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
Visiting Artist Talk: John Menick
ATP welcomes John Menick as part of the 2026-27 Visiting Artist Series.
Menick is an artist who works in the moving image, sound, performance, and technological systems. His artworks have encompassed fiction and hearsay, the apocalyptic imagination, subliminal messages, and generative algorithms. His visual art has been included in dOCUMENTA(13) and Greater New York, while his films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and CPH:DOX, among other venues. Recent exhibitions, screenings, and performances include The World Through AI, Jeu de Paume; 2019, Grazer Kunstverein; and Edge of Life, Palazzo Grassi and Lo Schermo dell'arte.
One of Menick’s earliest works, Giving Time, was exhibited in 2000 for the first Greater New York at MoMA PS1. For the exhibition, the artist constructed a wristwatch that runs on a 28-hour day. Members of the audience were invited to live on this extended time and speak with the artist about their experiences.
For dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012, Menick was commissioned to make Starring Sigmund Freud, a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s life as a fictional character in the cinema. Menick also exhibited a sound installation containing subliminal messages, as well as published a book of collected prose, A Report on the City, with Buchhandlung Walther König. The latter was selected by frieze magazine as one of the highlights of the year.
Menick’s other works include the 2023 film, autoextinction, narrated by three superintelligent machines; a filmed monologue from 2005 about "last person on Earth" films (The Secret Life of Things); and a two-channel video structured around supernatural domestic horror in cinema (Haunting, 2020). His earliest video, The Disappearance (2001-02), used the procedures of location scouting to investigate the post-war history of Nuremberg, Germany. In 2025, the Lo Schermo dell’arte film festival in Florence commissioned the artist to make a new performance, Edge of Life, addressing the possibility of digital resurrection. The performance was later restaged at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
On occasion, Menick has worked in collaboration with his partner, the artist Agnieszka Kurant, including on Production Line (2017), a series of plotter drawings made with the input of thousands of online “crowdworkers.” In 2013, he co-wrote Kurant’s film Cutaways, which restaged scenes with actors whose characters had been edited out of feature films. The film is currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Born in White Plains, New York, Menick studied fine art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After graduation, he was an early member of several New York art collectives including Nomads + Residents and 16 Beaver Group.
In addition to the venues listed above, his visual art and films have been exhibited and screened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Artists Space, New York, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Menick’s essays and stories have appeared in frieze, The Believer, Mousse Magazine, BOMB, Spike Art Quarterly, Art in America, and Witte de With Review, among other publications.
Menick has been awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received several commissions, including from Lo Schermo dell'arte in Florence and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in France.
Menick currently lives in New York City where he has taught as a visiting professor at the Cooper Union.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 18, 5:00pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL ROOM 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
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
