ABOUT THE ARTIST

Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines the intersections of architecture, community, and the environment through inventive visual storytelling. By merging physical and digital elements with both historical and speculative contexts, his practice offers critical reflections on existing systems while imagining alternative ways of relating to each other and the spaces we inhabit. His art has been exhibited at major institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, and Guggenheim Bilbao, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and SFMOMA.

In addition to an extensive exhibition history, he has spent over a decade creating large-scale public installations and was co-commissioned to design a monument to Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for New York City’s She Built NYC initiative. His distinctions include the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, the 2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, and two NYFA Fellowships. He has also been awarded residencies at MacDowell, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and he currently serves as the 2026 Brooklyn Botanic Garden Heidi Nitze Fellow.

ABOUT MAS CONTEXT

MAS Context shares ideas and facilitates discourse about urban design and the built environment. Deeply rooted in Chicago but with a global reach, MAS Context nurtures an inclusive community of creative thinkers across disciplines who are interested in the future of cities. Over the past seventeen years, MAS Context has collaborated with almost 1,000 architects, designers, artists, and writers across a variety of mediums and platforms in addition to its topic-based journal, including books, online publishing, public events, oral histories, exhibitions, and site-specific installations. These platforms allow for varying speeds, formats, engagements, audiences, and outcomes. All content is archived online and available for free.

ABOUT CHICAGO FILM ARCHIVES

Chicago Film Archives is a regional film archive dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving and providing access to films that represent the Midwest. These films include home movies and amateur films as well as works made by professional filmmakers. CFA’s purpose is to serve institutions and filmmakers of this region and elsewhere by establishing a repository for institutional and private film collections; serve a variety of cultural, academic and artistic communities by making the films available locally, nationally, and internationally for exhibition, research, and production; and serve our culture by restoring and preserving films that are rare or not in existence elsewhere.