The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University is a free, AAM-accredited teaching museum located in Evanston, just north of Chicago. Since opening in 1980, The Block has presented original, research-driven exhibitions and public programs that uncover overlooked histories, expand the art historical canon, and connect art to the questions shaping our world.
An engine for questioning, experimentation, and collaboration across disciplines, The Block activates art as a form of insight, research, and knowledge creation. The museum presents a year-round rotating exhibition program across three galleries, featuring historical and contemporary art from around the world. Developed in collaboration with artists, scholars, students, and communities, its exhibitions offer new perspectives on subjects ranging from Indigenous art and environmental justice to photography, film, and contemporary practice. The Block's collection of more than 6,000 works supports teaching and research across Northwestern University.
The Block is also home to Block Cinema, a 150-seat theater internationally recognized for its innovative film exhibition, preservation, and research. Free screenings throughout the year feature newly restored films, artist conversations, retrospectives, and moving-image works that invite audiences to discover untold histories and fresh perspectives.
Located in Northwestern's Arts Circle, The Block welcomes visitors from across the Chicago region to experience exhibitions, films, and public programs that create shared encounters with art and one another, fostering curiosity, critical inquiry, and new ways of understanding the world.
September 9 – December 6, 2026
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.
September 9 – December 6, 2026
Each year, Northwestern undergraduates help shape The Block Museum of Art’s collection through a student-led acquisition process. The Block Collects 2026 presents the work selected by the 2025–26 Block Museum Student Associates: and you, all future tense, leak through (2023), a mixed-media work on hand-cut paper by Antonius-Tín Bui.
Bui’s wide-ranging practice spans hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture, often engaging with hybrid identities and complex relationships with the past. As a Vietnamese American, queer, and genderfluid artist, Bui offers beauty as a place of refuge for others from marginalized communities.