Fall 2020 Public Events

The urban environment is woven from many threads—ecology and geography, but also hidden social patterns. As both a landscape designer and public artist, Walter J. Hood creates ecologically sustainable environments that also tease out local histories and speak to the aspirations of marginalized communities.

This fall, the MacArthur “Genius” Fellow will discuss his practice—which encompasses city parks and museum grounds as well as traffic islands, vacant lots, freeway underpasses, and other neglected spaces—for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Titled Hybrid Landscapes, Hood’s September 26 talk is presented as part of the Sam Fox School’s fall Public Lecture Series and as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s “In Conversation” series. Other events will feature artist Jamal Cyrus and curator Stephanie Weissberg (October 7), illustrator and comics artist Eleanor Davis (October 22), Yale School of Architecture dean Deborah Berke (October 26), Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (November 14), and artist Mika Rottenberg (November 18).

Combined, the series will include 20 virtual presentations by nationally and internationally renowned speakers.

Events will begin September 12 with art historian Natilee Harren, assistant professor at the University of Houston School of Art, and Meredith Malone, associate curator for Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Their talk, which is also part of the “In Conversation” series, is held in conjunction with Multiplied: Edition MAT and the Transformable Work of Art, 1959–1965. The critically acclaimed exhibition opened last February but was forced to close for most of the spring and summer.

“In Conversation” will continue on September 29 with Geoff Ward, professor of African and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and curator of the Teaching Gallery exhibition Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice; on October 10 with art historian Alexander Alberro of Barnard College, joined by Malone and WashU’s Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences; on November 7 with the Sam Fox School’s Constance Vale and Shantel Blakely; and on November 14 with Rothberg. The latter talk is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity.

Architect Margarita Jover, co-founder of the Barcelona-based firm aldayjover architecture, will discuss strategies for mitigating and reversing socioecological crises, on October 12. Other architectural speakers will include Robert McCarter (October 15), Robert Kahn (November 16), Eric Mumford (December 3), and Blakely (December 7). Design and visual arts speakers will include Silas Munro (October 28), Corey Escoto (November 3), and Vanessa German (November 11).

In addition, the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design will host a pair of roundtables—about architectural history and academia, and about architectural history and diversity, respectively—as part of its “Discussions” series September 30 and October 28.

All events are free and open to the public and will be hosted online. RSVPs are required for individual lectures; links will be provided via the Sam Fox School website closer to the event dates.