Come one, come all to ATP's annual undergraduate art showcase, SHOW OFF.
We're hosting our annual salon with deejays, donuts, and raffle on Wednesday, November 11, 4:30 - 6:00 PM, throughout ATP on the ground floor of Kresge Hall.
Bring your friends and see what ATP students are up to this fall!
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 11, 4:30pmat ART THEORY & PRACTICE
KRESGE HALL, GROUND FLOOR
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Artist Talk with ATP Alumna Deniz Türkoğlu Hewes
ATP Major Class of 2020, Deniz Türkoğlu Hewes, returns to campus to discuss how she has forged a creative life and present on projects undertaken in photography, video, and installation since graduating in 2020.
Open to undergraduates only.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, October 21, 12:00pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Only a filmmaker as deft, as deliberate, and as devilishly clever as John Smith could keep pace with the last five decades of London’s radical urban transformation. From pubs to public housing, shadowy edifices to sparkling spires, Smith’s films survey London’s sites of mass psychic, social, and commercial exchange; through the prisms of his intellect and his camera, he unmakes their solid forms, casting up the image of a city both crystalline and turbulent.
The three films in this program approach London obliquely, beginning with 1987’s THE BLACK TOWER (1987, 24 min), whose abstract account of a city dweller plagued by visions of an omnipresent structure plays on the uncanny spirit of hostility in the commons of Thatcher’s England. From this opacity, SLOW GLASS (1991, 40 min) turns to principles of transparency and reflection to guide its anachronic sightseeing tour of East London. At once a tribute to the monumentality of the pint glass and a treatise on the ephemerality of property, SLOW GLASS showcases the unique temporal economy of Smith’s cinema. Thence, CITADEL (2020) flashes forward to a moment when London threatens to disappear entirely into the spectacle. Completed during the first Coronavirus lockdown, CITADEL is composed of views of the city’s financial centre taken from the filmmaker’s apartment window, offset by a soundtrack of public bloviations by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Smith’s once-in-a-generation gift for visual satire looms large in this masterwork, which wields architecture the way Gillray and Hogarth wielded caricature.
Following the screening, filmmaker John Smith will appear in person for discussion, in partnership with the Art Theory and Practice program at Northwestern University. Smith will also appear at 6pm on Thursday November 5 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, where he returns to Conversations at the Edge for a special program celebrating the 25th anniversary of his appearance at the very first CATE screening. Block Cinema would like to thank Amy Beste, Steve Reinke, Michael Rakowitz, and Abina Manning for the opportunity to welcome Smith to Northwestern.
Films Screened:
THE BLACK TOWER
(John Smith, 1987, 24 min, 16mm-to-digital)
SLOW GLASS
(John Smith, 1991, 40 min, 16mm-to-digital)
CITADEL
(John Smith, 2020, 16 min, HD digital)
Total runtime: approx. 80 min.
John Smith is a British artist-filmmaker whose slyly humorous and formally rigorous works explore the unstable boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation, and abstraction. Since 1972, Smith has created more than 60 films, videos, and installations, earning major international festival prizes, as well as the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011 and the Jarman Award in 2013. His 2024 film Being John Smith was a finalist for the European Film Academy Awards. Recent solo exhibitions include the Vienna Secession, Kate MacGarry, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His work is held in such collections as Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and FRAC Île-de-France. Smith lives and works in London and Aude, France, and is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at the University of East London.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 4, 7:00pmBLOCK CINEMA at BLOCK MUSEUM
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
We can make any two stories touch: readings and discussion with the artists
The 2026 Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition We can make any two stories touch will be on view at the Block Museum from May 8-June 14, 2026. The five international artists in the show, Lamia Abukhadra, Pegah Bahador, Gabby Banks, naakita f.k. and Przemek Pyszczek, will gather on May 27 to share writing and discuss their thesis projects with Block Museum audiences. RSVP here.
This exhibition and associated events are co-organized by the Department of Art Theory & Practice and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Support is provided by the Norton S. Walbridge Fund; the Myers Foundations; the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts; and the Alsdorf Gallery Endowment.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, May 27, 6:00pmat BLOCK MUSEUM
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Visiting Artist Talk: Kameron Neal
ATP welcomes Kameron Neal as part of the 2025-26 Visiting Artist series.
Neal is an artist and designer working across video, installation, and performance whose work examines surveillance, public records, and the afterlives of recorded images. As a Public Artist in Residence with New York City’s Department of Records, he created Down the Barrel (of a Lens), an archival film installation interrogating NYPD surveillance. The project received first prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and is currently on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and at MoMA PS1 as part of Greater New York 2026.
As a projection designer, he has worked on numerous productions, including Ryan J. Haddad’s Dark Disabled Stories at The Public Theater, for which he received Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Design Awards. His work has also received a Creative Capital Award, The Vineyard Theatre’s Colman Domingo Award, a Princess Grace Award, and an Opera America Award for his collaboration with Paul Pinto. With Shayok Misha Chowdhury, he collaborated on Rheology and MukhAgni, multimedia performance memoirs presented at Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, and the Under the Radar Festival.
Artist residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, Lincoln Center’s Social Sculpture Project, CultureHub, ALL ARTS, MAXmachina, NYU ITP’s Project Fellowship, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, and The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group. Kameron was a 2024–25 Movement Lab Fellow at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an Interdisciplinary Fellow between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, April 23, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
ATP welcomes Esteban Cabeza de Baca as part of the Visiting Artist Series.
Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Ysidro, California) is an American painter of Mexican and Native American heritage who lives and works between Queens, New York, and the Southwest United States. He numbers among his influences San Ysidro, the liminal border town of his youth, and his parents, whose intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to shelter undocumented migrants during his youth. Cabeza de Baca’s work entwines layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs in ways that confound Cartesian single-point perspective. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Art, Cooper Union (2010) and Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2014). He has had solo exhibitions at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2025); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2023); Boers-Li Gallery, New York (2019); Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany (2019); and Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, Amsterdam (2019). He has participated group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York (2019); Royal Palace of Amsterdam (2018); Yale Institute of Sacred Music, New Haven (2017), and Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York (2015, 2014). Cabeza de Baca’s works are part of the permanent collections of Harvard University, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Parrish Art Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; and Williams College Museum of Art. He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery and Parker Gallery.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, April 8, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DR
EVANSTON, IL 60208
ATP welcomes Rush Baker IV as part of the ongoing visiting artist series.
Rush Baker IV (American, b. 1987, Washington, DC; he/him) is a painter whose work explores landscapes as vessels of cultural memory, transformation, and identity. Embracing uncertainty as a central methodology, Baker works through the tension between destruction and reconstruction, using abstraction as a strategy to unsettle preconceived ideas and fixed narratives. Through experimental approaches to material, process, and scale, his paintings challenge the boundaries between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers to encounter landscape as an active, unstable participant in history.
Baker’s practice is informed by a sustained engagement with history, geography, and the ways place shapes human experience. His work often reflects overlooked or erased narratives, weaving together elements of topography, architecture, and personal memory. Employing techniques such as scraping, layering, erasure, and the use of unconventional tools, he constructs dense surfaces that evoke both natural and built environments. His process mirrors the complexities of history itself—revealing and obscuring information in equal measure, and allowing meaning to remain provisional rather than resolved.
Baker has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Future Gallery (Berlin), Scaramouche Gallery (New York City), The Cooper Union (New York City), HEMPHILL Artworks (Washington, DC), Honfleur Gallery (Washington, DC), and Keijsers Koning (Dallas), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Zidoun-Bossuyt (Luxembourg), The Third Line (Dubai), the Harvey B. Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC), MOCADA (Brooklyn), Bowie State University, Koki Arts (Tokyo), and Yale University.
He received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he was awarded the Jack Stewart Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting, and an MFA from Yale University, where he received the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award for outstanding achievement in drawing or painting from nature. In 2023, Baker was a Trawick Prize finalist, and in 2024 he was named an Artsy Foundations Prize Finalist. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), the International African American Museum (Charleston, SC), the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), and the Soho House Collection, among others.
Baker is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Drawing and Painting at the University of Iowa, where he was also the 2024–25 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting and Drawing, and earlier taught in the MFA Program at American University’s Katzen School of Art in Washington, DC. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, March 4, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
