Justin Beal to Present 'Sandfuture' Lecture for Fay Jones School Jan. 24

Balthazar Korab

Minoru Yamasaki and assistant with a model of the World Trade Center, circa 1969. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Justin Beal will present a lecture at 4 p.m., Monday, Jan. 24, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. The lecture will also be available to watch live via Zoom.

Beal is an artist with an extensive exhibition history in the United States and Europe.

The Fay Jones School's spring lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism.

Registration for the online version of the lecture is available on Zoom.

In his lecture, "Sandfuture," Beal will discuss his recently published book, Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021). The book looks at the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. Among his projects, Yamasaki designed the original World Trade Center in New York in the 1960s.

Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture's role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster.

From the central thread of Yamasaki's life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built.

Beal graduated from Yale University with a degree in architecture and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the University of Southern California.

His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America and the Los Angeles Times, and it is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Beal teaches at Hunter College in New York City. Sandfuture is his first book.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is open to the public. Admission is free, with limited seating. For details on watching the lecture online, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire online lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.