Image: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University will present its annual student-led acquisition in ‘The Block Collects 2026,’ an exhibition running from September 9 through December 6, 2026, in Evanston, Illinois. The exhibition will feature ‘and you, all future tense, leak through’ (2023), a mixed-media work by Chicago-based artist Antonius-Tín Bui, alongside selected works from the museum’s collection.
The acquisition was recommended by the 2025–2026 Block Museum Student Associates, an interdisciplinary group of Northwestern undergraduates. Each year, the students participate in a process through which they recommend a work for acquisition, placing student research and judgment directly within the museum’s collecting activity.
Bui’s work is made from hand-cut paper and forms part of a practice that spans paper cutting, community engagement, performance and soft sculpture. According to the museum, the artist’s work often engages with hybrid identities and complex relationships with the past. Bui is identified by the Block as a Vietnamese American, queer and genderfluid artist whose practice offers beauty as a place of refuge for people from marginalized communities.
At the exhibition, ‘and you, all future tense, leak through’ will be shown in conversation with other works in the Block’s collection. The museum describes these connections through recurring concerns including cutting, weaving and movement, as well as changing histories of place and material belonging. The presentation is intended to situate the new acquisition within broader conversations already present in the collection rather than display it as an isolated addition.
‘The Block Collects 2026’ is curated by Llewyn Blossfeld, curatorial associate, and Essi Rönkkö, associate curator of collections and academic programming at the Block Museum. The exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Purchase funds for Bui’s work were provided by Craig Ponzio, the Rubens Family Foundation and the Block Student Impact Fund.
The exhibition will be on view on the museum’s second floor at 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston. The Block Museum is free and open to all, with academic-year hours listed as Wednesday through Friday from noon to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. The museum’s public calendar also lists a December 2 conversation, ‘Antonius-Tín Bui in Conversation: Students Shape the Collection,’ during the exhibition’s final week.
