The Block Museum

05/28/2026

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

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

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

05/27/2026

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

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

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

05/21/2026

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

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

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

05/20/2026

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

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

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

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

05/15/2026

Diné in Focus Photography Collective: Artist Talk [Video]

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

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

05/14/2026

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

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

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

05/12/2026

An underseen, epic documentary by Sumiko Haneda makes its way to the Block Museum via a 16mm print from Japan as part of a small US tour this week. THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY (1982) invites viewers to inhabit the disappearing world of the farming communities around Mount Hayachine in northern Japan. Organized around the yearly kagura ritual in celebration of the mountain deity, the film intersperses captivating sequences of folk dance performances with passages of quiet observation and reflection upon the rapid transformations uprooting local economies and culture. Set against sweeping economic and social transformations, THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY attends closely to the granular details of the kagura’s dances, songs, and costumes, lending the film both humility and grandeur. Her camera venerating places where deep cultural memory infuse the landscape, offering dignified representations of traditional labor and astonishing images of the natural world.

Born in 1925, Haneda made her first documentary, Women’s College in the Village, in 1958. As one of few female members on the roster of documentary film company Iwanami Productions, her work has enjoyed less attention than that of colleagues and kindred spirits like Shinsuke Ogawa and Noriachi Tsuchimoto. Nonetheless, THE POEM OF THE HAYACHINE VALLEY is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in all of nonfiction cinema, a work of great musicality, visual vitality, intelligence, and empathy. Screening in a rare 16mm print from the Japan Foundation, THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY offers a revelation and an affirmation of documentary’s lyrical possibilities.

HAYACHINE NO FU (THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY, SUMIKO HANEDA, 1982, 186 min, 16mm courtesy of the Japan Foundation)

Thursday, May 14 at 6PM. Free and open to the public.

05/09/2026

In New York in the fall of 1969, writer-producer-director Karen Sperling began shooting MAKE A FACE, a 35mm feature in which she plays the leading role of Nina, a young artist plagued by hallucinations. Filmed largely inside her own New York City apartment, MAKE A FACE is a defiantly dissociative psychodrama, in which a woman confronts intimations of exploitation and her own fears mirroring a backdrop of cultural collapse. Though Sperling grew up in the milieu of the movie business as a member of the Warner family, MAKE A FACE rejects classical Hollywood models of narrative cohesion and realism. Instead, the film makes boldly expressive use of production design, split-screens, and superimpositions to realize a subjective vision of cinema in which a character’s dreams, fantasies, and daily realities have equal expression and value. 

Released in 1971, MAKE A FACE appeared at major international film festivals and premiered at The Carnegie Hall Cinema in New York, where Sperling and the film were the subject of numerous profiles and reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice and international media. Over the decades, the original 35mm prints and negatives were lost and discarded, leaving only video transfers and a single 16mm reduction print extant.

Working with Karen Sperling, Block Cinema has created a new digital transfer of the last remaining film print, which will screen for the first time in five decades.

Screening the new digital transfer on Friday, May 15 at 7PM with filmmaker Karen Sperling in person. Free & open to the public.

04/24/2026

On November 4 1966, heavy rains caused the banks of the Arno River in Florence, Italy to overflow, sending 20-foot floodwaters through the streets of a city world-renowned for its art and cultural collections. Renowned Florentine theatre director Franco Zeffirelli was editing his first feature film when the disaster struck, and he swiftly mobilized a crew of collaborators to document the flood and its aftermath. Broadcast on Italian television only 19 days after the flood, FLORENCE: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION mounts a moving and impassioned appeal for a worldwide relief effort, voiced by Welsh actor and Taming of the Shrew star Richard Burton. Exported around the world, the documentary helped generate millions for a recovery effort that is widely cited today as the birth of modern library conservation. 

Seen infrequently in the 60 years since its release, Block Cinema presents FLORENCE: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION in a rare presentation of an original 35mm print. For the occasion, the Block Museum welcomes Melina Avery, senior conservator at University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, and Dr. Jayme Collins, postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, to discuss lessons for conservators and researchers invested in protecting cultural heritage from the ongoing impacts of climate change.

📽️ Friday, April 24 at 7 PM. Free and open to the public.

Block Cinema thanks the Sloan Foundation and the Coolidge Corner Cinema’s Science on Screen program, for their support of the screenings in the “Watching the Weather” series, as well as RAI TECHE, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. and the Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group.

04/16/2026

Northwestern Water Research Community considers Teresa Montoya’s Photography

"Wildcats in Water" is a monthly seminar series hosted by NU Water at Northwestern University, showcasing student and faculty research on water technology and policy. It serves as a hub for collaborative research on water security, quality, and sustainability On April 8, the Wildcats in Water student seminar series which typically hears from scientists and researchers, looked at water through a different lens: art....

“Wildcats in Water” is a monthly seminar series hosted by NU Water at Northwestern University, showcasing student and faculty research on water technology and policy. It serves as a hub for collaborative research on water security, quality, and sustainability On April 8, the Wildcats in Water st...