During the twentieth century, the modern city became both a defining subject and a testing ground for artistic experimentation. Picturing the Modern Metropolis brings together more than 90 prints and photographs from The Block Museum of Art’s collection to consider how artists working in the United States pictured urban life and helped shape the ways we continue to imagine it.

Towering buildings, crowded intersections, public transportation, and fast-moving streets offered artists a visual language for the pace and scale of metropolitan experience. Through dramatic viewpoints, fragmented compositions, and experiments with light and form, they translated the city’s sensory intensity into images. Yet these works do more than record changing architecture and public space. They also reflect ideas that have long been attached to city life, including mobility, diversity, belonging, freedom, and individual expression.

The exhibition places widely recognized figures such as Edward Steichen, Vivian Maier, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol in conversation with Chicago-based artists including Henry Simon and Yuichi Idaka. Seen together, their works reveal the city as a shared subject open to many perspectives. The metropolis can appear monumental or intimate, exhilarating or disorienting, depending on who is looking and how.

Drawn primarily from twentieth-century holdings, Picturing the Modern Metropolis invites visitors to look again at familiar urban scenes and consider how artists have influenced our understanding of the spaces we inhabit together. The exhibition is curated by Eduardo Bello, The Block’s 2025–26 Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator. The Graduate Fellowship is generously supported by The Graduate School at Northwestern University.