MUSEUM VIEWS

The Block's staff shares thoughts on the year's impact and learning.

This year, we have worked to connect intersecting communities – on campus, in Evanston, across Chicago, and beyond -- with the Block and each other through programs and initiatives that make visible what art is, and what it does in the world; to enrich the Northwestern co-curricular student experience, support student well-being, and offer hands-on learning opportunities in the arts and museums; and to build new bridges with partners in Evanston for shared learning and engagement.

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

Over the past year, we have been inspired by artworks that reframe the past and shape the future. Our Fall 2021 exhibition asked, Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts, while inviting many Northwestern voices into our effort to think about history through art. Our Winter/Spring 2022 exhibition, A Site of Struggle: American Artists Against Anti-Black Violence, called on art and artists to guide us in grappling with the enduring reality of anti-Black violence in the United States.

—Kathleen Bickford Berzock Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs

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

—Corinne Granof Academic Curator

I have been so deeply moved by the way A Site of Struggle has been taken up as a resource for both the Northwestern University and greater Evanston communities and humbled by colleagues nationally citing it as a model of museum practice. Groups as different as Evanston Township High School’s Students Organized Against Racism (S.O.A.R) and Feinberg School of Medicine’s Palliative Care program have centered the exhibition in discussions around racial violence, racial equity, and trauma-informed care.

In 2021-2022 we were able to embrace new storytelling tools to activate meaningful conversations with and among our audiences. We created knowledge in print and online, as well as in the gallery - reaching audiences across platforms to showcase the many forms a museum's work can take. Both Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts and A Site of Struggle became opportunities for the rich dialogue and partnership stories that form the core of our institutional narrative. Of particular note, our blog reached over 25,000 readers who engaged with our news, essays, videos, and insights.

—Lindsay Bosch Senior Manager of Marketing & Communications

Our exhibition and publication project Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection in the fall felt not only like the culmination of three years of work to build our collection and relationships across campus; it felt like a launching point for new ways for connecting the collection to the curriculum. We already saw positive ripple effects in the winter and spring term in the form of increased collection use in the study room. I look forward to building on this momentum in the coming years.

—Essi Rönkkö Associate Curator of Collections

This year we were thrilled to see our traveling exhibition program realized across different projects: Caravans of Gold was able to open in Washington D.C at the National Museum of African Art, while we also planned for A Site of Struggle to travel to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art in August 2022. We were also able to highlight our growing collection by mounting several exhibitions drawn entirely from our holdings. This strategy of exhibition making helps increase the teaching, learning and research impact of our work by having more of it on public display. We are excited to continue looking for these opportunities in the coming years.

—Dan Silverstein Associate Director of Collections and Exhibition Management

This year I was fortunate enough to work on the return of all the artworks from the Caravans of Gold exhibition. It was especially rewarding to return the loans from Africa back to all their institutions. I received a WhatsApp call afterward from a staff member at the National Museum in Lagos, Nigeria and was able to say thank you to everyone there. It was such an honor and a privilege to work on this exhibition!

—Kristina Bottomley Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Collections

Throughout 2021-2022, Block Cinema invited audiences to look beyond the screen, with illuminating in-person conversations around films that explore the histories and communities represented in Block exhibitions. Strong attendance for programs like Holding Binoculars, Pointing a Camera and Block by Block: Short Films About Chicago revealed our audience’s appetite for unusual documentaries that speak to the world we inhabit together. With over 25 guest filmmaker appearances throughout the year, we not only showed movies—we created transformative encounters for students, faculty, and the larger community.

—Michael Metzger Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts

2021-22 was a wonderful learning opportunity for the Engagement department in the creation of programming that arose from true partnership. This year the ideas that sparked our dialogues and events were often ideated from the community, student and partner expertise all around us. We embraced our role as a connective department, one that excels in creating moments where folks from varied spaces of knowledge and expertise can intersect and create something new.

—Isabella Ko Engagement Coordinator