Description:

The Block Museum exhibition, William Blake and the Age of Aquarius kicks off with an opening day  conversation between Northwestern University Professor of Art History and exhibition Curator, Stephen Eisenman and W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake scholar, editor of “Critical Inquiry” and Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago.

The illustrated discussion "Blake, Now and Then" will look comparatively at three periods in the reception of Blake: the first is his own time, when he was virtually unknown, a neglected outsider artist whose work could have easily disappeared except for a few devoted friends; the second is the period of modernism from the pre-Raphaelites to Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Bataille, and Joyce; the third is the “long 1960s,” starting with the Beat Generation and moving into the era of Marshall McLuhan, the rise of the New Left, the Hippies and counterculture. The conversation will conclude with the question of our own time: what is Blake’s relevance to our moment?

This conversation will be preceded by an all ages morning of printmaking and music William Blake and the Age of Aquarius: Block Museum "Be-In" from 10AM to 1PM.

Programming support provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art