Elisa Silva
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Elisa Silva | Informal Cities Workshop Kickoff Lecture
Elisa Silva will deliver the 2024 Informal Cities Workshop Kickoff Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
Silva is principal and founder of Enlace Arquitectura, a professional practice in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture and Enlace Foundation, an NGO that promotes cultural and educational programs of social inclusion and participatory design collaborations. Enlace’s work has been recognized in the XI and VII BIAU awards, Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, the Biennale di Venezia, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Arc en Rêve.
About Elisa Silva
Elisa Silva is an American-Venezuelan architect, with a Master of Architecture from Harvard University. She has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy, the Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard, Graham Foundation Grants in 2017 and 2021 and the Lucas Artist Fellowship. She is co-author of CABA: Cartography of the Caracas barrios (2014) and author of Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements (Actar, 2020).
She is an associate professor at Florida International University, lecturer at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University, the University of Toronto, the Simón Bolívar University, and the Central University in Venezuela.
Recording
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series