First solo museum exhibition by Olalekan Jeyifous, with milled-wood reliefs, carved sculptures and video works that treat the Mississippi River as a site of memory.
Olalekan Jeyifous is showing Hydricosmic Litanies at The Walker Art Center, his first solo museum exhibition. It's running in Gallery C/Burnet through January 3, 2027, and it treats the Mississippi River as a site and symbol of memory, transformation, and human intervention.
Jeyifous (US, b. Nigeria, 1977) draws on Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road to build the show, melding African diasporic cosmologies with Indigenous water knowledge. He frames the river as a keeper of ecological, spiritual, and industrial memory, and the exhibition unfolds across short, linked passages rather than as one big room. You'll find milled-wood reliefs and carved sculptures rooted in Yorùbá, Dakota, and Ojibwe contact, alongside nets and bindings that evoke river life and its histories of labor and enslavement.
It's not just sculpture, either. The show includes videos with flickering effects and sounds that shift in pitch and volume, so it's as much about what you hear as what you see. The whole thing was curated by Taylor Jasper and Susan and Rob White.
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If you're planning a visit, the gallery is open 10 AM to 5 PM daily. The exhibition opened with a community event on Thursday, August 6, and runs through January 3, 2027, at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Date
18 October – 3 January
Recommended Age
+14 years
