On 6 August, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center marked the opening of Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies with a free community evening and a conversation between the artist and curator Taylor Jasper. The museum’s calendar now records the event as having passed, confirming that the opening took place rather than remaining a scheduled announcement. The exhibition, Jeyifous’s first solo museum presentation, runs until 3 January 2027.
Hydricosmic Litanies builds a speculative archive around the Mississippi River. Jeyifous imagines remnants from a riverine enclave shaped by ecological change, industrial systems, migration and memory. The installation does not describe a perfect future or a ruined one. Instead, it gathers evidence of a society continually adapting to water, an approach that connects the river’s material history to questions of power and survival.
Created specifically for the Walker, the exhibition combines milled-wood reliefs, carved sculptures, digital imagery, experimental video and sound. Nets, bindings and machine noise evoke the river as both a source of nourishment and a channel for extraction and labour. The official exhibition page says the project also brings African diasporic cosmologies into dialogue with Dakota and Ojibwe knowledge of water, while linking the Niger and Mississippi as living archives rather than neutral scenery.
The opening is a significant institutional milestone for the Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based artist and trained architect. Jeyifous received the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale for ACE/AAP, a speculative project that reimagined African infrastructure after successful decolonisation. His practice repeatedly uses architecture as a language for examining who controls space, whose histories remain visible and how communities might construct more equitable futures.
A recent Wallpaper* profile placed the Walker commission within Jeyifous’s broader idea of “protopias”: worlds that remain unfinished and open to correction. In Hydricosmic Litanies, that method becomes especially local. Minneapolis’s relationship with the Mississippi is treated not as background but as a social, ecological and spiritual system. Highways, displaced Black neighbourhoods, aquaculture and imagined artefacts are brought into the same field of inquiry.
That combination gives the exhibition relevance beyond a conventional museum debut. It asks how cultural memory accumulates in landscapes altered by commerce and engineering, and whether speculation can recover possibilities erased by official histories. The community opening, offered free with ASL interpretation, also framed those questions as a public conversation rather than a closed curatorial statement.
Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies is on view in Gallery C/Burnet at the Walker Art Center through 3 January 2027. The opening on 6 August places the exhibition in Yesterday in Art, while its continuing public run also makes it an Art Exhibition.
Featured image: exterior of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, photographed by Paul VanDerWerf on 12 August 2024. Contextual illustration, not a view of Hydricosmic Litanies. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0. No modifications other than automatic WordPress resizing.
