History of Art and Architecture

The Spear Endowed Architecture Lecture

A co-sponsored, annual architectural lecture presented by the History of Art and Architecture and Visual Arts departments.

Spear Lecture 2024, Olalekan Jeyifous Artist Talk

Green field with futuristic building
Olalekan Jeyifous, Barotse Aerial, 2023.

November 13th, 6 pm, List 120

Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work re-imagines social spaces that examine the relationships between architecture, community, and the environment. He has exhibited at esteemed venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, where his artwork is featured in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design.

Olalekan was co-commissioned to design a monument for congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as part of the City of New York’s “She Built NYC” initiative and has garnered numerous awards, including the notable Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Additionally, he is a recipient of the 2021 Fellowship by the United States Artists and has been a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and completed artist residencies at the Bellagio Center, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program.

Register here.

 

Spear Lecture 2025, Thomas Phifer

Man in glasses wearing black shirt sits at a table in an all-white room

April 24th, 6 pm, location TBD

Thomas Phifer (b.1953) is an American architect based in New York City, and he will present the 2025 Spear Lecture.

 Phifer is perhaps best known for his design of the Glenstone      Museum expansion in Potomac, Maryland, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Corning Museum of Glass Contemporary Art + Design expansion, and the Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Register here.

  •  Location: TBD

    Thomas Phifer (b.1953) is an American architect based in New York City, and he will present the 2025 Spear Lecture.

    Phifer is perhaps best known for his design of the Glenstone Museum expansion in Potomac, Maryland, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Corning Museum of Glass Contemporary Art + Design expansion, and the Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

  •  Location: List Art BuildingRoom: 120

    The Departments of the History of Art & Architecture and Visual Art invite you to the 2024 Spear Endowed Architecture Lecture.

    Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work re-imagines social spaces that examine the relationships between architecture, community, and the environment. He has exhibited at esteemed venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, where his artwork is featured in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design.

    Olalekan was co-commissioned to design a monument for congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as part of the City of New York’s “She Built NYC” initiative and has garnered numerous awards, including the notable Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Additionally, he is a recipient of the 2021 Fellowship by the United States Artists and has been a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and completed artist residencies at the Bellagio Center, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program.

    Register here
  •  Location: List Art BuildingRoom: 120

    The 2023 Spear Endowed Architecture Lecture


    The Departments of Visual Art and The History of Art & Architecture are pleased to welcome Amira Osman to give the 2023 Spear Lecture.


    Amira Osman is a Sudanese/South African architect, researcher, academic, activist, public speaker, and author. She is a Professor of Architecture at the Tshwane University of Technology and holds the position of SARChI: DST/NRF/SACN Research Chair in Spatial Transformation (Positive Change in the Built Environment). Amira is a joint coordinator for the international CIB W104 Open Building Implementation network, Past President of the South African Institute of Architects (SAIA) and convenor of the conference series: A City is [Not] a Tree: the Urban Ecologies of Divided Cities launched in 2022. She is the director of PLATFORM 100, a think-/do-tank and collaborative vehicle for promoting change in conversations and practice around architecture, space and cities. Amira is a registered Professional Architect (SACAP 7267) and the editor of The Built Environment in Emerging Economies (BEinEE) Book Series. Amira has extensive experience curating international events, coordinating complex programmes and exhibitions in terms of design, conceptualising content and managing diverse teams. Despite having lived and worked in Southern Africa for over 26 years, her links with the Sudan, and Khartoum specifically, remained strong throughout. Her doctoral study, completed in 2004 at the University of Pretoria, was titled Space, place and meaning in Northern Riverain Sudan. She first started her training as an architect at her father’s practice in Khartoum and is currently completing his archives. She has continued to speak on, study and write about the Sudan over the years. 

     

    RSVP is strongly encouraged, but not required.

  •  Location: List Art BuildingRoom: 120

    Despina Stratigakos is a writer, historian, and professor.

    Her research explores how power and ideology function in architecture, whether in the creation of domestic spaces or of world empires. She is the author of four books. Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020), winner of the Society of Architectural Historians 2022 Spiro Kostof Book Prize, examines how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to construct a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II. Where Are the Women Architects? (2016), confronts the challenges women face in the architectural profession. Hitler at Home (2015) investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), which traces the history of a forgotten female metropolis, won the 2009 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize. Stratigakos has served as UB Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence and on the Board of Directors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, Society of Architectural Historians, International Archive of Women in Architecture, and Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. She also participated on Buffalo’s municipal task force for Diversity in Architecture and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy and academic excellence. She received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. During the 2016-17 academic year, she was in residence as a member of the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton.

  •  Location: List Art BuildingRoom: 120

    Cultural historian, architectural designer, and curator, Mabel O. Wilson teaches Architecture and Black Studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? —an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. She is the co-host of the podcast Black Lives in the Era of COVID 19, a close look at the impact of the virus on New York City communities. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).