Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan ‘LEk’ Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.
He has received a number of grants for his artwork such as a fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Brooklyn Arts Council. He has recently completed artist residencies with the Headlands Center for the Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program, and he was a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.
In addition to his extensive exhibition history, he has spent over a decade creating large-scale artwork for a variety of public spaces. He created award-winning installations for Starbucks located in the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn and their Flagship store located in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. Most recently, he has completed commissions for the Durham SmART Vision Plan, a 50ft-tall sculpture for the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
LEk designed Protest, an installation series orginally created as part of LANDFORM that is now permanently installed outside of the Cleveland Public Library Langston Hughes Branch. LEk was inspired by the history of protest, peace rallies, and civic gatherings that have taken place in Public Square and wanted to acknowledge this tradition through large-scale characters engaged in various forms of that practice.
