Pride Month: Curators' Tour of Fantasizing Design

Join curators Stephen Vider and M.C. Overholt for a special LGBTQ+ Pride Month tour of Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture. Curators will explore Birkby’s life and career as a lens on lesbian, feminist, and queer liberation.

Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture (open through September 2, 2025) traces the life, work, and networks of lesbian feminist architect Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994), who pushed design professionals and the public to imagine a built environment beyond the confines of existing male-dominated forms. Inspired by the women’s movement and gay liberation, she joined one of the first lesbian feminist consciousness-raising groups, staged a feminist building occupation, and co-founded the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Her most groundbreaking intervention, however, was a series of workshops that encouraged women to imagine and draw their “fantasy environments”—the home and community spaces they would like to inhabit. Fantasizing Design takes Birkby and her circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators as a lens on the broader ways feminists and lesbian feminists have worked to remake architectural practice, domestic space, and the broader built environment.

Speakers:
Stephen Vider, co-curator, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture
M.C. Overholt, co-curator, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture

About the Speakers:
Stephen Vider is associate professor of history and co-director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College. His first book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Chicago Press, 2021), received honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American studies and was one of six finalists for the Huntington Library’s 2023 Shapiro Prize for outstanding first scholarly book in American history. In 2017, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism for the Museum of the City of New York. He was also co-curator of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York (Museum of the City of New York, 2016–17) and co-author of the accompanying book.

M.C. Overholt is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a graduate of the Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) program at the Yale School of Architecture. Her scholarly work—which has appeared in venues including Public Culture, Platform, and the forthcoming collection In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory (edited by S.E. Eisterer)—uses queer and feminist-of-color analytical frameworks to reread interlocking histories of modern architecture and the sciences. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Visiting Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College, and a co-editor of Perspecta 57, the oldest student-edited architectural journal in the United States.