes” in a popular visual culture bereft of realistic Black images, let alone venerated ones. The Wall of Respect shifted in form and content over time, but its first iteration debuted on August 24, 1967. The Wall was divided into seven sections: Theatre, Statesmen, Religion, Literature, Sports, Rhythm & Blues, with the final section, Jazz, designated to Donaldson. Wall of Respect was painted over in 1971; this study is one of the few remaining physical documents of the project. In 1968, one year after the first iteration of the Wall of Respect, Jeff Donaldson submitted his dissertation outline, themed around the cross-generational reciprocity of Black artists in the United States. Donaldson would be the first African American to earn a doctorate in art history at Northwestern University.

In Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis) the figure of Miles Davis melds into the energetic paint daubs of the background, resisting any easy dichotomy of figuration versus abstraction. The 1969 manifesto Donaldson penned as cofounder of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) reframes mimesis as “the spot where…the abstract and the concrete” meet. His own multifaceted revolutionary practice consisted of abstraction and figuration; teaching and writing. Here Donaldson portrays Davis as the embodiment of blackness and a performer of unseen histories. This work reminds us that black life—black study—exceeds the academy, the “proper,” and even property.

—Benjamin Jones ’23 PhD, Art History

1 The People’s Art: Black Murals, 1967–1978 (Philadelphia: The African American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1986).

JESS T. DUGAN

American, born Biloxi, MS, 1986

VANESSA FABBRE

American, born San Jose, CA, 1978

Gloria, Chicago, IL, 2016 from the portfolio To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, 2018 Inkjet print on paper, 20 × 16 inches Block Friends of Art Fund purchase, 2019.2.1e–f

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults is a collaborative project between photographer Jess T. Dugan and social work professor Vanessa Fabbre. It consists of sensitive portraits of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, paired with excerpts from interviews in which they discuss their experiences. The portfolio, which was developed specifically for university art museums, presents twelve photograph and text pairings drawn from the larger series. The project stemmed from Dugan and Fabbre’s previous work with trans communities, and a desire to highlight a population that is often not seen. Over a period of five years, Dugan and Fabbre traveled across the United States photographing and interviewing people in rural and urban communities and from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds. The development of their pool of sitters started with Dugan and Fabbre’s ties to organizations that serve the LGBTQ community, and grew through word-of-mouth recommendations.

With many trans-related media stories focused on the violence and discrimination that trans people face, Dugan noted that they had a growing “…awareness that younger trans people don’t have a lot of images of older trans people to look to for validation.”¹ The pair wanted to preserve the stories of these pathbreaking generations. Fabbre, for her part, was inspired by the potential for art to reach a broader audience than the academic channels through which she usually disseminates her work.

All photographs in the series are shot in or near the sitters’ homes, with the subjects’ full collaborative participation. Each photograph is paired with a text sheet with an excerpt from the subject’s interview. The photograph functions as its own composition, even though both text and photo are always meant to be exhibited together. Dugan and Fabbre are working to deposit the full interview transcripts in archives across the United States so that these stories will be preserved for and accessible to future generations.

—Janet Dees

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

1 Karen Irvine, “An Interview with Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre,” in Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Berlin: Kerher Verlag, 2018), 150.

ROSALIE FAVELL

Canadian / Métis, born Winnipeg, MB, Canada, 1958

Facing the Camera: Shan Goshorn, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2012, 2012

Inkjet print, 17 x 22 inches

Block Friends of Art Fund purchase, 2019.26.8

Rosalie Favell is a photo-based artist who often draws inspiration for her work from her family history and Métis heritage. She uses a variety of sources, ranging from pop culture to family albums, to present complex portraits of her experiences as a contemporary Indigenous woman and of the communities to which she belongs.

Facing the Camera, a project that took place over ten years (2008–18), represents the artist’s effort to create portraits of Indigenous artists and arts professionals as a larger document of this community. As artist and curator Barry Ace (Anishinaabe (Odawa); born 1958) has observed, through this project Favell is creating a “visual lineage of this art history movement [of contemporary Indigenous art].”¹ The series serves to both affirm community and counter stereotypical depictions by non-native photographers.

Favell developed the idea for the series during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. She later decided to set up portrait sessions as she traveled, which greatly expanded the project. For example, during a 2012 visit to Santa Fe, Favell photographed 175 people over the course of four days. The title of each work indicates the name of the sitter and the city in which they were photographed. Currently, the series includes over 500 works.

The Block’s collection includes ten photographs from Facing the Camera. They focus primarily on figures with connections to the museum and the greater Chicago area. The subjects include Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee; 1957–2018) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Flathead Nation; born 1940), whose works are also in The Block’s collection; Marie Watt (Seneca; born 1967) whose work was featured in the 2017 Block exhibition If You Remember, I’ll Remember ; Chris Pappan (Osage/Kaw/Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux; born 1971), an artist who lives and works in Chicago; and Daphne Odjig (Odawa/ Potawatomi; 1919–2016), an influential modernist painter, for whom Chicago is part of her traditional homelands.

—Janet Dees

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

1 Barry Ace, “Revealed: The Portraits of Rosalie Favell,” in Facing the Camera: Rosalie Favell (Winnipeg: Urban Shaman, 2012), 5.

DONNA FERRATO

American, born Lorain, OH, 1949

Margo, Unbeatable Woman, Mt. Tamalpais, San Francisco, CA, 2010

Pigment inkjet print, 20 x 24 inches

Gift of David Kieselstein KGSM ’88, 2016.16.15

Donna Ferrato’s Margo, Unbeatable Woman, Mt. Tamalpais, San Francisco, CA is part of a series of photographs begun in 1981 and revisited in the 2010s that creates narratives to humanize those who have experienced domestic violence. While much of her work offers a window into the deeply disturbing and gendered terrain of intimate partner violence, her photographs also demand that we take notice of the complexity of survivors’ experiences. As shown in this photograph, Ferrato connected with many of her subjects to capture them on the other side of their crisis moments. Some of them are alive, healing, and full of hope, as reflected in Margo’s smile here. According to the artist’s caption for this work, Margo tells her own story as one of triumph for herself and her daughters: “After the great escape across the country to California, [she] knew she did the right thing.” Yet, in another photograph in the series, Ferrato does not allow us to break our gaze when she captures the humanity of a murdered mother and daughter from their coffins. We are forced to confront the reality that their lives have been cut short.

Earlier in the series Ferrato used the institution of law enforcement as her literal vehicle into a horrific world of interpersonal violence. She was permitted to accompany police officers and to take photos as they responded to calls of domestic violence. From this embedded position, Ferrato exposes the limits of the police force: the laws they are charged with enforcing do not prevent domestic violence or repair relational disharmony. Ferrato’s work allows us to bear witness to the inadequate institutional responses to persistent and violent forms of masculine power and its aftermath. The acute responses of the police do not offer healing to those who have been harmed nor rehabilitation for those who have harmed, but often uphold dominant forms of societal violence that undergird the interpersonal forms of violence seen in her project. Ferrato’s work, then, is most hopeful in its capacity to activate her audience as a caring and engaged community, which must exist beyond institutions in order to create the safe world we all deserve.

—Sekile M. Nzinga Director of

the Women’s Center and Interim Chief Diversity Officer, Northwestern University, 2017–21

Chief

Equity Officer, Office of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker

MARISOL (MARISOL ESCOBAR)

Venezuelan-American, born Paris, France, 1930, died New York, NY, 2016

Pocahontas, 1976

Color lithograph on paper, 26 x 19 5/8 inches

Gift of Paul S. D’Amato, LS 1985.3.8

From the archives of American history, Marisol extricates the portrait of the legendary Native American woman popularly known as Pocahontas (ca. 1596–1617). In addition to written accounts from colonial times, which narrate her mythical role interceding between the Powhatan Algonquian people and English settlers in the Virginia region, Pocahontas was the subject of a 1616 engraving by Dutch printmaker Simon van de Passe (1595–1647). Marisol recreated this image in 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial, in a moment when national allegories were ripe for new critical readings. That same year, her fellow Pop artist and collaborator Andy Warhol made a series of portraits of Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means. Marisol, with her artist-immigrant’s keen eye for the visual codes that mark an individual’s social status, identity, and class, strips away the image of the “civilized Indian” that the engraving serves to promote, making the Indigenous woman resurface. We read “Matoaks as Rebecka,” her Christian name, in the biographical sketch the artist has handwritten at the bottom of the image, decisively re-inscribing information from the engraving, which sought to transform Pocahontas’s heritage into a royal genealogy in an apparent seamless patriarchal line.

Working on a black background, Marisol applies color, highlighting the constraining aspect of the European attire over the dark-skinned woman with penetrating melancholic eyes—features distinctly different from Simon van de Passe’s engraving and not unlike Marisol’s own. The jewelry and the rich brocade of her costume in the 1616 source image are gone; the feather fan and the starched and intricate lace collar remain, an aggressive contrast of white over black closing in on the woman’s face rather than playing up any attribute of femininity. Looking into the historical past and melding it with her own experience, Marisol explores the tension between assimilation, cultural preservation, and resistance.

—Alejandra Uslenghi Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literary Studies

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

American, born New York, NY, 1946, died New York, NY, 1989

Patti Smith, late 1986

Gelatin silver print, 19 x 22 3/4 inches

Gift of Jeffrey H. Loria, 2015.7.3

The deep friendship and creative collaboration of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe began with three chance encounters of the hungry twenty-year-olds in New York City in 1967. “You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist,” Smith later wrote.1 By 1979, they had made their names— Patti Smith as poet, rock musician, and performer; Mapplethorpe as a studio photographer of artists, celebrities, still lifes, and daring erotic subjects. In 1980 Smith married Fred “Sonic” Smith and moved to Detroit. In September 1986, pregnant with the Smiths’ second child, she learned that Mapplethorpe had been hospitalized with AIDS.

Mapplethorpe’s first and most photographed model, Smith sat for him several times over the thirty months left to him. “I don’t know how he does it, but all his photographs of you look like him,” remarked Fred Smith. 2 In Mapplethorpe’s cover photograph for Smith’s 1988 album, Dream of Life, the gazes of artist and subject merge: “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that .… And I am looking at Robert and he is alive.”3

The profound solemnity and sadness that emanate from the formal portrait of late 1986 memorialize this cruel moment in the artists’ lives and in the early history of a ravaging, often deadly disease. Mapplethorpe poses Smith as a gravid Madonna in mourning, her left hand with its wedding band placed near her heart on her dark sweater, touching a strand of her flowing hair—bright signs of fruitfulness against the velvet ground.

Echoing Albrecht Dürer’s Christlike self-portrait of 1500 and Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1874 photograph of the widowed Julia Jackson Duckworth (later Virginia Stephen Woolf’s mother), Mapplethorpe’s expectant Madonna is also a mater dolorosa, a mother of sorrows, bound to life, destined for grief. In this study in blacks at the edges of light, Smith’s grave, stricken gaze reaches through space to the world. Still “holding hands with God,” artist and subject together make of chance something timeless.4

—Christine Froula Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies

1 Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 276.

2 Smith, Just Kids, 273.

3 Smith, Just Kids, 271.

4 Smith, Just Kids, 276.

CATHERINE OPIE

American, born Sandusky, OH, 1961

Skeeter from the series Portraits, 1993

Chromogenic print, 40 × 30 inches

Gift of Armyan Bernstein and Christine Meleo Bernstein, 2018.9

Among the photographs in Catherine Opie’s series Portraits—made between 1993 and 1997— Skeeter (1993) is unusual. A pillar of sunflowers leaning against the table commands as much space as does Skeeter, who breathes them in while seated. By being present with these organic bodies, Skeeter embodies care, quietude, and reflection.

Signaling such quiet strength was crucial for Opie, as Skeeter and her cohort of sitters for the series also comprise the photographer’s own chosen family within the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco in the early 1990s during the AIDS crisis. To portray these sitters as both present and dignified along gallery walls was—and remains—a significant political intervention. Opie explained: “A good amount of my friends were fighting AIDS or dying. A lot of them. And I wanted to make a body of work about the queer community that used bright backgrounds offsetting it, almost like a Hans Holbein painting.”¹

Indeed, Opie’s spectrum of emerald greens evokes the backgrounds of sixteenth-century portraiture. Each sunflower’s vibrant yellow bloom brightens Skeeter’s skin tone, offering reprieve from an otherwise dark setting. The decaying bramble on the table, likewise reminiscent of Holbein and his contemporaries, anchors the bouquet as precious and fleeting. It also inverts the pale green glint of Skeeter’s wristwatch—a minute detail that likewise signals the passage of time. Opie’s bold color decisions bring attention to Skeeter’s tattoo of a rising sun, which serves as a permanent reminder of renewal, vitality, courage, and energy.

The strategic art-historical citations Opie used to portray otherwise marginalized subjects bring visual and political representation to a compelling intersection, revealing the difficult intimacies and responsibilities of telling an individual, yet deeply collective, history.

— Sarah M. Estrela ’22 PhD, Art History

Block Curatorial Graduate Fellow, 2018–19

1 “Catherine Opie’s groundbreaking queer portraiture,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, video, 3:59, June 22, 2018, https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/ catherine-opies-groundbreaking-queer-portraiture/.

American, born Philadelphia, PA, 1890, died Paris, France, 1976

Marcel Duchamp in a Blond Wig, ca. 1954

Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid), 4 3/16 x 3 1/4 inches

Gift of James Geier, 2019.11

Wearing a blond wig and man’s suit, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) smiles at the camera held by his friend and fellow artist Man Ray. Their collaborations, most notably Man Ray’s portraits of Duchamp in drag as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, have long been celebrated in the canon of modern art as examples of identity play and performance prevalent in both Dada and Surrealist visual art and literature. Those images, taken between 1921 and 1923, show Duchamp posed in women’s clothing like a fashion model, while this photograph, made over thirty years later, eschews such pageantry, instead emphasizing the casual intimacy between friends. Duchamp sits in Man Ray’s Paris apartment looking at ease, resting his weight on his right elbow and leaning forward with a pipe still aglow in his left hand as if he just took a puff.

Typically associated with popular photography, the Polaroid camera Man Ray used to capture Duchamp would have almost instantaneously produced this small photograph—creating more of a personal keepsake than a fine art photograph. While the blond wig harkens back to their acclaimed Rrose Sélavy portrait sessions, Duchamp does not truly perform his alter ego here and Man Ray uses an informal mode of photography to reflect the intimate spaces of home, friendship, and the shared history of two artists in the second half of their lives and careers.

—Alissa Schapiro ’22 PhD, Art History

DEBORAH ROBERTS

American, born Austin, TX, 1962

She’s Mighty, Mighty, 2017

Collage, 30 x 22 inches

Purchased with funds donated by Diane and Craig Solomon, 2017.11

She is many and she is one. Through her method of collage, Deborah Roberts creates a kind of every girl. Composed of found images from magazines and online sources, She’s Mighty, Mighty’s complexity of form accentuates the individuality that is denied to Black girls beginning at a young age. Aggressive forces that reduce Black women’s identities are ever present in society and popular culture. By creating a singular representation that centers the diversity of Black girls, Roberts leans into and pushes against monolithic narratives of Black girlhood. Cultural markers like her twisted hairstyle and a small yellow barrette place the girl at around five to eight years old, an age when prejudices and stereotypes begin to establish concrete bearings in interpersonal relationships and in one’s sense of self. Conversely, her facial features, each from a different source image, are reminders of how reductive notions of identity located in the body create painful commonalities that extend to Black womanhood. The unfair burden of such prejudices are a much larger fight than any one girl can combat on her own. She’s Mighty, Mighty references an instance from the artist’s own childhood in which her non-Black teacher grabbed Roberts’s chin to lift her face.¹ In the work, the girl’s uncomfortable smile and stoic gaze starkly contrast with the screaming monkey coming out of her head as a white arm extends down to force her chin up. She is unable to exert agency over her own disposition because of this teacher’s racist and gendered ideations, thus leaving her to grapple with how to navigate external expectations within her own identity. Interactions like the one Roberts had with her teacher are representative of broader obstacles Black girls begin to encounter before they understand their gravity. The petite figure’s struggle to hold up a pair of deep red boxing gloves nearly the size of her torso is a reminder of the overwhelming weight racism places on Black girls. These gloves are the protection that society should have given her but she must now provide for herself.

—Brianna Heath ’21, Art History

Block Curatorial Summer Intern, 2018 Block Student Docent, 2018–21

1 Deborah Roberts, in conversation with Janet Dees, December 6, 2017.

CINDY SHERMAN

American, born Glen Ridge, NJ, 1954

Untitled Film Still #14, 1978

Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches

Gift of Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross, 2019.15

The women of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills—a celebrated series of seventy black-and-white photographs that cast the artist as a myriad of female archetypes from the world of cinema—exist in a state of irresolution. Her characters are typically framed alone, eyes searching beyond the picture frame, either reeling from an unseen event or waiting for something to happen. The subject of Untitled Film Still #14 (1978) stands anxiously in front of a mirror, her look suggesting a disruption beyond our field of vision. Telling details, such as the faint thread of smoke in the bottom right corner and the reflections of a cocktail glass and a jacket slung over a chair, hint at a second, troublingly absent figure, whose next move we can only imagine.

The temporality of Untitled Film Still #14 is complex. The image conjures suspense, a present anticipation of an uncertain future. Yet this is a second-hand suspense, as elements of gesture and décor like Sherman’s black dress and her pearl-clutching gesture refer back to horror and melodrama films of the 1950s and early ’60s, when women were depicted primarily as victims and sex objects. Sherman alludes to these tropes, but also resists them: her character wields a knife-shaped object in her right hand, perhaps challenging the very conventions of victimhood that the composition invokes. Her character is poised between a toxic nostalgia for icons of female passivity and the potential for feminist empowerment.

Film theory is often used to discuss Cindy Sherman’s images, particularly their sophisticated references to genre and their critique of cinema’s stifling male gaze. But the Untitled Film Stills also help us understand the uncanny temporality that defines the cinematic medium, which film theorist André Bazin famously described as “change mummified.” Cinematic time reanimates frozen traces of the past in the eye of a present beholder; the Untitled Film Stills similarly combine retrospection and expectation for artist and viewer alike. For Sherman, re-embodying dated female stereotypes offers an unlikely site of playful self-renewal; for the viewer, these suspended narratives validate our cultural memory even as they invite us to imagine different, more radical outcomes.

—Michael Metzger Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts

American, born Detroit, MI

Sun Ra Space I, New York City, NY, 1978

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches

Purchase funds donated by Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund, 2019.28.1

Ming Smith’s work is familiar to those of us who were listening to music in the late 1970s and ’80s. Shooting New York’s jazz scene with great sensitivity, Smith produced images of the musicians at rest or in action. She was on the inside, an integral part of the scene she depicted. This photograph documents a performance by Sun Ra (1914–1993), an American jazz composer, bandleader, pianist, poet, and visionary thinker. Transforming his persona by means of what he called Myth-Science, Ra asserted his extraterrestriality, proclaiming himself a being from the planet Saturn. He was a pioneer of what is now called Afrofuturism, a philosophy and artistic genre mixing elements from ancient Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, African diasporic culture, advanced technology, and science fiction.

One of the keys to Sun Ra’s reinvention of himself was photography. For four decades, he crafted his identity in part by means of his image. In the 1960s, with the help of drummer and photographer Tommy “Bugs” Hunter, Ra sat for elaborate shoots in which he was decked out in a flowing costume, a burst of flame or a mysterious metal star suspended mid-air between his hands like a magician or sorcerer. Later he posed in towering Egyptian headwear borrowed from an Oakland Masonic temple, and as his public profile grew Ra eventually turned his entire public life into a photo opportunity. Each concert was a series of perfect setups; every time he stepped up to the microphone to give a recitation or waved his tiger-patterned cape to signal to the band in a conducted improvisation, Ra was also offering himself up for potential image capture.

Smith’s Sun Ra Space I, New York City, NY is an action shot, slightly disorienting, in which Ra’s physical presence is almost dematerialized. She converts his body from object into atmosphere. Ra’s cape—this time one with a cosmic design—is caught in motion, the blackness of its fabric blending into the background of the club, the bandleader’s arm disintegrating into star-scape. Ra’s metallic cap blurs too, a flare in this Sun Ra solar system.

—John Corbett ’94 PhD, Radio/Television/Film Writer and independent curator based in Chicago

EDWARD STEICHEN

American, born Bivange, Luxembourg, 1879, died Redding, CT, 1973

Greta Garbo, Hollywood, 1928

Gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 × 7 5/8 inches

Gift of Richard and Jackie Hollander in memory of Ellyn Lee Hollander, 2019.29.22

At the height of her popularity in the 1920s, actress Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was dubbed “La Divine,” “the Swedish sphinx,” the woman with “perfect” features. Her frequently photographed face became her defining trademark and remains more famous than her movies. The emerging star system by which Hollywood studios created and managed movie performers in the 1910s and 20s relied on still photography and fan magazines to turn their contract actors into icons. At the same time, photographers Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and others advocated for photography’s recognition as an independent art form.

This image is from a series of photographs Steichen took of Garbo for Vanity Fair to promote her film A Woman of Affairs (Dir. Clarence Brown, 1928). Her face is positioned in the center of the image, surrounded by diffuse light and shadows. The thick material of her dark dress creates an arc around her face and spills beyond the lower edges of the frame. Her posture creates a sense of disconnect between her well-lit face and the dark fabric cloaking her body. In an almost child-like gesture, and reportedly at Steichen’s request, she covers her hair and her ears with her hands in a manner that both accentuates and shelters her features. Garbo looks straight into the camera with a pensive, withdrawn expression that appears counterintuitive to the staged image’s composition and to the conventions of Hollywood’s star iconography. This ambiguity speaks to the lingering fascination that surrounds Garbo, the actress, the star, the myth. Roland Barthes summed it up most pointedly in Mythologies: “Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image.”

—Evelyn Kreutzer ’20 PhD, Screen Cultures Block Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, 2018–19 Postdoctoral Researcher, Filmuniversität Babelsberg

1 Nationalmuseum, “New Acquisition: Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen,” press release, March 16, 2018, https://www.nationalmuseum.se/en/ nyf%C3%B6rv%C3%A4rv-greta-garbo-av-edward-steichen.

2 Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 56–57.

PLACE AND MEMORY

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

The long history of landscape art reveals how artists can use the seemingly neutral natural world as a site for making meaning. In this section, artworks from The Block’s collection thematize how past and present are intertwined in representations of the land and how artists grapple with such negotiations—whether through addressing markers and memorials or absences and erasures.

Histories related to a place are sometimes invisible and often overlooked. The Block Museum of Art, for example, sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami, and Ho-Chunk nations. As stated in Northwestern University’s Land Acknowledgment, “The region was also a site of trade, travel, gathering, and healing for more than a dozen other Native tribes and is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois.” Today, this land is home to the third largest urban Native American community in the United states and is the site of complex negotiations between and among people from around the world.

Representations of landscapes almost always ask the viewer to adopt a position relative to the view they present. In Dawoud Bey’s haunting Untitled #17 (Forest) (2017) [PAGE 109] , part of a larger series, we are invited to reimagine the environment that was faced by fugitive slaves in the United States on their way to free states or Canada along the Underground Railroad. Engaging with the historical pathways that led from slavery to freedom, Bey does not situate the spectator at a documented point on those paths. Rather he asks viewers to engage in an act of historical restitution, to project ourselves into the experience of another: to envisage a journey through the woods under the cover of darkness. In Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), Sky Hopinka similarly recovers moments of oppression and escape in Native American history, in this case through a multilayered video located in a historic site of imprisonment [LEFT AND PAGE 119] . This and other artworks call on our imaginations and reveal complicated layers of personal, generational, and societal histories rooted in place.

Sky Hopinka, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer, 2019 (film stills).

DAWOUD BEY

American, born New York, NY, 1953

Untitled #17 (Forest) from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017

Gelatin silver print, 44 x 55 inches

Purchase funds provided by Susan and Richard Rieser, 2019.4

When I was just starting to write, my father suggested I write a poem about nature. By "nature" I think he had in mind the trees because he had been teaching me their names since I was a little girl. Often, on long walks, he’d linger to stare up into the branches of the sycamores, the outer layer of rough brown bark peeling away, revealing another layer beneath it, smooth and white as bone.

As with those sycamores, there was always something else lurking beneath the surface when I tried to write a nature poem, something more sinister, as in Lucille Clifton’s, “surely i am able to write poems.” These lines echoed my own difficult knowledge of and fraught relationship with— as a Black Mississippian—my native geography:

… but whenever i begin “the trees wave their knotted branches and…” why is there under that poem always an other poem?

Is it the specter of lynching, the terror of the woods at night in Mississippi? Contemplating Dawoud Bey’s photograph Untitled #17 (Forest), and summoning Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations”—from which the series title comes—I am reminded of the transformative power of metaphor, of words and visual language. One afternoon, when I was very small, I was in the kitchen with my father. He had been entertaining me with a hand puppet—a wolf in a bonnet from the story of Little Red Riding Hood. “See that wolf out there?” he asked. At that moment I saw my great-aunt Sugar, transformed: a wolf in a day dress and hat walking through the woods behind my grandmother’s house. I am reminded now of seeing those woods in a different way, and of the happiness of that place and time, the tenderness embodied in the darkness and deep shade of those trees rooted in the landscape of my home—both a physical and psychological geography. I can hear the crickets that sang me to sleep.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” Robert Frost wrote. And in my mind’s eye, night at the house of my childhood settles around us, as in Hughes’s poem, “tenderly/Black like me.”

—Natasha Trethewey Board of Trustees Professor of English

ALAN COHEN

American, born Harrisburg, PA, 1943

Now (Auschwitz-Birkenau) 13-2, 1994

Gelatin silver print, 18 7/8 in x 18 1/2 inches

Gift of Ann and Edwin Rothschild, 1995.49.24

Over time, at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most infamous of the Nazis’ killing camps, nature consumes human history. Vegetation signifies life, but we face a choice: Allow sites of atrocity to disintegrate and permit nature to conceal genocide? Or pause the destructive effects of time to preserve evidence of humanity’s crimes? Attempts to touch the reality of and reach understanding about the Holocaust are impossible. As tourists, what we see and smell is so unlike what prisoners experienced: the air hung with filth and human ash, and in desperate hunger, they ate the grass, flowers, weeds. In specific locations, the grass in Auschwitz-Birkenau was lush and manicured, watered by underground sprinklers. When the new arrivals of Jews and Roma walked unknowingly toward the gas chambers, a camp band was forced to play. Green grass. Music. The promise of a hot shower. As if this were a civilized place. The rumors of Nazi mass murder are false. There is nothing to fear.

This photograph is one from Alan Cohen’s series Now (Auschwitz-Birkenau), made in 1994, which depicts seemingly unrecognizable landscapes. Square close-ups of soil, cracked concrete, broken brick, vegetation. The barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built of wood; the gas chambers of brick and concrete. Does this photograph show the exterior ruins of one of the four gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau? If so, what is outside and what is inside? With the Allies closing in, the Nazis demolished these buildings before they fled. Evidence was destroyed; genocide denied. In this place, we are both inside and outside at the same time. Near and far. Oxygen and Zyklon B. Understanding and utter bewilderment.

—Danny M. Cohen Associate Professor of Instruction

WILLIE DOHERTY

Northern Irish, born Derry, Northern Ireland, 1959

Border Crossing, 1994

Inkjet print, 13 x 17 5/8 inches

Purchase funds contributed by Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross, 2014.1e

My training is that of an English landscape archaeologist. I look at ordinary features in the landscape—roads, trackways, fields, hedges, trees, houses, farm buildings. I use these features as traces or clues, and think about how old they are, in what sequence they were created or laid down, how they have changed through time. I then take these traces and assemble them into a story.

Stories about landscape tell us about who we are. Stories have power, whether they are objectively based or freighted with elements of myth.  In English cultural life, the oak tree is an emblem of national identity. Ancient churches speak to a perceived continuity of religious belief. Old trackways address pilgrimage, contact, and movement. Prehistoric burial mounds and stone circles invoke elements of the uncanny, the pagan, the ancient.

Willie Doherty’s photograph speaks to me as an archaeologist on a series of levels. It has a prosaic, everyday quality about it: a trackway, an old tree, a fence, some concrete bollards, a fern-covered hillside in the background. But at a deeper level, I see Doherty gesturing towards ideas of history, continuity and discontinuity, and referencing Irish and Northern Irish identity. He’s called it Border Crossing : these are not any old lumps of concrete, but “dragon’s teeth,” barriers placed by British authorities to mark and enforce the 1921 partition into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Partition was a political act that cut across the grain of the landscape. The artificial border thus created was the focus of violence during the Northern Ireland conflict known as The Troubles (1968–98).

There’s a tension, then, between the old and enduring landscape and the artificial border thrown across it. One central achievement of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement was to resolve this tension, and effectively remove any physical presence of the border. As I write during Britain’s exit from the European Union, this agreement, the invisibility of the border, and the decades of peace it materializes are under threat, in part from a backward-looking English nationalism. Landscape archaeology, then, is not just about the past; we are always on a roundtrip ticket back to the present.

—Matthew Johnson Professor of Anthropology

RUBY FRAZIER

American, born Braddock, PA, 1982

A Message in Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, Macana Roxie and LaToya Ruby Frazier at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint MI, 2017

Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches

Gift of Lynne Jacobs, 2018.5

To save money, city officials of Flint, Michigan temporarily switched the city’s main water supply from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River in April of 2014. This change was implemented without first developing infrastructure for testing and treating the water for hazardous contaminants, and as a result, the health and safety of Flint residents was compromised beyond recognition and repair. Not only is this historical event a glaring manifestation of necropolitics—enactments of power that determine who is “worthy” of life and who is “deserving” of death—it also illuminates the insidious nature of anti-Blackness and [disaster] capitalism, both of which position the marginalized experiences of Black people and working class, poor people outside of society’s capacity for empathic concern and response.

In addition to its focus on this public health crisis as a violation against human life, this grayscale image by LaToya Ruby Frazier also highlights how strategic negligence impacts our already-imperiled environment. Produced alongside members of The Sister Tour (a community organization of Flint artists and activists), Frazier’s photographic intervention magnifies the fact that millions of single-use plastic water bottles have been distributed to (and purchased by) residents of Flint in the ongoing wake of this catastrophe. In a compelling way, the four women in this photograph deploy this excess of plastic to stage an ironic and multilayered provocation via a commonly-used social media hashtag: #NOFILTER.

The ongoing water crisis in Flint reflects an enduring history of global violence that has structured an antagonistic relationship between Black people and water—the most essential element of our biological existence and our human experience. While the State of Michigan claims to have regulated contamination, residents of Flint continue to rely upon bottled water out of fear that whatever is flowing into their homes remains polluted with lead, fecal bacteria, and other life-threatening substances. Through this image, Frazier inserts incisive critiques of environmentalism into a visual and intellectual discourse that traditionally excludes the concerns and perspectives of Black citizens. Furthermore, she reminds us that public trust is fundamental to successful and ethical governance, with significant implications for the future and sustainability of our environment.

—Nnaemeka Ekwelum ‘23 PhD, African American Studies

Chinese, born Changchun, Jilin Province, China, 1962

Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, 2000–2002

Four inkjet prints, 24 x 24 inches each Gift of Melih and Zeynep Keyman, 2015.1

Memories can imprint in our minds like photographs: everything stays the same in that moment, even as time marches on. Returning to the site of a memory, then, can be a jarring experience. Hai Bo’s Four Seasons lingers on that unsettling sensation. In four photographs, the artist captures himself sitting in front of the same tree in each season, and in doing so, references his own past. A young Hai Bo played by this tree when it was part of an old field, the site of his brother’s drowning. As his hometown Changchun expanded, the tree became enclosed in a city park. While this history is not visible in the images, the signs of transition from spring to summer, fall, and winter provide a meditation on change over time.

The cycle of life and death—from snow to green grass, barren branches to foliage—ever-present in the natural world imbues Four Seasons with the melancholic atmosphere typical in Hai Bo’s work, which reflects a sense of loss both personal and national. The timeline of the artist’s childhood mirrors that of China’s growth. In 1966 a four-year-old Hai Bo toddled as China plunged into the Cultural Revolution. In his teenage years, he navigated a post-Mao era. When the artist returned home as an adult from his new life in Beijing, he found his hometown transformed: his community had aged and changed, the natural landscape now a cityscape. While he had grown from child to man, the geography shifted from agrarian to urban. Four Seasons is both a record and a reminder. Hai Bo preserves the tree and himself in this moment. The photos also serve as a memento mori—a symbolic reminder of death. Time continues its unceasing movement forward. This core tension resides at the heart of Hai Bo’s work: his photographs may be fixed in time, but they are reflections of unrelenting change.

—Kelsey Allen-Niesen ’19, Asian Languages and Cultures

SKY HOPINKA

Ho-Chunk/Pechanga, born Ferndale, WA, 1984

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer, 2019

Two-channel digital video, color, with stereo sound, 13:15 minutes, loop Block Friends of Art Fund purchase, 2019.27.1

Structures of settler colonialism permeate American history, manifested physically as architecture and, more intangibly, as regimes of power and knowledge. With the two-channel video installation Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer, Indigenous experimental filmmaker and media artist Sky Hopinka unfolds this duality by exploring the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida.

Built by Spanish colonizers in the seventeenth century, the Castillo was later known as Fort Marion when it served as a US Army detention facility for Native prisoners during the Second Seminole War of 1835–42 and after the Red River Wars of the 1870s. One of the nation’s oldest edifices of imprisonment, its carceral legacy extends beyond its walls: techniques of religious indoctrination and linguistic discrimination devised there led to a cultural genocide that continues to burden Native lives and communities. Hopinka’s cinematography captures the material and immaterial layers of the Castillo’s history by embracing both straight documentation and spectacular digital effects. His camera conducts an archaeology of anti-Indigenous oppression, probing the rugged textures of the Castillo walls and confronting the viewer with primary historical documents, such as drawings made by Native prisoners. To suggest aspects of historical experience that elude apprehension, Hopinka juxtaposes out-of-sync visual and verbal renderings of the testimony of Seminole chieftain Coacoochee, who escaped from the fort in 1837. One sequence depicts a circular pan surveying the walls of an interior courtyard; Hopinka digitally composites the enclosure with a shot of St. Augustine’s immaculate beaches. The breathtaking technique seems to dematerialize the ramparts of the fort, promising an escape akin to Coacoochee’s prison break.

A title card tells us that Native prisoners at the seaside fort felt their captors had “tied the ocean to [their] beds,” turning the sea itself into a symbol and instrument of colonization. Hopinka’s edit dissolves the ramparts of the fort, but also insinuates that contemporary structures of domination have become more diffuse and all-encompassing. Today, the work suggests, we must look closely at the monuments of oppression, drawing inspiration from historical narratives of Indigenous resistance; using new tools of sound and vision, we must also pioneer techniques of emancipation in the present.

—Michael Metzger Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts

MARY PECK

American, born Minneapolis, MN, 1952

Stadium from the portfolio The Temples of Greece, 1979

Gelatin silver print, 4 1/8 x 5 1/8 inches

Gift of David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg, 1987.1.5

This photograph of the stadium at the ancient Greek site of Epidaurus elicits a reflexive response: the romantic feelings that well up while viewing a classical-period ruin set amid the scenic wilderness of the Peloponnese. One might be tempted to make the typical tourist presumption that the landscape has not changed since antiquity. However, a close examination reveals things to be otherwise. The tree in the foreground, as well as those on the left encroaching on the stadium, look young, no more than a few years. They betray an area stripped bare after decades of intensive excavations, and only recently reclaimed by nature. Viewed from a distance, the white stones on the right resemble grazing sheep, reinforcing the false impression of a bucolic landscape. In fact, they are the exposed seats of the stadium, which is largely intact, but covered by a layer of earth to protect it from the elements after excavation.

Peck took this photograph before UNESCO declared Epidaurus a World Heritage site in 1984. In the 1970s, clearly concerns more prosaic than presenting the ancient archaeology to an appreciative audience informed site management. Only visible with effort in Peck’s photograph, but undeniably there, are electrical lines irreverently bisecting the stadium. Since Peck visited Epidaurus, much has changed at the site. The electrical lines have been removed. But the trees are still present. They have matured, shading a recent reconstruction of seats on the left-hand side of the stadium. In contrast to 1979, the view has been tamed, in keeping with contemporary trends toward increasing the comprehensibility of archaeological parks. Epidaurus may have lost some of its romantic appeal, but it is still one of the most celebrated sites of ancient Greece.

—Taco Terpstra Associate Professor of Classics and History

—Marc Walton

Co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts and Research Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

PAT PHILLIPS

American, born Lakenheath, England, 1987

Yall Wanna See a Dead Body?, 2017

Acrylic, pencil, reflective tape, reflective glass beads, airbrush, and aerosol paint on canvas (diptych), 48 × 108 inches (overall)

Purchase funds provided by The Block Board of Advisors, 2019.12

Pat Phillips creates highly textured, representational paintings that combine a variety of media, from acrylic and spray paint to glass beads. Yall Wanna See a Dead Body? is part of a series of works that Phillips began in 2017, loosely based on his life growing up in suburban Louisiana. Created in a two-panel format and at a large scale, the work commands careful contemplation of its subject matter and its expressive, painterly surface [DETAIL OPPOSITE;

DIPTYPCH ON FOLLOWING SPREAD]

In Yall Wanna See a Dead Body? Phillips engages in a multilayered juxtaposition of pop culture references. The title is based on a line from the 1991 film Boyz N the Hood, which made a strong impression on Phillips. Written and directed by John Singleton, the film was a coming-of-age story based on Singleton’s life growing up as a young African American in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. The depicted scene directly references one from the film, down to the clothing and gestures of the figures. In the film four adolescents encounter a dead human body near train tracks in their neighborhood. This scene itself is a reference to a similar one from Stand by Me (Dir. Rob Reiner, 1985), a parallel coming-of-age film in which four young white boys go on a hike in 1950s Oregon and find the dead body of a missing boy. In Yall Wanna See a Dead Body? Phillips turns this encounter on its head and injects it with wry humor. The figures are transported to the landscape of suburban Louisiana, alongside Interstate 49, and the body they encounter is a deer. While the skid marks imply that the deer was the casualty of highway traffic—a typical scene on busy interstates—Phillips’s rendering of the animal evokes the animated film Bambi (1942). Bambi was also a coming-of-age narrative, one in which the protagonists develop and grow, seeking to preserve some of their childhood innocence, carefreeness, and curiosity in an environment marked by loss, echoing the themes invoked in Phillips’s painting.

—Janet Dees

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

MARK RUWEDEL

American, born Bethlehem, PA, 1954

Chocolate Mountains, Ancient Footpath toward Indian Pass, 1996, printed 2000

Gelatin silver print, 14 15/16 x 18 15/16 inches

Gift of Gary B. Sokol, San Francisco, 2020.4.1

This photograph takes a view just outside of the Indian Pass Wilderness area near the border between California and Arizona. The desert seems to be slowly retaking the trail, yet a thin line remains. The footpath’s age and purpose are likely remembered by the ʔívil uʔat (Cahuilla), the Native American tribe whose territory the trail crosses, with stories of this trail— who walked it and where they were going.

People often assess landscapes based on aesthetics or what they are perceived to offer humans. When I first saw this image, it reminded me of places where I have enjoyed working as an anthropologist conducting research on cultural resources in drop zones and impact zones. These are places where artillery and aerial bombardments take place, either in the act of war or for testing and training. In fact, there is an impact and drop zone near this trail (the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range). Trails and impact zones are similar in that both are often considered dead and degraded because of their intensive alterations by humans. But landscapes are dynamic and they change through the effects of wind, rain, plants, humans, or other animals. Humans change things in a moment, but landscapes readapt and reconfigure themselves over time. Impact zones, such as the one near this site, tend to contain tremendous amounts of wildlife and plants. Each one is rebuilding the landscape in its own way, taking advantage of up-turned soil and the recently laid down nutrients. The rocky landscape of the “Ancient Footpath” deceives the uninitiated: it appears to be barren and lifeless. However, the simple turning of a rock would reveal signs of water, signs of life: insects, spiders, lizards, snakes, rodents, cacti, moss. In the air, birds scan the ground looking for morsels to eat. The morsels themselves, rodents, busily gather and store seeds or dig deeper to bring up fresh soil—simple acts and cycles that restore and maintain the land.

—Eli Suzukovich III

Adjunct Lecturer in Environmental Policy and Culture

TSENG KWONG CHI

Canadian, born Hong Kong, 1950, died New York, 1990

Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 1986 from the self-portrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989, 1986

Gelatin silver print, selenium-toned, 36 x 36 inches

Purchased by the Block Museum Board of 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

There he is. The punctuating presence of a fetching young man in a Zhongshan suit (famously worn by Mao Zedong) stares up at the faces of former US presidents on Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Tseng Kwong Chi made an art of performing the self, producing photographs in which he embedded his body within and amidst a range of landscapes and social scenarios. From 1979 until his premature death from AIDS in 1990, he made a series of self-portraits: posing with guests at the 1980 Met Gala, nightlife revelers at Danceteria, boozy Rockaway beach bums, or at iconic European and US sites like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower; in each assuming a casual snapshot pose and facing the camera directly.

Many of Tseng’s photographs are developed as large-scale gelatin silver prints. Between the sheen of the material, the grayscale of the image, and the glass of the frame, a spectator becomes embedded in the work as a reflection. Tseng is there too, an anchor in the image, but not quite available to you. If you are looking at him, he’s looking at something, or someone, more important than you.

Tseng created the self-portrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989 in the final five years of his life. In these photographs, the scale of the print mimics the grand, Imperialist ambitions of North American landscape photography. He captures himself amidst the vistas of the Canadian Rockies, the North Dakota Grasslands, and the Grand Canyon, critically appropriating a photographic tradition tainted by its role as a facilitator of Euro-US settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. If, as Iyko Day writes, Tseng’s “photographs prompt a recognition of landscape as both a biopolitical expression of white supremacy and a personification of white male domination,” Mount Rushmore is the ultimate embodiment of this conceit.¹

He looks so little. A gay Asian man facing the imposing white edifice of patriarchal power. He is consumed by the landscape. Later, he will be consumed by the plague while the most powerful white men look on, unfeeling.

There he is. He isn’t here anymore.

—Joshua Chambers-Letson Professor of Performance Studies

1 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 79.

REFRAMING THE PAST

Essi Rönkkö and Kate Hadley Toftness

As Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, has noted, “History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions,” and further, that a museum’s “challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.”¹ The works of art in this section reevaluate established ideas about the past and offer new perspectives on more recent events.

Artists use a variety of strategies, from recycling visual tropes to creating alternative narratives to reframe historical moments. Shan Goshorn creates a healing discourse between past and present in Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance [LEFT AND PAGE 139] . Her basket weaves together texts she has drawn from historical treaties and other documents related to the persecution of Native Americans by the United States government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using traditional Eastern Cherokee patterns, Goshorn binds these elements with texts drawn from tribal songs that are intended to bring balance, transfiguring the burden of history into a device for surviving and thriving. Rose Kgoete, an artist working in South Africa, also stitches together the past and present in her textile work 16 June 1976 Youth Day (1999/2007) [PAGE 145] . The artist recreates an iconic photograph of a murdered boy from the Soweto uprising in 1976 some thirty years after his death. The image of Hector Pieterson, who was shot by police while protesting apartheid, is at the center of a large and colorful scene of protest that also includes more recent national symbols. Recontextualizing the original black-and-white image that helped spark the worldwide movement to end apartheid, Kgoete provides a remembrance of state violence that also sows seeds of hope for the future.

1 David Gelles, “Smithsonian’s Leader Says ‘Museums Have a Social Justice Role to Play’,” New York Times, July 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/ smithsonian-lonnie-bunch-corner-office.html.

Shan Goshorn, Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance, 2012 (detail).

DAVID P. BRADLEY

Chippewa/White Earth Ojibwe; White Earth Anishinaabe, born Eureka, CA, 1954

The Married Woman, 1980s

Color lithograph on paper, 22 1/2 x 15 inches (plate)

Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs

“I write to create a memory and to change the cockeyed views and simulations of the anishinaabe, Ojibwe or Chippewa, and Native American Indians.” So the White Earth Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor describes his work in Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance ¹ Such cockeyed views are familiar to me as a literary scholar: American literatures have mass-produced misrepresentations of Native people—as noble, as vanishing, as possessing a magical relationship to nature, to name a few—that circulate today in Native mascots, Halloween costumes, and tired, stock characters in films, books, and visual art. David P. Bradley’s work resonates with Vizenor’s practice of playfully exposing the assumptions on which such misrepresentations rely. Bradley asks how Native people make art in a world where they have been rendered objects of appropriation and commodification. And like Vizenor, he both criticizes misrepresentations and creates a memory, or narratives that remain uncaptured and unappropriated.

The Married Woman opens a window into a room in which a young Native woman looks away from the viewer’s gaze. An electrical cord snakes out of the frame, suggesting another world invisible to the viewer, a suggestion mirrored in the window opening to a desert city and the wallpaper peeling off the wall, revealing the presence of other surfaces and spaces. The woman gazes at a ring on her finger, refusing to meet the viewer’s gaze, and her feet turn to the left as if to follow the electrical cord. Her feelings are not for the viewer to read but are perhaps seen by the dog, who howls from the floor. Possibly referencing Coyote, known as a trickster in many Indigenous stories, the dog’s presence lets us know that, like Coyote, it and the woman evade being fixed within one interpretation or narrative. The image asks viewers to contemplate their desires for knowing the woman as well as the history of those desires when directed at Native people, even as Bradley simultaneously imagines Native people and art as inhabiting other, unseen worlds.

—Kelly Wisecup Associate Professor of English

1 Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 5.

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA

American, born Mexico City, Mexico, 1953

Return to Goya No. 9, 2010

Etching and aquatint with letterpress on paper, 14 5/8 x 11 1/8 inches

Purchase funds provided by Sandra Lynn Riggs, 2010.18.2

In Return to Goya No. 9, Enrique Chagoya satirically reinterprets Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s (1746–1828) No te escaparás (You will not escape) from the series Los Caprichos (The Caprices, 1797–98). Chagoya diligently recreates his near-namesake’s print with one provocative difference: he replaces a bemused, female dancer’s face with the smiling visage of President Barack Obama. This transformation provokes many questions, a signature tactic of Chagoya’s work (after all, he once titled a painting Part of the Charm is the Elusiveness of Meaning).

We might ask: Who are the four gargoyles in the ghoulish gaggle that menace the feminized dancer-President as he grins his way through an arabesque? How has Obama’s presidency thus been set upon? How is it under threat? How do Goya’s overarching critiques of the Spanish ruling class relate to this representation of the first African American president of the United States?

The detail at the bottom of the print presents another riddle to interpret. In the red stamp beneath this cross-dressing historical satire, Chagoya tucks a cross in the wing of a plucked chicken that wears a conical mask as it flees from a blaze. Once we let this pun hatch, we might hear only the “clucks” of a chicken-hearted Ku Klux Klansman. But other inquisitions haunt the cartoon detail: the mask also recalls the religious penitents who parade in the capirotes (canonical hats) of the Spanish Nazarenes— hats that likely inspired the early Klan outfits. Historical fashions may not have changed as much as we like to think, as is apparent in this disturbing link between Goya’s eighteenth-century Spain and Chagoya’s allusion to a racist present.

Chagoya’s larger body of work—paintings, etchings, screen-fold books, and other media—incorporates a complex universe of mutating historical details like this plucked chicken and misplaced Obama. These transformations render their meanings elusive and unstable, even if these meanings, like Obama, cannot “escape” their historical situations.

—Harris Feinsod Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies

EMMANUEL BAKARY DAOU

Malian, born San, Mali, 1960

Campagne de lavement des mains (Handwashing Campaign) and Stop Ebola

From the series Le temps Ebola (Ebola Times), 2016

Chromogenic prints

19 11/16 × 29 1/2 inches each (image)

Irwin and Andra S. Press Collection Endowment Fund purchase, 2018.10.1 & 6

As a cultural anthropologist who has studied the policing and militarized dimensions of Sierra Leone’s Ebola response, I see Emmanuel Bakary Daou’s series Le temps Ebola (Ebola Times) as a stark, satirical reading of government and community responses to the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–16. In Campagne de lavement des mains (Handwashing Campaign), a thin, old man with a white goatee casts his gaze toward something in the distance as he holds his hands up and out in front of him, fingers spread in the image’s foreground. Compressed into the background, a few relatively young observers watch as two masked people in jumpsuits, rubber gloves, and boots crouch over the old man, pointing their disinfectant spray, soaps, and hand sanitizer in his direction. These masked individuals are presumably health workers involved with the handwashing campaign referenced in the title. “Campaign” in this case, carries a double meaning: in this “war” against the virus, handwashing is both a weapon against the foe and an indicator of compliance with evolving public health norms that include frequent handwashing, contact tracing, and arcane rules for “safe burials” of Ebola dead. Has the old man violated those norms? Has he not sufficiently protected himself against the common enemy? The masked figures are poised to pull the trigger. Looking closely, we see that these figures are not wearing standard personal protective equipment (PPE). One has fashioned foot coverings from old packaging. Their masks are constructed of soft foam. Who are they? The masks’ exaggerated features accentuate their power to conceal and reveal, their ability to represent and evoke the vigilance and surveillance crucial to public health work in a viral emergency. In fact, Daou staged these photographs with hired actors in Mali, which counted eight Ebola cases and six deaths, magnitudes fewer than its southern neighbor, Guinea. Along with the photograph Stop Ebola, which features a Bamako street scene of two mock-PPE-clad health workers standing over a corpse-like figure wrapped in plastic, the staged images vaguely resemble crime scenes: who is responsible; who will investigate; whose point of view will matter?

—Adia Benton Associate Professor of Anthropology

SHAN GOSHORN

Eastern Band Cherokee, born Baltimore, MD, 1957, died Tulsa, OK, 2018

Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance, 2012

Arches watercolor paper, archival inks, and acrylic paint, 18 3/4 x 18 3/4 x 23 1/4 inches

Purchased with a gift from Sandra Lynn Riggs and members of The Block Leadership Circle, 2017.3

After many years of working primarily as a painter and photographer, Shan Goshorn turned to basket weaving in 2008 as her primary mode of expression. Goshorn’s conceptual baskets combine Cherokee aesthetics with thought-provoking content to address the links between historical events and ongoing struggles for Native American sovereignty and self-determination. Several of these works reference the fraught history of treaties between the US government and Native American nations, as well as the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School. In operation from 1879 to 1918, Carlisle served as the model for boarding schools across the United States that sought to assimilate Native American children through a process of forced acculturation.

Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance employs the form of a traditional Eastern Cherokee burden basket and variations of two weave patterns known as Chief’s Daughter and Unbroken Friendship. Burden baskets were used to carry heavy loads such as produce or firewood. The artist’s choice of this basket form underscores other types of burdens carried by Native American people referenced in the work.

The basket is woven from paper splints printed with excerpts from historical documents, including the Carlisle’s mission statement, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, after which the Cherokee purportedly agreed to leave their territory in North Carolina for land in Oklahoma. The majority of Cherokee protested, claiming the treaty was invalid because the men who signed it on their behalf were not authorized to do so. Other splints are printed with stereotypical uses of Native names in commercial products, alcohol, and mascots, as well as statistics of domestic violence in Native communities. Black splints printed with excerpts from the New Testament written in Cherokee syllabics are woven throughout the work. These burdens are metaphorically acted upon by being interwoven with elements deemed healing, including four splints painted in the colors of the four sacred directions of Cherokee cosmology— red (east), black (west), white (south), and blue (north)—and printed with the words of Cherokee morning and evening songs performed to open and close the day in a balanced way.

—Janet Dees

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS

Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, born Wichita, KS, 1954

Public Enemy Care for Youth (The Brutality Which Is America), 1992

Three screenprints on paper, 40 1/4 x 34 inches each 1994.90.1-3

Southern Cheyenne artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds combines words from songs, conversations, speeches, and street signs in works that often address the struggles, experiences, and presence of Native peoples. Stretched across three large prints of white text on black backgrounds, this work would command attention in a gallery, on a billboard, or carried by a crowd of protestors. I try to imagine chanting the words, but immediately stumble on “ THE BRUTALITY WHICH IS AMERICA ,” a phrase that does not roll off the tongue. The phrase conjures white supremacy in the United States, manifest in state violence and in more insidious structural violence. America does not contain brutality, Heap of Birds suggests, it embodies it.

“ RAISES MAD DOGS ” gives further pause, echoing a familiar instance of brutality: Native American boarding schools in the nineteenth century. The leaders of these government-funded schools ripped thousands of Native children, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather among them, from their cultures, languages, families, and homes in the name of cultural assimilation. The third panel ends with the words “ THAT WERE ONCE BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN,” mourning the loss of identity.

The text across the bottom of the triptych is more ambiguous: “PUBLIC” /“ ENEMY ”/“CARE FOR YOUTH.” The small size of the type requires the viewer to step closer, look longer. “ PUBLIC ” is paired with the panel speaking of structural violence; “ ENEMY ” with the victims of that violence. Together they recall government rhetoric as well as the 1990s hip hop group Public Enemy, whose lyrics critiqued police brutality. “CARE FOR YOUTH” sits on the third panel, an invocation that contrasts with the words above it. These statements are like fragments of policy, pop culture, and personal experience. Heap of Birds leaves us to weave them together. When I look at this work I think about my family, my Anishinaabe and Cherokee ancestors, and my Native community at Northwestern. Heap of Birds responds to histories of colonial violence that warp the identities of Native people. He suggests a parallel history, one in which our acts of care counteract this intergenerational trauma.

—Lois Biggs (White Earth Ojibwe and Oklahoma Cherokee) ’20, Art History and Comparative Literary Studies

Block Student Docent, 2017–20

Fulbright-University of Leeds Postgraduate Scholar 2020–21

ADMIRE KAMUDZENGERERE

Zimbabwean, born Harare, Zimbabwe, 1981

RACHEL MONOSOV

Russian, born St. Petersburg, Russia, 1987

First Home, Aug. 21, 1972 from the series 1972, 2017

Inkjet prints in artist frame, cardstock, and pins, 12 x 9 inches

Purchase funds provided by Northern Trust, Hugh and Nancy Magill and the Andra S. and Irwin Press Collections Fund 2017.7a

In 2017, Zimbabwean artist Admire Kamudzengerere and Rachel Monosov, a Russian-Israeli artist, were married in Harare, Zimbabwe, by a traditional shaman in a Shona-Jewish ceremony that took place under a Chuppah before family and friends. Although their interfaith, interracial relationship may not seem questionable today, it would have been highly taboo under the white settler-colonial governments that ruled the country for much of the twentieth century. Monosov and Kamudzengerere explore this sociopolitical history in 1972 (2017), a series of twenty-three black-and-white photographs that employ ethnographic approaches and fiction to address racist attitudes and historical anxieties about miscegenation.

The project was catalyzed by Kamudzengerere and Monosov’s unsuccessful attempts to find photographs of interracial couples in Zimbabwe’s National Archives. To overcome this absence, the artists created the types of “archival” images they initially sought out, casting themselves and friends as both actors and directors in a multi-part photographic quasi-fiction. Set in 1972 during the violent Bush War between black nationalists and the ruling white minority government, the photographs chronicle the marriage and domestic life of a black Zimbabwean named “A,” and his partner, a white Israeli woman named “R.” The images capture the preparation and festivities surrounding A and R’s wedding, their leisure time, their first home, and the natural environment of Harare and surrounding villages. Whether framed singly or in pairs, the photographs are all set in white mats and accompanied by typewritten captions affixed with pushpins at the frame’s lower left or right corner. These captions evoke the excessive description and pretenses of ethnographic evidence, and thereby lend credibility to the photographs’ quasi-fictional scenes. “What Monosov and Kamudzengerere have effectively done,” observed the critic Loring Knoblauch, “is create a visual time capsule in the present, buried it, and then pretended to unearth it as documentary evidence from 1972.”¹ As a consequence, the project convolutes distinctions between reality and image, fact and fiction, forcing us to reckon with just how historical attitudes about race continue to haunt and shape social relations in the present.

—Antawan I. Byrd ’21 PhD, Art History

Associate Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago

1 Loring Knoblauch, “Rachel Monosov/Admire Kamudzengerere, 1972 @ Catinca Tabacaru,” Collectors Daily, April 5, 2018, https://collectordaily.com/ rachel-monosov-admire-kamudzengerere-1972-catinca-tabacaru.

South African, born 1972

16 June 1976 Youth Day, 1999/2007

Embroidery on fabric, 43 1/4 × 45 inches

Gift of Kate Ezra, 2018.8

Rose Kgoete’s textile recaptures a pivotal moment in the long campaign to overturn apartheid, a system of racial subjugation that held sway in South Africa for more than four decades, from 1948 to the early 1990s. The artist allows us to imagine a particular intersection in Soweto, where a great tragedy occurred on June 16, 1976.

On that day students left their classrooms in protest of the addition of Afrikaans alongside English as a compulsory language of instruction. The decree proved a flash point for Black students because Afrikaans was the language used by National Party leaders of a white minority regime. Singing struggle anthems, the students were met by police, tear gas, and live ammunition.

More than 500 young people died, including Hector Pieterson, the 12-year-old boy who has been stitched into the heart of this work. At the time, Pieterson’s murder was memorialized by photojournalist Sam Nzima in an iconic black-and-white image that rocketed around the world. Journalists, videographers, and photographers regularly risked their lives to chronicle anti-apartheid protests. Their reports about brutal police violence sparked and helped sustain an international solidarity movement that was akin, in scale and scope, to the mass worldwide mobilization against slavery a century earlier.

What is radical, upending, and deeply moving about Kgoete’s piece is the way she prods our memories while also inviting us to consider the entire community. Hector Pieterson’s murder gets its rightful due, but there’s more to the story here. Working from a black-and-white image, she instead renders the neighborhood in resplendent color. The township Kgoete creates is filled with blooms and a flowering tree, more like it looks today than it did forty-four years ago. It is legible here as a beloved space filled with young survivors of the massacre who raise their arms in protest—“Stop shooting!”—but also in exuberant expressions of determination and joy. The artist does far more than reproduce a memorial scene. Instead, she widens the frame and enriches our understanding of a historic insurrection.

—Douglas Foster Associate Professor of Journalism

NATALIA LUDMILA

Mexican, born Mexico City, Mexico, 1980

The State of Affairs, 2013 Five watercolors on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches each Gift of Melih and Zeynep Keyman, 2016.11a-e

In these five watercolors [FOLLOWING PAGES] , Natalia Ludmila recreates images of public protests culled from news photographs in 2013—a year marked by civil unrest across the globe. The artist’s decision to leave each image unidentified distills these disparate international conflicts into solo acts that capture the common threads that bind episodes of civil unrest and the efforts to quash them.

Isolated from their antagonists or victims, and extracted from any identifying backdrops, these combatants illustrate both the primal and dehumanizing nature of the skirmishes that mark our existence and continuously pour into our newsfeeds. Yet here we see not a clash of individuals and ideologies, but the universal struggle with our collective selves, devoid of judgment about who is right or wrong in these encounters. As the viewer faces off with these lone warriors, we wrestle with the eternal question: “What are we fighting for?”

—Charles Whitaker Professor of Journalism Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED

American, born East Palo Alto, CA, 1985

Lazy Equation, 2019

Inkjet print on paper, 20 x 16 inches

Purchase funds provided by the Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund, 2019.18.1

Language is a key element of Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s work as both an educator and an artist. In her artwork, she takes simple phrases and puts them into a visual form that questions their assumed meanings. Complicating the format and content familiar from textbooks, Rasheed creates subtle references to racial relations and the expectations placed on marginalized groups.

Lazy Equation uses mathematical symbols and short statements— printed in white text on a black background—that read like math and social science textbooks taken apart and reassembled. The first line is simple arithmetic: 1 + 1 = 2, but Rasheed calls into question the validity of the elementary calculation by placing the left-hand side of the equation in quotation marks. This intervention asks the viewer to reevaluate the equal weight of the numbers added. The two statements that follow create a relationship between ideas about who is considered fully human. The footnote numbered 16 following “we already human!” contradicts the exclamation with a cautionary “not yet.” This annotation, and those implied to have come before it, suggest that this is one of many ways the notion of universal humanity is negated by a history of anti-Blackness. Rasheed continues by adding, “But lazy equations can trick our efforts,” to point out how complacency can undermine the work toward racial equity. At the time I am writing this in 2020, protestors across the United States and in several European countries have accepted the risks in refusing COVID-19 stay-at-home orders to gather, and speak out against and demand change to the carelessness with which Black lives are frequently taken by the police and vigilantes. Many of the voices raised have pointed to the systemic ways in which the humanity of Black people has been challenged, especially in the United States, historically and in the present. Yet Rasheed gives us hope by adding a comma at the end of the last line of Lazy Equation, indicating a pause rather than a conclusion, and suggesting that there is much more to say about efforts to ensure it is known that everyone is already human.

—Alisa Swindell Curatorial Research Associate

ADAM ROLSTON

American, born Los Angeles, CA, 1962

Untitled (Goodman’s Egg and Onion Matzos), ca. 1993

Acrylic on canvas, 24 3/16 x 24 3 /16 inches

Gift of Norman L. Kleeblatt, 2019.16

In the early 1990s, Adam Rolston began painting matzo boxes in a bold, bright style that references iconic works of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans. While Rolston faithfully copies the simple graphic design of a Goodman’s matzo box, he enlarges it and emphasizes the brushstrokes. Rolston translates the familiar box of flatbread mass-produced by such immigrant-founded companies as Goodman’s, Streits, and Manischewitz in a way that suggests complex questions about place, history, and identity.

A Jewish ritual food closely tied to the observance of Passover, matzo is a symbol of freedom. It is eaten at the holiday and serves to remind Jews of the unleavened bread their ancestors ate while fleeing slavery in Egypt. Every spring Jews throughout the world participate in rituals and food preparation centered on matzo in order to reflect on the idea of freedom. By nature, matzo is a sign of observing tradition and participating in a practice connected to several thousand years of Jewish history.

While Rolston’s painting refers to the history recalled each year at the Passover Seder, a ceremonial meal that is part of the holiday, he has enlarged the box and emphasized its loud colors and commercial design in order to draw attention to its other status as a commodity. In focusing on the box alone, Rolston’s painting has us reflect on the role of religion in late twentieth-century American life, where Judaism may be practiced not only through prayer, ritual, and reflection, but by purchasing a product. The matzo box becomes an ambiguous expression of Jewish identity or possibly assimilation. It also speaks to nostalgia; through the dated design one connects to the past and is reminded of the Jewish diaspora—not only Jews who were slaves in Egypt thousands of years ago, but European Jews who came to the United States for refuge and a better life in the early twentieth century. In the artist’s words, “The paintings are at once generic documentary, personal history, and an unpacking of consumer identity.”

—Corinne Granof Academic Curator

American, born New York, NY, 1960

Stack of Diaries, 1993

Photo linen panel, glass, steel, 81 1/2 x 28 1/4 x 18 inches (overall)

Edition of 5

Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.53

The artist Lorna Simpson made her name in the New York art world of the late 1980s with works that wedded large-format photographs of Black women, often with their backs turned away from the viewer, with elliptical phrases printed on plastic placards. In these pieces, Simpson deployed and cross-wired formal strategies associated with conceptual, feminist, and other post-Minimal aesthetic practices in order to chart Black women’s vexed positioning—as both object of property and subject of violence— in the modern era. In 1992, however, the figure began to disappear from Simpson’s art, replaced, as in Stack of Diaries, with sculptural surrogates that nonetheless remained bodily in scale and address.

Comprised of a photograph of spiral-bound notebooks hung directly behind a modernist steel shelf lightly stacked with glass plates, this piece not only refuses to picture a body, but also frustrates our access to the artist’s words. “[W]ithin a year the carefully maintained entries she made were maintained by him”: such phrases, affixed to the glass plates with vinyl letters, suggest tantalizing fragments of an otherwise lost story of gendered relation, while the photograph holds out a mountain of interior thoughts, which, like the diary form, are rendered private sites of encounter. Here, then, rather than imaging the “Black woman” as a transparent site of visual inspection, Simpson insists on the opacity of that figure and of any means of conjuring her. Like the human itself, the work’s materials must be confronted on their own terms; their meaning is generated as much by absences and gaps as by what is visually made manifest. In this way, Simpson’s art limns the historical lacunae that continue to both shape and deform our understanding of the centrality of Black female bodies, thoughts, and labors to the making of the world.

—Huey Copeland

Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor and Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, 2005–20

BFC Presidential Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

LORNA SIMPSON

FEDERICO SOLMI

American, born Bologna, Italy, 1973

The Great Farce Portable Theater, 2019 Acrylic paint, mixed-media, and gold leaf on laser cut MDF, Plexiglas, nine-channel digital video, color, sound, 8:11 minutes, loop, 60 x 30 x 5 inches Gift of the artist, 2019.25.2

Since 2004 Federico Solmi has created increasingly complex animation-based works in which he employs extreme satire to critique the corrupting influence of power across cultural, financial, governmental, and religious institutions. The Great Farce (2017–19), an immersive nine-channel video installation, is Solmi’s most ambitious work to date in its technical complexity, physical scale, and scope of content. It was originally commissioned for the 2017 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany, where it was presented on the facade of the Schauspielhaus opera theater and later adapted into a gallery-based installation. For each edition of the work Solmi creates a unique painted handmade box—a portable theater—that represents the “content, spirit, and aesthetic” of the installation.¹ These echo the form of his “video paintings” and are self-contained works that can be hung on the wall, with a video-loop presenting the same nine channels of video as the larger installation.

With The Great Farce, Solmi demonstrates his innovation as a producer of media art. Handmade paintings, drawings, and motion-capture images are stitched together using digital gaming technology to create a surreal universe. The installation presents a sprawling send-up of empire building as an enterprise and a scathing commentary on contemporary culture—where spectacle and celebrity serve as distractions from sinister machinations and where the speed of things contributes to the blurring of myth and truth. The action is driven by a cast of characters based on world leaders culled from ancient Egypt to present-day United States. In Solmi’s rendition of history, Alexander the Great, Marie Antoinette, and Donald Trump occupy the same milieu. Acts of political aggression meld into decadent parties and ceremonies fueled by a feverish energy and unbridled quest for power. The aesthetic—marked by exaggerated facial features, a garish color palette, and a dissonant amusement park-influenced soundtrack—underscores the frenzied narrative. The work invokes multiple meanings of the word “farce”—as a literary form where it denotes a satirical comedy that relies upon extreme exaggeration and extravagance to create an improbable, often complex, plot—but also as a situation that has gone terribly wrong.

—Janet Dees Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

1 Federico Solmi, email correspondence with the author, June 1, 2019. Detail below, opposite is a still from the nine-channel video.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS

American, born Plainfield, NJ, 1976

Available in a Variety of Sizes and Colors, 1977/2007

From the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968–2008, 2007

Digital chromogenic print, 54 × 50 1/2 inches (image)

Gift of The Block Board of Advisors in honor of Jean Shedd, 2018.4.2

In the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008, Hank Willis Thomas took advertisements aimed at African American consumers between the years 1968 and 2008 and digitally removed the language explicitly identifying the product being marketed, reinscribing them with suggestive titles of his own. Available in a Variety of Sizes and Colors, 1977/2007 raises questions about what is being sold in the image. The composition and exchange of gazes in the image offer clues about the original advertisement and foreground the role of race and gender in consumer culture and in historical processes of commodification.

The work centrally features a young African American woman whose legs, casually crossed, yet poised, extend in the foreground of the photograph. The man behind her directs his gaze toward her legs, shifting his body away from the woman to his immediate right. The original 1977 advertisement aimed to market pantyhose as a barely perceptible other skin, though it could just as easily have been an ad for food, plates, or for hair or skincare products. In this case we might see pantyhose as a loose preexisting frame bound to ideals of femininity, masculinity, beauty, desirability, objectification, feel, and touch, into which women were encouraged to insert themselves to gain approval in the eyes of others. The intentional ambiguity of the title highlights a longer history in which Black women’s bodies were subject to inspection, commodification, and other wanton uses.

The ad, however, includes details that might inadvertently highlight a history of Black women’s refusal to be contained in or defined by histories and representations of objectification. The central female figure is depicted as oblivious to her suitor’s gaze. Another woman curiously lingers in the background of the image, with her back fully turned looking at an artwork on the back wall. Her face cannot be seen—or consumed— by the viewer as she attends to her own aesthetic experience. The framing of these figures and where they direct their gazes foreground counterhistories that might be read into the unbranded advertisement.

—Krista Thompson Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art History

KARA WALKER

American, born Stockton, CA, 1969

The Bush, Skinny, De-Boning, 2002

Stainless steel painted black, 7 x 6 x 1 inches (overall)

Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.58

Kara Walker’s works have often focused on the harms white enslavers inflicted on Black enslaved people in the antebellum United States. In this three-part sculpture she uses the visual language of cut-paper shadow puppets to tell a story of the impact of those harms—the ways in which abuse within Black communities can be rooted in interracial abuse. On the left, The Bush , a woman wields a hoe against herself. The hoe that usually clears out the bush or breaks up fertile ground to make it ready for planting, here deepens the damage caused by the enslaver’s apprehension of the woman’s fertility. In the middle, Skinny, a woman—the same one?—forces a child—hers?—to eat (from) a penis-shaped object, which does not promise nutrition for him anymore than it had for her. Her clothing—particularly her headdress—echoes that of a Klansman, the children’s nursery rhyme character Mother Goose, and an old-fashioned nun’s habit, connecting intergenerational violence from (before) antebellum slavery through postbellum emancipation (and beyond). On the right, De-Boning shows the futility of attempts to separate from racial trauma: if some escaped their chains, others remain fettered via family ties. The head might belong to her white male enslaver, or it might be the adult head of their child together.

The Bush, Skinny, De-Boning was commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, which brings to bear the context of global histories of colonialism. Germany’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century occupation of Namibia and genocidal violence against the Herero and Nama people there paralleled racial violence in the United States. In this context, it is difficult not to see the title The Bush as a reference to Africa. As with US enslavers, German colonists also raped African women and created children with them, even as they claimed Africans were racially beneath them, a separate species.

—Leslie M. Harris Professor of History

FRED WILSON

American, born New York, NY, 1954

Untitled (Venice Biennale), 2003

Chromogenic print, 28 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches (image)

Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.62

In 2003, artist Fred Wilson represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. Research for his project included seeking out overlooked, historic representations of Africans in that city’s churches, civic buildings, museums, and antique shops, while simultaneously observing the constant presence of Senegalese immigrant street vendors. Wilson’s immersive Biennale installation, Speak of Me as I Am , responds to these encounters. Its title comes directly from Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, and evokes the tragic final speech uttered by Othello, the Black figure at the heart of Shakespeare’s drama, just before he kills himself. In referencing Othello, the famous literary Moor, Wilson’s work signals the presence of Africans during Shakespeare’s time, and in twenty-first-century Venice.

This print was created to support the Biennale project. It juxtaposes images of two objects Wilson acquired during his wanderings: a commonly-found tourist engraving of Venice and a damaged Black figurine—a so-called “blackamoor”—representing an exoticized image of an African. The artist has described this worn figurine as an “abused slave,” an individual who may have passed through the cosmopolitan city but, “due to his bondage or psychological state, never truly became part of it.”¹ To Wilson, the figurine evoked the undocumented lives of both today’s African immigrants and Africans in early modern Europe, especially those in the trading-city of Venice.

By the late fifteenth century, Africans had become a highly visible presence across Europe. In monumental paintings celebrating Venice, they are often included at a diminutive scale, as gondoliers for example, floating amongst extravagantly and jewel-toned dressed Venetians.

In Wilson’s print this compositional order is inverted. The boldly “colored” slave figure, an outsized, ghostly, and defining presence, hovers over small, faceless gondoliers rowing past Venice’s iconic waterfront. This reversal of scale and color serves as a metaphor: Wilson’s intervention in pictorial convention disrupts the hierarchical, racialized values of dominant narratives of history. This untitled print revises the Venetian history that is reflected in the city’s renowned paintings, testifying to the presence of the African individuals who are as much a part of Venice today as they were hundreds of years ago.

—Peter Erickson Professor in Residence, Alice Kaplan Institute

for the Humanities, 2012–20

1 Fred Wilson, email message to author, September 24, 2019.

STUDENTS DISCUSS MUSEUM COLLECTING

Hannah Feldman, Essi Rönkkö, and Kate Hadley Toftness

As an academic museum, The Block Museum of Art’s collecting strategy is intricately linked to the culture and curriculum of Northwestern University. It was important, then, that a project that delineates future directions for The Block’s collecting include input from students and faculty in a curricular setting.

During spring quarter 2020, twelve Northwestern undergraduates from four schools and representing nine disciplines took part in an art history seminar titled “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts? ” We co-taught this course to introduce students to museum collecting strategies and their critiques, and to invite them to think about what criteria should be used for acquiring works of art at The Block. The course took place at a time when curators, directors, and museum board members—along with artists and educators—were rethinking what it means to collect and display works of art in societies that aspire to be integrated and equitable to all their members. Building from a history of critical museum studies, we read about and discussed the ideological underpinnings of inclusion and exclusion, the politics of museum finances, canon formation, and what it means to “decolonize” the museum in relationship both to the history it presents and the futures it maps. In addition to reading and discussions, the course included the examination of artworks from Chicago-based galleries, speaking with artists directly about their work, and culminated in the students’ collective recommendation of a work of art to be purchased by The Block, published in this volume, and exhibited in its companion exhibition. The last weeks of the class also coincided with national protests against anti-Black violence, which affirmed the importance of taking stock of the ongoing impact of white supremacy in institutional decision-making and pedagogy. This section presents the students’ collectively composed final statement about the project and an essay on Myra Greene’s Undertone #17, #23, #51, which they successfully presented for acquisition by The Block. This project lays the foundation for an ongoing commitment to including student perspectives in The Block’s collecting.

Myra Greene, Undertone #17, #23, #51, 2017–18 (detail).

MYRA GREENE

American, born New York, NY, 1975

Undertone #17, #23, #51 from the series Undertones, 2017–18

Three stained-glass ambrotypes and acrylic shelf, 5 1/2 x 24 x 2 1/2 inches (overall)

Purchase funds donated by Richard and Susan Rieser, 2020.3.2

Three small stained-glass plates lean precariously against a wall on a transparent ledge. The glass surfaces display fragmented views of artist Myra Greene’s facial features: her nose, lips, and closed eyes. In creating these plates, Greene used the technique of ambrotype, a photographic medium widely used in the 1860s. The longer exposure time required in this wet-plate collodion process leads to images that reveal darker areas of the subject in more detail than shorter shutter speed cameras, making it easier to represent darker skin tones. 1 Unlike ambrotypes in the nineteenth century, which were printed on clear glass, Greene’s Undertone #17, #23, #51 is printed on stained glass, enriching the work’s play with color. The hues of the plates represent the spectrum of undertones that compose Greene’s skin color: deep green, red, and blue. When light shines through each plate, it casts a distinct, tinted shadow onto the gallery’s wall. This play with light makes the colors more prominent, suggesting an exploration of the complexities and pluralities associated with Black skin.

By choosing the ambrotype as her medium, Greene ties her work to photography’s history as a tool of racial violence. The emergence of photography in the 1840s provided scientists with means to illustrate physical differences among people that they used to assert racial hierarchies and, therefore, further white supremacy. 2 Due to their ability to capture dark skin, ambrotypes in particular were frequently used to classify Black physiognomy, associating certain features with behavioral tendencies. This practice was embedded in essentialist ideologies that reduce individuals to their physiognomy, resulting in further stereotyping of and discrimination against Black people. The story of Harvard University ethnologist Louis Agassiz demonstrates the reverberations of nineteenth-century photography in the twenty-first century. In 1850, Agassiz commissioned photographer Joseph T. Zealey to make a series of portraits. As Christina Sharpe, a scholar of English literature and Black Studies, writes in Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, these photographs were intended to classify African physiognomy and make legible “an essential black inferiority and black monstrosity” as a means “to justify continued anti-black violence and subjugation.”3 These photographs became part of Harvard University’s institutional archives. In March 2019, Tamara Lanier, a descendent of Delia and Renty, two enslaved individuals who were photographed by Agassiz, filed a lawsuit against Harvard and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to gain ownership of the images. 4 Her legal claim relies on the argument that, because of their legal status as property, Delia and Renty could not and did not consent to having their images captured. Therefore, Harvard cannot claim to have lawful possession of their images. Lanier’s lawsuit reflects a similar urge to reclaim past representations of Black

Americans that we find in Greene’s appropriation of the ambrotype. In both instances, we perceive that we cannot move forward until we confront the racist actions of our predecessors.

In contrast to the images of Lanier’s ancestors, Greene asserts personal agency over the production of her images by her unwillingness to turn her camera on any Black person but herself, lest their images enter art markets and become commodified, thereby further reinscribing historical pain. 5 Thus, through self-portraiture Greene circumvents what theorist Ariella Azoulay has named the necessarily “extractive principle” of photography. 6 This notion, first introduced to the authors by our Northwestern colleague, art historian Emma M. Kennedy, emphasizes how the photograph’s subject is rarely an active participant in the process of photography itself. Greene’s self-determination is a critical aspect of Undertones. By constructing these images of her own likeness, the artist allows for a visual analysis of Black identity and representation that comes from a place of consent. Her decision to focus on her eyes, nose, and lips prompts the viewers to connect intimately with Greene. As viewers, we engage with the features of her body most closely related to her senses. The small size of the plates, each of which would fit in the palm of your hand, further invites a need for close looking. Yet the fragmentation of her facial features across the three plates creates a separation.

By creating a series of self-portraits based on a historical medium that evokes the era of American slavery, Myra Greene creates a sense of oscillation between the past and the present. In the present, she challenges the notion of racial identity as monolithic by using multicolored glass to point to the complexities and the undertones of Blackness as a physical and social construct. By inserting herself intimately in the work, Greene does not reproduce the violence that is engraved in the historical use of the ambrotype, but proposes a more nuanced reading of existing narratives surrounding Black identity. She shows that past and present are not disparate, but deeply dependent and interconnected; attempts to separate them deny and obfuscate Black pain.

—Students enrolled in “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts? ” seminar, spring 2020

Samantha Baldwin ’21, Art History and Journalism

Lois Biggs ’20, Art History and Comparative Literary Studies

Cooper Brovenick ’20, Art History and Economics

Meghan Clare Considine ’20, Art History and Performance Studies

Ela Dayanikli ’20, Communication Studies

Zoe Detweiler ’20, Art History and Journalism

Kathleen Dewan ’20, Materials Science and Engineering

Vitoria Monteiro de Carvalho Faria ’23, Art History and Economics

Brianna Heath ’21, Art History

Wenke (Coco) Huang ’22, Art History and Performance Studies

Mina Pembe Malaz ’21, Art History and Psychology

NOTES

1 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form,’” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 31–60.

2 Amy Louise Wood, “Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (review),” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 660–61.

3 Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 11.

4 Jennifer Schuessler, “Your Ancestors Were Slaves. Who Owns the Photos of Them?,” The New York Times, March 22, 2019. Erik Ofgang, “Tamara Lanier is suing Harvard over photos of her enslaved ancestors,” Connecticut Magazine, April 15, 2020.

5 Conversation with the artist, May 13, 2020.

6 Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 147. This thinking is indebted to Emma M. Kennedy’s method in “ The Appropriation of a Visual Logic: Myra Greene’s Character Recognition” (unpublished paper, last modified December 2019).

COLLECTING AND CRITIQUE: A STUDENT PERSPECTIVE

WHO SAYS?

Every work of art speaks. Between the artist creating the work and the viewer perceiving it, many others have a say as well. Galleries, auction houses, and collectors speak through the monetary value they assign to works of art. Museums communicate their judgments and institutional motives by making decisions about what gets included in or excluded from collections and exhibitions and how much light is shined on it.

WHO SHOWS?

The question of agency is closely related to the question of whose work gets displayed in museums. Museums should work toward expanding the art historical canon: female artists, artists of color, and artists of diverse backgrounds must be given their rightful space. It is time that museums’ collecting practices and curatorial decisions more frequently reflect the contemporary moment in which they exist, not only the historical moment in which they were founded. This includes acknowledging privileges and insights, as well as omissions and missteps.

WHAT COUNTS?

Museums are not insulated from oppressive systems that shape our everyday lives. We must reckon with this and think critically about the institutions in which we participate. This self-reflexivity is essential for institutions that seek to become more inclusive. As the artist Andrea Fraser reminds us, “We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”¹ It is important to count the currency—both social and economic—that fuels curatorial and collecting practices within museums to expose its violent roots in capitalism and colonialism. In our class conversations we imagined different ways to count, new ways

1 Andrea Fraser, “From Institutional Critique to the Institution of Critique,” Artforum, September 2005, 283.

to acknowledge histories unaccounted for, and how to reassess our priorities. We thought about The Block’s mission, discussed museum decolonization, and developed the following set of criteria for curatorial practice:

• We, as the institution, must be transparent regarding our connections to oppressive systems. We must recognize the museum’s capacity to harm.

• We must also recognize that, as part of a social world, we have the capacity to intervene.

• We must develop a critical curatorial practice that holds us accountable to our communities and a critical collecting practice that focuses on works that, through their form or content, challenge the dominant, teleological notions of history that are often highlighted in museum spaces.

• We must think critically about museum space and our efforts to “decolonize” museums. To quote Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; it is inextricably tied to the land.² We can acknowledge the history of the land we occupy and make our institutional history visible, but we must accompany these moves with material actions.

• We must meaningfully dedicate museum space and attention to marginalized voices. As we do so, we must work directly and build relationships with local communities and with the communities we represent. We must seek feedback and dialogue from these groups, as well as provide support through purchases and employment as we develop exhibitions. We must form and support a museum staff that brings diverse perspectives to their work.

• Altogether, we must curate with reciprocity. Reciprocity doesn’t have to mean harmony or accordance. It can look like dissent, like a challenge, like a rupture. A reciprocal curatorial practice is defined by equitable exchanges that move us toward something mutually beneficial—in this case, toward the institution we aspire to be.

— Students enrolled in “Collecting|Critique: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts?” seminar, spring 2020

2 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

STAFF

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs

Lindsay Bosch ’04, Senior Manager of Marketing & Communications

Kristina Bottomley, Assistant Director of Collections and Exhibition Management and Senior Registrar

Aaron Chatman, Manager of Visitor Services

Lisa G. Corrin, The Ellen Philips Katz Director

Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Corinne Granof, Academic Curator

Malia Haines-Stewart, Associate Film Programmer

Mark Leonhart, Lead Preparator

Rebecca Lyon, Head Projectionist

Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts

Erin Northington, Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director, Campus and Community Education and Engagement

Rocio Olasimbo, Visitors Services Officer

Elisa Miller Quinlan ’98, Director of Development

Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas, Media and Communications Coordinator

Jenna Robertson, Assistant to the Director

Essi Rönkkö, Associate Curator of Collections

América Salomón, Manager of Public Programs

Joseph Scott, Collections and Exhibitions Coordinator

Rita Shorts, Business Administrator

Dan Silverstein, Associate Director of Collections and Exhibition Management

Jeff Smith, Senior Business Administrator

James Stauber, Visitors Services Officer

Alisa Swindell, Curatorial Research Associate

Melanie Garcia Sympson, Curatorial Associate

Vincent Taylor, Visitors Services Officer

Kate Hadley Toftness, Senior Advancement Manager, Grants and Collection Council

BOARD OF ADVISORS

Anu Aggarwal (SP KSM ’97)

Kim Allen-Niesen (Parent ’16, ’19)

Mary Baglivo (MDL ’81)

Clare Bell (Parent ’22)

Maria Bell (WCAS ’85)

Daniel S. Berger

Christine Bernstein (Parent ’17, ’23)

Julie Bernstein (Parent ’24)

Stuart H. Bohart (WCAS ’89) (Parent ’25)

Priscilla Vail Caldwell (WCAS ’85)

Stacey Cantor (WCAS ’90) (Parent ’20)

John Corbett (Comm PhD ’94)

Nicole Druckman (WCAS’92) (SP WCAS ’93)

Kristin Peterson Edwards (WCAS’92)

Kate Ezra (TGS PhD ’83)

James Geier

Lynn Hauser (FSM ’74 ’76 ’80) (SP FSM ’75 ’79 ’80)

Steven P. Henry (WCAS ’85)

Rashid Johnson

Cheryl Johnson-Odim (WCAS MA ’75 PhD ’78)

Ellen Philips Katz (WCAS ’70)

Zeynep Keyman (Parent ’07 ’12)

James A. Klein (MDL ’68 ’69)

Dianne Loeb (KSM’80) (SP KSM ’81)

Angela Lustig (SP MDL ’67 ’68)

R. Hugh Magill (SP Music ’86)

Craig Ponzio (Parent ’22)

Irwin Press (WCAS ’59)

Richard M. Rieser, Jr. (SP SESP ’70)

Sandra L. Riggs (Comm ’65)

Christine O. Robb, Chair (WCAS ’66) (SP WCAS ’66) (Parent ’93)

Selig D. Sacks (WCAS ’69) (Parent ’17)

Jean E. Shedd (KSM ’97)

Diane Solomon (Parent ’10 ’15)

Lisa Tananbaum (WCAS ’86)

Martha Tedeschi (WCAS PhD ’94)

Ken Thompson (WCAS ’91)

Sue Wilson (MDL ’70) (SP WCAS ’70 KSM ’74)

IMAGE CREDITS

All photographs by Clare Britt for The Block Museum of Art, except as noted below:

PAGE 10: Courtesy the Artist and PATRON, Chicago. Photography by Aron Gent; PAGE 24: © 2021 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; PAGE 31: © 2021 Deborah Kass / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. PAGE 32: © 2021 Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; PAGE 39: © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; PAGE 41: © Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation; PAGE 42: Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York; PAGE 43: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; PAGE 45: Copyright Andrea Carlson, Image courtesy of Highpoint Editions and the artist; PAGE 47: Courtesy of the artist; PAGE 53: Courtesy of Philip Martin Gallery and The Kwame Brathwaite Archive; PAGES 61, 63: © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; PAGES 65, 105: © 2020 The Estate of Edward Steichen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; PAGE 67: © Thomas Struth; PAGE 95: © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul; PAGE 91: © 2020 Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; PAGE 93: Patti Smith, 1986 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission; PAGE 97: © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020; PAGE 101: Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; PAGES 106, 119: Courtesy of the artist and The Green Gallery; PAGE 115: A Message in Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, Macana Roxie and LaToya Ruby Frazier at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint MI, 2017 © LaToya Ruby Frazier; PAGE 117: © Hai Bo, courtesy Pace Gallery; PAGE 121: © Mary Peck 1979; PAGE 127: © Mark Ruwedel, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York; PAGE 129: © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.; PAGE 133: Courtesy of the artist and Peabody Essex Museum; PAGE 143: Courtesy of Admire Kamudzengerere, Rachel Monosov, and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery; PAGE 151: Courtesy the artist and NOME, Berlin; PAGE 155: © Lorna Simpson, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; PAGE 157:

Courtesy Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York; PAGE 159: © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; PAGE 161 © Kara Walker; PAGES 164, 167, 170, 171: Courtesy the artist and PATRON, Chicago. Photography by Evan Jenkins.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection

The Block Museum of Art Northwestern University September 22–December 5, 2021

This publication has been made possible by the Alumnae of Northwestern University, the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Sandra L. Riggs Publication Fund.

Printed by Shapco Printing

“Thrall” from THRALL: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2021 by The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.

www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu

Cover: Omar Victor Diop, Juan de Pareja (detail), 2014. Pigment inkjet print. Purchase with funds from the Irwin and Andra S. Press Collection Endowment, 2016.9.2.

ISBN 978-1-7325684-2-6

Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection highlights more than fifty contemporary works of art recently acquired by The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Contributions from Northwestern students, alumni, faculty, and staff from across wide-ranging fields of study respond to these works. Together the works in this volume foreground The Block’s commitment to including diverse voices and global perspectives in the museum’s collection. The book’s title draws inspiration from artist Louise Lawler’s provocative 1990 sculpture Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts—a work in The Block’s collection—posing questions about who has agency in the collecting and display of art and why that matters. With these questions in mind, the book’s authors also reflect on The Block’s collecting history and lay out a vision for collecting in the future. Through a collaborative approach, Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts encourages critical reflection on how museum collections frame our view of history and enrich our understanding of the present.