Brigitte Shim: Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture
Brigitte Shim will deliver the Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Brigitte Shim
Brigitte Shim was born in Kingston, Jamaica and lives in Toronto, Canada. She studied architecture and environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1994, Shim and her partner, A. Howard Sutcliffe, founded Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto. Their design practice explores the integration and interrelated scales of architecture, landscape, furniture, and fittings. Shim-Sutcliffe has realized built work in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia, focusing on placemaking.
To date, Shim and Sutcliffe have received sixteen Governor General’s Medals for Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada along with an American Institute of Architects National Honor Award and many other professional accolades for their built work. In 2013, Shim and Sutcliffe were awarded the Order of Canada, for their contributions as architects designing sophisticated structures that represent the best of Canadian design to the world. In 2021, they were awarded the RAIC Gold Medal for their tireless commitment to advocacy, teaching, and mentoring along with their commitment to craft, tectonics, site, and ecology in their built work and its lasting impact on Canadian architecture.
Shim is a faculty member at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. She was the 2022 Norman Foster Visiting Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and has been a visiting chair and lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Cooper Union’s Chanin School of Architecture, the University of Auckland, and others. She has served on numerous international, national, and local design juries as an unwavering advocate for design excellence.
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.