Curator’s Talk: All the Noise and the Hurry

This talk will focus on highlights from Picturing the Modern Metropolis and consider how artists gave visual expression to changed perceptions of space and time in the urban environment. It will bring attention to artists working in Chicago, some of whom immigrated to the United States, and saw the city as a site of new beginnings. It will also reflect on how artists conveyed the ordinary as extraordinary and how familiar surroundings are reframed and reimagined with a new perspectives.

The talk will draw attention to key artworks in The Block’s collection and consider how representations of the city have served as expressions of access, mobility, and co-existence for many city-dwellers throughout the 20th century.

Programs are open to all, on a first-come first-served basis. RSVPs are appreciated, but not required.

About the speaker: Corinne Granof is Academic Curator at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University where she directs curatorial initiatives with students and faculty. She is the co-curator of the Block exhibition Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Prints and Photographs from The Block's Collection. Granof has collaborated on over 30 past exhibitions and publications for the Block, including Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper (2025), Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism (2024); For One and All: Prints from the Block’s Collection (2023); and William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017).

The Block Museum of Art acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.

Image credit: William Clutz (American, born 1933), Summer Street (hand colored), 1973. Lithograph with hand colored additions. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Curated Prints, Ltd. 1999.28.63.