Minneapolis has a joyful new reason to look at the Mississippi River with fresh eyes. At the Walker Art Center, “Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies” turns the great river into a living archive of memory, ecology and imagination — and it marks the first solo museum exhibition for the celebrated artist, architect and designer.
Jeyifous, born in Nigeria in 1977 and based in the United States, imagines an archive of remnants surfaced from a speculative river enclave. The enclave grows out of the histories of the Mississippi, yet sits outside fixed time — neither utopian nor dystopian, simply full of possibility. Along the way, the artist brings African diasporic cosmologies together with Indigenous water knowledge in a warm meditation on how waterways and people shape each other.
Instead of one single story, the show unfolds in short, linked passages for visitors to follow at their own pace. Milled-wood reliefs tell stories of environmental connection and material extraction, carved sculptures suggest a belief system born of Yorùbá, Dakota and Ojibwe contact, and nets and bindings evoke both the nourishing gifts of river life and its histories of labor. Water and song wash through the galleries, with the hum of machinery never far away — fragments gathered, as rivers do, by flow, accumulation and return, from the Niger to the Mississippi.
The exhibition, curated by Taylor Jasper, the Walker’s Susan and Rob White Associate Curator of Visual Arts, is on view in the Burnet Gallery through January 3, 2027, at the Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place. The Walker is open Wednesday and Friday–Sunday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Thursday 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Gallery admission is free every Thursday night from 5 to 9 p.m. and on the first Saturday of the month, and visitors under 18 are always free — a lovely invitation to wander in and let the river carry you.
Photo: Eric Mueller, courtesy Walker Art Center
