Image: Yuichi Idaka, Untitled, ca. 1946. Photograph, gelatin silver print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of the Bauhaus Chicago Foundation, 2024.21.7. Courtesy of the Estate of Yuichi Idaka
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston is presenting Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Prints and Photographs from The Block's Collection, on view until December 6, 2026. Drawing on more than 100 prints and photographs from the museum's holdings, focused primarily on the 20th century, the exhibition looks at how artists working in the United States made the city their subject.
Towering skyscrapers, crowded intersections and dynamic street scenes that emphasise the fast tempo of urban life became familiar ways of representing the modern metropolis. Using exaggerated form and fragmentation, artists sought to convey the sensory experience of urban space — and, in experimenting with modernist forms, proposed new ways of understanding the spaces people share with one another.
The exhibition sets well-known figures such as Edward Steichen, Vivian Maier, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol alongside Chicago-based artists including Henry Simon and Yuichi Idaka. Works highlighted by the museum include Steichen's Radio City, New York (1932), Maier's Chicago (1962), Simon's silhouetted street view at State and Monroe Streets (c. 1965) and an untitled Idaka photograph from around 1946, as well as Bruno Bak's woodcut The Bottleneck from his portfolio One Hundred Views of Chicago (1967), Clare Romano's color woodcut New Jersey Turnpike, Night (1962), Christo's Wrapped Building Project for Allied Chemical Tower (1991) and Richard Nickel's Garrick Theater (c. 1957).
According to the museum, each of these artists consistently engaged with the city, focusing on its sensory and visual experience while also bringing in ideals long associated with urban life: mobility, diversity, belonging and individual expression. Together, the works invite viewers to reconsider how artists helped shape impressions of the city and found in it a democratised subject, full of possibilities for creativity and freedom. The presentation is organised into themes including skylines and cityscapes, the street, and fragments of the metropolis.
The exhibition is curated by Eduardo Bello, the Block's 2025–26 Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator. A programme of related events continues through the autumn, including a curator's talk, "Modernity in the Making," on October 22 and a conversation with Adrienne Brown on rethinking urban emptiness on November 11.
