Aaron Betsky: Harris Armstrong Fund Lecture
Aaron Betsky will deliver the Harris Armstrong Fund Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Aaron Betsky
Aaron Betsky is a critic and teacher in Philadelphia. Previously, he was professor and director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech and, prior to that, president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of more than twenty books on those subjects. He writes a weekly blog, “Beyond Buildings,” for Architect Magazine. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky has served as the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2008, he directed the Venice Biennale of Architecture. His latest books are “The Monster Leviathan,” “Don’t Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse,” “Fifty Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Making It Modern,” and “Architecture Matters.”
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series