An Evening with Olalekan Jeyifous and Gudrun Lock

Olalekan Jeyifous and Gudrun Lock are sitting down for a conversation at the Walker Art Center on Thursday, October 22. It's part of the museum's Talks and Lectures series and one of its Free Thursday Nights, so it's an easy one to drop into if you're around that evening.

Jeyifous is a US artist born in Nigeria in 1977, and this is his first solo museum exhibition. The show, Hydricosmic Litanies, runs from August 6, 2026, to January 3, 2027, at the Walker. He takes the Mississippi River as his starting point and pulls in Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road to imagine an archive of remnants from a speculative river enclave—one that grows out of the river's histories but exists outside of fixed time, blending African diasporic cosmologies with Indigenous water knowledge. The exhibition unfolds across short, linked passages: milled-wood reliefs, carved sculptures rooted in Yorùbá, Dakota, and Ojibwe contact, and nets and bindings that bring to mind river life alongside its histories of labor and enslavement.

That's the context for the talk. Jeyifous will be joined by artist and educator Gudrun Lock, and the two will talk through the intersections of architecture, engineering, and site-responsive art. They'll look at how their practices draw from built environments, material systems, and the histories and communities embedded in place. If you've spent any time with the exhibition, it's a good chance to hear the thinking behind the work directly from the artist.

The conversation happens in the Cargill Lounge at 7 PM. It's free and no ticket is required, so you can just show up.