Brigitte Shim: Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture
Brigitte Shim will deliver the Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Brigitte Shim
Brigitte Shim was born in Kingston, Jamaica and lives in Toronto, Canada. She studied architecture and environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1994, Shim and her partner, A. Howard Sutcliffe, founded Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto. Their design practice explores the integration and interrelated scales of architecture, landscape, furniture, and fittings. Shim-Sutcliffe has realized built work in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia, focusing on placemaking.
To date, Shim and Sutcliffe have received sixteen Governor General’s Medals for Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada along with an American Institute of Architects National Honor Award and many other professional accolades for their built work. In 2013, Shim and Sutcliffe were awarded the Order of Canada, for their contributions as architects designing sophisticated structures that represent the best of Canadian design to the world. In 2021, they were awarded the RAIC Gold Medal for their tireless commitment to advocacy, teaching, and mentoring along with their commitment to craft, tectonics, site, and ecology in their built work and its lasting impact on Canadian architecture.
Shim is a faculty member at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. She was the 2022 Norman Foster Visiting Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and has been a visiting chair and lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Cooper Union’s Chanin School of Architecture, the University of Auckland, and others. She has served on numerous international, national, and local design juries as an unwavering advocate for design excellence.
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman