What’s inside the Block? It depends on how you look.
The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University is an engine that drives questioning, experimentation, and collaboration across fields of study, with visual arts at the center. We do this by activating art’s power as a form of insight, research, and knowledge creation that makes human experience visible and material. Fueled by diverse perspectives and ways of knowing, we create shared encounters with art and with one another to deepen understandings of the world and our place within it.
Through exhibitions, classes, programs, screenings, and initiatives, The Block convenes bold conversations that explore the relevance of art to our lives and that deepen our thinking. We are as committed to exploring what art can do as we are to studying what art is.
Always free and open to all.
Image: Block Museum Student Associates tour The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, 2023
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2025 Student Acquisition
The Block Museum of Art’s collection supports learning across disciplines through exhibitions, research, and class and co-curricular visits. One of the ways we grow this resource is through an annual student-led collecting initiative undertaken by the Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs), an interdisciplinary group of Northwestern undergraduates. Throughout the academic year, they learn about museum interpretation, gallery teaching, and collecting practices, culminating in their recommending the purchase of one or more works of art that invite sustained looking and multiple avenues of inquiry.
The 2024–2025 BMSAs recommended the purchase of three works by artist Chitra Ganesh inspired by images from the comic book series Amar Chitra Katha, which popularizes Indian epics and folklore. These comics seek to educate children in India and across its diaspora on South Asian history, culture, religions, and mythologies. Like many stories written for children, Amar Chitra Katha reinforces conventional models of gender relations and sexuality as well as citizenship, nationalism, religious expression, and public behavior. Ganesh subverts these narrative traditions and their embedded patriarchal norms by constructing alternative worlds where women, girls, and other marginalized communities are empowered. Ganesh has cited canonical and contemporary feminist and queer scholarship as sources of inspiration for her work.
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