Exhibition Keynote: Bev Grant in Conversation

Join us in celebrating Fall exhibition, and the stories it shares of civil rights and social justice movements in the United States. Artist Bev Grant will be in conversation with co-curator Ruslana Lichtzier, 2023-2024 Block Museum Art History Graduate Fellow, to discuss Grant’s artistic practice documenting and participating in radical political movements in the late 1960s and 70s. Sarah Brown, Director of the Women’s Center at Northwestern University, will provide an introduction to the history of this groundbreaking intersectional feminist activism, and its legacies in the ongoing work of the Women’s Center at Northwestern today. The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A.

Participation level – light, participants can choose to participate by submitting questions via Social Q&A or requesting the microphone to ask a question.

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

Co-sponsored by the Northwestern Women’s Center.

The Block is proud to present a two-part series of programs featuring Bev Grant. Guests are invited to attend programs of their own choosing. Thursday, October 10 at 7 PM, will show JANIE'S JANIE and EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTA (THE PEOPLE ARE RISING), films about radical struggles in the early 1970's from the women's movement to liberatory practices of the Young Lords in East Harlem, followed by a conversation with Bev Grant about activism-focused filmmaking.

Sarah Brown is the Director of Northwestern University’s Women’s Centers on the Evanston and Chicago campuses. She is a proud alum of Brooklyn College in the City University of New York, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Brown, where she completed her PhD in American Studies. Sarah has her dream job, working with talented people across Northwestern to create space and opportunity for feminist leadership, to move a patriarchal institution toward a place of progress, and to imagine a more just and affirming future. She is a writer and a teacher in our Gender and Sexuality Studies Program with a background and interest in feminist science studies, affect theory, and late twentieth-century U.S. history.

Bev Grant is a labor and social justice activist, feminist, musician, photographer, and filmmaker. In July 2017, Grant began digitizing images she shot in the late 1960s, including iconic photos of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In 1967, she joined in New York Radical Women (NYRW) and New York Newsreel, where she co-produced “Up Against the Wall Miss America,” a short documentary about the Miss America Beauty Pageant Protest in 1968, and “El Pueblo Se Levanta,” a documentary about the Young Lords Party. She has exhibited at OSMOS in New York City, the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in Portland, OR, and the American Labor Museum in New Jersey. A monograph of Grant’s photographs called: Bev Grant Photography: 1968-1972, was published by OSMOS Books in December 2021. She is currently working on a documentary film focusing on her experiences and photos.

Photography website: www.bevgrantphotography.com

Music website: www.bevgrant.com

YouTube: www.youtube.com/bevgrant2008

Instagram: www.instagram.com/bevgrant1

Ruslana Lichtzier is a doctoral candidate, curator, and critic. Born in the USSR, raised in Israel, and residing today in the US, Lichtzier's practice originates from the non-place of migration. She works on modern and contemporary art and visual culture in the MENA region and beyond. Her dissertation explores the construction and deconstruction of contemporary coloniality in Palestine/Israel, examining how it manifests in the shaping of the Israeli landscape and nature, as well as the anti-colonial practices that seek to dismantle it.

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art