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  Location within Chicago metropolitan area | |
| Established | 1980 |
|---|---|
| Location | 40 Arts Circle Drive Evanston, Illinois United States  |
| Coordinates | 42°03′09″N 87°40′22″W / 42.0524°N 87.6727°W |
| Type | Art |
| Director | Lisa Graziose Corrin (Since January, 2012) |
| Architect | Loebl Schlossman & Hackl |
| Website | www |
The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary (daughter of Albert Lasker) and Leigh B. Block (former vice president of Inland Steel Company) donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction of an art exhibition venue.[1] In recognition of their gift, the university named the changing exhibition space the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. The original conception of the museum was modeled on the German kunsthalle tradition, with no permanent collection, and a series of changing temporary exhibits. However, the Block Museum soon began to acquire a permanent collection as the university transferred many of its art pieces to the museum.[2] In recognition of its growing collection and its expanding programming, the Gallery became the American Alliance of Museums accredited Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 1998. The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000.
The Block Museum has strong partnerships with museums worldwide including with the Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton University Press, The Nasher Art Museum at Duke University, the Grey Art Gallery at NYU, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. The Block often collaborates with these museums on exhibitions that travel across the country and the world.
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Are we all Cockneys now? (UCL Festival of the Arts)
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Power and Distorted Relationships: The Psychology of the “Loyal Slave” and “Mammy” (Lecture)
Transcription
We're here at St Mary-le-Bow Cheapside. Traditionally, the Cockney was somebody born within the sound of Bow bells - that's one definition that goes back quite a long way. But some of our modern notions about what the Cockney might be are not held in the early 19th century and in the Medieval and Shakespearian period. We tend to think of the Cockney nowadays as being a badge of distinction, something that people are proud of, but also of it being kind of specifically kind of working-class - barrow boys from the East End. What's interesting about the term, I suppose, is the way in which for most of its history, up until the mid Victorian period, it didn't really have that flavour. It was much more a term of abuse for people who were thought not to be gentleman, who were thought to be sort of 'misshapen children of the city'. A Cockney, literally, etymologically if you like, is a cock's egg, so in other words, an impossibility, a pampered and effeminate child of the city, and for a long time that was the flavour of the term. So in calling somebody Cockney, you're identifying them not so much as working-class, but somebody who didn't really fit anywhere, and who, especially if you took them out of the city, was simply a joke. What I became interested in is the way in which this term was being used not only to describe Londoners in the early 19th century, but actually the new suburban suburbanites, as it were, of the early industrial metropolis. The term had a special sort of intensity, a special sort of venom, if you like, because London was expanding so quickly, and lots of those people who formerly used to live in London started living in the suburbs - Camden Town, Dulwich, even Hampstead, and the term 'Cockney' was often being used by Conservatives to describe a whole new belt, as it were, of the social order; not the working-class specifically, but the lower-middle-class - the kind of class from which Dickens emerged; Leigh Hunt, Keats and so on. So what I became interested in is the way in which this term is being used, rather as we might use an 'Essex man', an 'Essex woman' today, as a way of indicating a new kind of species of being, a species of being that you can't quite put in any particular category, that seem neither to belong in the middle-class or in the plebeian class, and that people don't quite understand, that they're afraid of in a way, that they're the new citizens on the block. I suppose the main figures of the study, the kind of people I'm interested in are the poets; Leigh Hunt, John Keats most notably, because they are the people who really attract quite a lot of Cockney criticism for the way in which they write about nature. They write about nature, according to the Conservatives, like people who only know it from books, or only know it from their private gardens, in suburbs such as Hampstead or Camden Town. So they're not writing about the grand rolling mountains and lakes that Wordsworth liked to write about, or Walter Scott, they're writing about these little feminised bowers, domestic bowers in which certain kinds of romantic or sexual (...) might take place, fanciful places, places in which you might feather and animate your own little private mythology, your own private world. So, quite often when critics are accusing these guys of being Cockney, they're accusing them of being effeminate, strange, fanciful, out-of-touch. They're attacking a kind of poetry which seems made-up and meant for the domestic. I suppose for me, it became interesting as a way of thinking about not only the growth in suburbanism in the early 19th century, but also, in a way, the conditions in which most of us now live. It gives a little sign, as it were, about the Cockney. They're our little ancestors of modernity - they're what most of us have now become.
Original exhibition highlights
- A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s (January 16 – July 17, 2016)
Charlotte Moorman was a musician and performance artist and a champion of experimental art, whose avant-garde festivals in New York City brought new art forms to a broad public. Recognition of Moorman in art history has been limited mostly to her collaborations with other artists, including composer John Cage and pioneering multimedia artist Nam June Paik, and to her 1967 performance of Paik's "Opera Sextronique," for which she became known as the "topless cellist" after being arrested on indecency charges. A Feast of Astonishments used the artists archive to looks deeper to portray Moorman as a leading international figure in her own right. The exhibition traveled to New York University's Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.[3]
- If You Remember, I’ll Remember (February 4 – June 18, 2017)
This group exhibition of contemporary work included works by artists Kristine Aono (b. 1960), Shan Goshorn (b. 1957), Samantha Hill (b. 1974), McCallum & Tarry (active 1998–2013), Dario Robleto (b. 1972), and Marie Watt (b. 1967). The exhibition contemplated the present through works of art exploring themes of love, mourning, war, relocation, internment, resistance, and civil rights in 19th and 20th century North America.
- William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (September 23, 2017 – March 11, 2018)
This exhibition explored the impact of British visionary poet and artist William Blake on a broad range of American artists in the post-World War II period. This exhibition was the first to consider how Blake's art and ideas were absorbed and filtered through American visual artists from the end of World War II through the 1960s.Blake's radical vision influenced artists of the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture. Among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to Blake were such diverse figures as Diane Arbus, Jay DeFeo, the Doors, Sam Francis, Allen Ginsberg, Jess, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger, Maurice Sendak, Robert Smithson, Clyfford Still, and many others. This exhibition also explored visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as Woodstock and the Summer of Love.[4]
- Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (January 13 – April 22, 2018)
- Up is Down: Mid-Century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio (September 18 – December 9, 2019)
In the 1950s, Chicago-based design firm Goldsholl Design Associates made a name for itself with innovative "designs-in-film." Headed by Morton and Millie Goldsholl, the studio produced television spots, films, trademarks, corporate identities, and print advertisements for international corporations like Kimberly-Clark, Motorola, and 7-Up. Although they were compared to some of the most celebrated design firms of the day, the Goldsholls and their designers are relatively unknown today. The Block Museum's exhibition Up is Down reexamined the innovative work of Goldsholl Design Associates and its national impact.[5]
- Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (January 26 – July 21, 2019)
Presenting more than 250 artworks spanning five centuries and a vast geographic expanse, the exhibition features loans from partner institutions in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria, many of which will be seen in North America for the first time. The Block Museum exhibition was curated by Kathleen Bickford Berzock and traveled to The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (Sept. 21, 2019 – Feb. 23, 2020) and then to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (April 8 – Nov. 29, 2020)[6][7]
Museum building and sculpture garden
The original museum building was constructed in 1980 and was designed by Chicago architecture firm Loebl Schlossman & Hackl. The Block's outdoor sculpture garden was established in 1989. Sixteen sculptures were gifts to Northwestern University by donors Mary and Leigh Block and other supporters. They are located outdoors and in indoor public spaces around Northwestern's Arts Circle, as well as in a sculpture garden designed by renowned Chicago architect John Vinci.[8]
The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000, with a design by Chicago architectural firm Lohan Associates.[9] Designed by acclaimed Chicago architect Dirk Lohan (the grandson of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and substantially funded by a private donation from businessman, lawyer, and philanthropist Paul Leffmann, the glass, steel and limestone structure tripled the size of the original facility. The 2000 expansion tripled the museum's gallery size.[2] The Block Museum is now home to three
In 2015, the museum launched a public lobby lounge known as The Block Spot, equipped with Wi-Fi, seating, study spaces and meeting spots. Block Spot was created with James Geier, president and co-founder of Chicago's award-winning 555 International, and with input from undergraduates in industrial designer and adjunct lecturer John Hartman's industrial design projects class at the Segal Design Institute, based at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.[10]
Museum Collections
The Block Museum houses a growing permanent collection of over 6,000 artworks. The collection is strong in prints, drawings, and photographs by American and European modern and contemporary artists. Specialized collections include American computer-generated artworks, Chicago-based printmakers of the 1930s and ‘40s, documentary photography of the Midwest, and South African prints of the early 1990s. Since 2016, The Block has increased the diversity of media and the international array of artists represented in its collection. Recent gifts and purchases have included videos, sculpture, drawings, photographs and installations by internationally known contemporary artists such as Paul Chan, Omar Victor Diop, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Carrie Mae Weems. An active teaching collection, the Block Museum's works are used in exhibitions, in wide-ranging curricula across the university, by students and faculty across disciplines, and by scholars and researchers regionally and nationally.[11]
The Block Museum collection can be browsed online via the museum's website.[12] To view objects from the collection, the public can make an appointment in The Eloise W. Martin Study Center.[13]
Collection highlights
- Jasper Johns, Decoy, 1971
- Max Beckmann, On the Streetcar, 1922
- Barbara Hepworth, Two Forms (Divided Circle), 1969
- Jean Arp, Feuille Se Reposant (Resting Leaf), 1959
- Joan Miró, Monument Dresse En Plein Ocean a La Gloire du Vent, 1967 and Constellation, 1971
- Chuck Close, Alex/Reduction Block, 1993
- Carrie Mae Weems, Ritual and Revolution, 1998
References
- ^ Mary Lasker Block Obituary, New York Times [1]
- ^ a b "History of the Block Museum". Archived from the original on 2009-03-06. Retrieved 2007-08-07.
- ^ Waxman, Lori. "The brilliance of Charlotte Moorman, on full view at the Block". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
- ^ Foumberg, Jason. "Take a trip and trip out to 'William Blake and the Age of Aquarius'". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
- ^ "Designing A Life Beautiful: "Up Is Down" Tells the Chicago Story of America's Iconic Brands | Newcity Art". art.newcity.com. 2018-09-13. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
- ^ "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time". Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
- ^ "In Centering West Africa, an Exhibition Tells Another Story of the Medieval Period". Hyperallergic. 2019-03-15. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
- ^ "Campus Art Walk: Block Museum - Northwestern University". www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
- ^ NU Facilities - Project history Archived 2008-05-19 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "The Block Spot: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art". www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2016-07-13.
- ^ "Block Museum receives major gift of contemporary art". news.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
- ^ "Collections – eMuseum". blockmuseum.emuseum.com. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ^ "Eloise W. Martin Study Center: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art". www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2016-07-13.
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This page was last edited on 28 January 2024, at 09:25