The Block Museum

“An Arc and a Not-Straight Line”: Erica DiBenedetto on Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing [Video]

In May 2026, the Block Museum hosted an online conversation about Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #215 (1973). Erica DiBenedetto, curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a scholar of LeWitt's work, joined Block Academic Curator Corinne Granof to discuss the wall drawings as a practice: how they are made, why LeWitt began making them in 1968, and what's involved in making and viewing them....

"An Arc and a Not-Straight Line": Erica DiBenedetto on Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing [Video] In May 2026, the Block Museum hosted an online conversation about Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #215 (1973). Erica DiBenedetto, curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a scholar of LeWitt’s work, joined Block Academic Curator Corinne Granof to discuss the w...

An underseen, epic documentary by Sumiko Haneda makes its way to the Block Museum via a 16mm print from Japan as part of a small US tour this week. THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY (1982) invites viewers to inhabit the disappearing world of the farming communities around Mount Hayachine in northern Japan. Organized around the yearly kagura ritual in celebration of the mountain deity, the film intersperses captivating sequences of folk dance performances with passages of quiet observation and reflection upon the rapid transformations uprooting local economies and culture. Set against sweeping economic and social transformations, THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY attends closely to the granular details of the kagura’s dances, songs, and costumes, lending the film both humility and grandeur. Her camera venerating places where deep cultural memory infuse the landscape, offering dignified representations of traditional labor and astonishing images of the natural world.

Born in 1925, Haneda made her first documentary, Women’s College in the Village, in 1958. As one of few female members on the roster of documentary film company Iwanami Productions, her work has enjoyed less attention than that of colleagues and kindred spirits like Shinsuke Ogawa and Noriachi Tsuchimoto. Nonetheless, THE POEM OF THE HAYACHINE VALLEY is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in all of nonfiction cinema, a work of great musicality, visual vitality, intelligence, and empathy. Screening in a rare 16mm print from the Japan Foundation, THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY offers a revelation and an affirmation of documentary’s lyrical possibilities.

HAYACHINE NO FU (THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY, SUMIKO HANEDA, 1982, 186 min, 16mm courtesy of the Japan Foundation)

Thursday, May 14 at 6PM. Free and open to the public.