Constantly changing shows
The museum was founded in 1980 as the Block Gallery to house art exhibitions. Though the founders did not expect to form a collection, every department at Northwestern gave its art holdings to the Block soon after the doors opened.

"Suddenly we had a collection," says Mickenberg. "Since it was mostly works on paper, we collected that. Now we have roughly 4,000 pieces dating from Dürer to the present day -- and about 1,000 more coming."

The Block achieved museum status in 1998 and took its present name. By then, Mickenberg had already prepared an expansion plan. "We wanted to complement, not duplicate, what is available at other regional art museums," he says. The new Block will collect works on paper, house traveling shows, exhibit faculty and student work in all media and serve the university and surrounding community as a teaching museum.

On its second floor, the Block has a 3,600-square-foot main gallery for traveling exhibitions. It also has a library; a smaller classroom gallery equipped for sound and digital art; and a study center for prints, drawings and photography with the permanent collection in open storage.

The first floor has a 1,300 square-foot exhibition gallery and a 160-seat auditorium equipped to show film and online art. "Our space is technologically up-to-date," says Mickenberg.

Built straight up
The Block hired architects Lohan Associates to design the expanded museum. "The job took about three years," says project architect Thomas Demetrion. "We did six different designs. The final one is a hybrid."

The museum is part of a crowded arts complex on the Northwestern campus that includes a 1,000-seat concert hall, a smaller concert auditorium and four theaters. "The Block had to harmonize visually with these structures, so we built straight up from its foundations," says Demetrion. "We added glass on the second floor to lighten the structure."

The Block's basement contains mechanical equipment that serves all buildings in the complex. The machinery had to run during construction, so it was impossible to dig. "To make the second floor structurally sound, we used micropiles," Demetrion explains. "They are clusters of pipe, which were pneumatically driven into the soil, filled with concrete and capped. Placement depended on loading. Building columns went on top of the micropiles."

The main gallery has flexible lighting and temporary walls that can be rearranged to accommodate a variety of exhibition layouts and installations. Lighting levels are low for the current drawing exhibition, but the window shades can be raised to admit natural light when sculpture is shown.

Another kind of language
The Block opened its main gallery with "Drawing is Another Kind of Language: Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection," a touring exhibition of more than 100 works, mostly by Minimalist and Conceptual artists. The show includes big names -- Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns -- and small -- Ann Ledy, Fred Sandback, Serge Spitzer and many more.

The drawings are formal and spare. These artists are concerned with visual questions -- human perception and experiences of seeing. But they put so little on the paper -- often just a line or two -- that the work must be explained to us. It's no wonder that art critics love Minimalism.

The most rewarding drawings in the show -- Untitled (1963-64) by Eva Hesse, Aspiration (1960) by Agnes Martin and Masking Drawing No. 20 (1983-86) by Brice Marden -- are intensely human. Marden made Masking Drawing for a stained glass window commission that he never completed. Bright and colorful, it shows a little-known side of this artist.

Less can be more
David Paul Lasry's Untitled (1991) is an invigorating triptych of abstract ink drawings in shades of white and brown with hints of orange. Lasry's forms are simple enough -- small dark rectangles atop larger, paler ones -- but the artist layers the ink under tight control to create deep, active color fields. This is Minimalism at its best -- and bravura drawing.

Robert Ryman's Untitled (1961) also shows how less can be more. We see the artist's familiar square with a penciled grid behind it and nervous calligraphic markings within. Covering the square is an active, transparent layer of white gouache. A vertical band of pencil destabilizes the image, tilting it to the left. Using simple means, the artist creates a tiny world.

One of the few narrative works in the show is Lawrence Weiner's Serpent Mounds, Ohio (1984). Inspired by a light aircraft flight over the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, it addresses a special concern of the artist -- how people add or subtract mass to change the earth's surface.

The unnamed individual who formed this drawing collection likes to buy from the studio and purchases preparatory drawings for works that are executed later in other media. An intriguing example of this is Barnett Newman's untitled 1946 ink on paper drawing -- long black vertical stripes on a white background -- that anticipates the Abstract Expressionist paintings he made after 1948.

Dan Devening's Windowwall
"SEEMS," one of the opening shows at the Block, was organized by the artist Dan Devening. He calls it a "subversively integrated installation of wallworks, sculptures, furniture and architectural interventions." His goal, he writes, is to "to exert a level of influence upon, and direct attention to aspects of the museum space [that are] typically ignored or bypassed during traditional exhibitions."

We see works by six artists in odd corners of the museum. Christine Tarkowski affixes site-specific wallpaper with a stacked firewood design on the side walls of the Block's wheelchair-accessible ramp. The Good Studio (Janice Clark + Dino Stoneking) mounts a small red plastic grocery-store coupon dispenser near the auditorium door. Instead of real coupons, visitors get slips of paper with colorful designs.

Devening's Windowwall is an 11 foot wide, 12 foot tall gridded mural made from 55 sheets of vellum that have been painted in subdued color to "suggest glass filtering cool exterior light," the artist states. Cool, fresh and beautiful, Windowwall responds to the Block's glass and steel façade and its location within sight of Lake Michigan. Stylized rain droplets "punched into the panels appear and disappear in varying patterns, depending on the humidity," says the artist.

A master class
In its study center, the Block has "Self-Portraits of Lovis Corinth," a truly superb show that amounts to a master class in drawing and printmaking technique. The 14 self-portraits, which date from 1904 to 1925, are chosen from a larger group that was given to the Block in 1999.

Judy Ledgerwood, a painter who teaches at Northwestern, plans to spend a lot of time in the Study Center. "I want to take the artwork out of drawers and look at it," she says. "Looking at art has been very important to my development as an artist. My students should have those experiences."