Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Mary and Leigh Block Museum
Janet Dees has been the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Northwestern’s Block Museum since 2015 and has affiliations with the Department of Art History and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Trained as an historian of American art, Dees has worked in the arts for over 20 years and has organized numerous exhibitions and produced new commissions with a wide range of contemporary artists. Her research and curatorial commitments include the work of African American and Native American artists; the depiction of African Americans in U.S. visual culture; the ways in which contemporary artists engage with history, collaboration in the making of exhibitions, and mentorship.
Dees has held education and curatorial roles at SITE Santa Fe, New York African Burial Ground Project, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art at the University of Delaware, among others. Since coming to The Block, Dees has curated several exhibitions including Hank Willis Thomas: Unbranded (2018); Carrie Mae Weems: Ritual and Revolution (2017); and If You Remember, I’ll Remember (2017). A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, will open at the Block in January 2022. This exhibition explores how art has been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-Black violence in the U.S. in the period between the rise of anti-lynching activism at the turn of the 20th c. and the founding of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and how art history can help inform our understanding of the deep roots of racial violence.