Image: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University will present ‘Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas’ from February 3 through June 6, 2027. The bilingual exhibition will be installed in the museum’s Main Gallery in Evanston, Illinois, bringing colonial paintings from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation’s Art of the Spanish Americas collection into dialogue with contemporary work from across the Americas and the Philippines.
The exhibition will include contemporary sculpture, textiles, photography, painting and mixed-media installations. Rather than separating historical and contemporary material by period, ‘Pasados Presentes’ is structured around their relationship, examining how artists use and adapt materials and artistic forms to transmit cultural memory, reinterpret inherited histories and shape ideas of identity and place.
According to the museum’s description, the exhibition will also consider materials and media as inseparable from the meaning of an artwork. Its framing asks how art participates in the construction of the history of the Americas, including which stories are preserved, obscured or reimagined within those narratives. The exhibition’s title, presented in Spanish and English, reflects its bilingual format.
The historical component is drawn from the Thoma Foundation’s Art of the Spanish Americas collection. One work identified in the exhibition material is ‘Saint Francis Xavier, Apostle of the Indies (San Francisco Javier, Apóstol de las Indias),’ an 18th-century oil painting by an unidentified artist. The work measures 40 1/4 by 32 5/8 inches and is listed as part of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection.
‘Pasados Presentes’ is curated by Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, and Kyle Stephan, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Block Museum of Art. The exhibition’s lead support is provided by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, with additional support from the Illinois Arts Council and The Alumnae of Northwestern University.
The Block Museum describes itself as free and open to all. It is located at 40 Arts Circle Drive in Evanston, and its listed academic-year hours are Wednesday through Friday from noon to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.; the museum is closed Monday and Tuesday. ‘Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas’ will remain on view in the Main Gallery through June 6, 2027.
