Exhibition as a Form of Attack: What Minerva Built

What Minerva Built explores the work of Minerva Parker Nichols (1862-1949), America’s first independent female architect, through the theme and mechanism of making an archive in the absence of one. Despite widespread interest in her work during her lifetime, and a laudatory obituary in the New York Times, Minerva’s life and work remain outside the mainstream histories of American architecture. Even in Philadelphia, the city that Minerva came to in 1876, and where she established her practice in 1888, one is hard pressed to find her mentioned in its architectural guidebooks or as the subject of discussion in classrooms. And yet, when she sat down at her drafting table, behind a door that read “Minerva Parker, Architect”, she had accomplished something no woman had done before.

With the support of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Weitzman School’s Architectural Archives, working in collaboration with scholar Molly Lester and architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella, is actively engaged in organizing an exhibition about Minerva scheduled to open in 2023. Join Lester and co-curator William Whitaker, for a lively discussion of Minerva, the project work to-date, and the idea of using an exhibition as a mechanism to address the blind spots in history, in collecting institutions, and in heritage work.

Molly Lester is the Associate Director of the Urban Heritage Project, based in the Weitzman School of Design's Graduate Program for Historic Preservation and PennPraxis. She joined PennPraxis in 2017 after three years of working as a freelance architectural historian and preservation planner for PennPraxis, the University of Pennsylvania, and other clients. Her portfolio includes research, documentation, and community engagement projects related to historic buildings and cultural landscapes, ranging from eighteenth-century historic sacred places to twentieth-century public golf courses.  Previously, she worked as a program director for Partners for Sacred Places, overseeing a national consulting and grantmaking program for historic congregations. She has also worked as an architectural historian and historic tax credit consultant for Heritage Consulting Group, advising on the rehabilitation of historic properties around the country.

Molly is a contributor to the Hidden City Daily in Philadelphia, a former co-chair of the Young Friends of the Preservation Alliance, and the founder of the InKind Baking Project. She holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architectural History from the University of Virginia.

William Whitaker is the curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Trained as an architect and architectural historian at the University of New Mexico and the University of Pennsylvania, Whitaker primarily works on documenting and interpreting Penn’s design collections, including holdings related to the of life and work of architect Louis I. Kahn and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, as well as that of the husband and wife design team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Whitaker is a curator, author, and lecturer on a wide range of subjects related to twentieth century architecture, landscape, and community design in the greater Philadelphia region, to audiences in the United States, Canada, Germany and India.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of this event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.