Justin Beal will presents his 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.

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.

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.