Good afternoon and welcome back to another Thursday roundup. Dispatches from Madame Architect, reorganizing the Seattle Art Museum, and virtual architecture exhibitions are all on the docket for today.

Here’s what you need to know:

Madame Architect hits 250 interviews with women transforming architecture

Founded in 2018 by Julia Gamolina, Madame Architect has since grown to include a full advisory board and a critic (AN’s own Kate Mazade). Now, the outlet, which is focused on interviewing the women in, around, and making changes in the world of architecture, has announced that it’s hit a 250-profile milestone. Read interviews with Neri Oxman, Frida Escobedo, former AN associate editor Sydney Franklin, AN president and co-founder Diana Darling, and many more.

The V&A Museum teams with Make Architects to stage a virtual exhibition

At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the new Perfect Spaces: Paintings by Ben Johnson show is showing the artist’s architectural paintings in a whole new way: virtually. The museum has teamed with the multinational Make Architects for a digital recreation of the V&A (accessible here), and Ben Johnson’s paintings will be available to view across 12 virtual pavilions, erected in a facsimile of the museum’s John Madejski Garden. The retrospective opened yesterday, June 16, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

A 1,100-foot-tall tower is proposed for West 57th Street in Manhattan

Another toothpick-like tower is set to rise on Billionaires’ Row in Manhattan, already home to a number of super slender supertall towers filled with exorbitantly priced condo units (and potentially the world’s largest NFT museum). Now, plans for another tower, this one likely to hit 1,100 feet tall, have reportedly appeared at the NYC Department of Buildings. If built as proposed, the mixed-use, 63-story tower would hold 119 residential units, a 158 key hotel, and space for retail and restaurants. Funnily enough, the address is the same one that Mark Foster Gage Architects proposed to build its 102-story Art Deco tower in 2015, clad in multiple eagles, terraces, and limestone reliefs throughout. While no architect has been announced for the project yet, it’s unlikely that “The Khaleesi” tower will be the one built.

H/t to New York YIMBY

The Seattle Art Museum is overhauling its American art galleries

Following the example of other art museums across the country, the Seattle Art Museum is embarking on a major overhaul of its American art galleries to broaden the diversity of the work shown therein. Thanks in-part to a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the museum will undergo a two-year expansion and has tapped curators Inye Wokoma, Nicholas Galanin, and Wendy Red Star to both put more diverse work on display but to also contextualize the extant collection.

H/t to The Seattle Times

An Alabama nonprofit receives a $250,000 grant to build a quilting museum

A nonprofit based out of Alberta, Alabama, the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, has received a $250,000 grant from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership to establish a new museum to memorialize the group’s past. Originally established in 1966, the original Freedom Quilting Bee group was created to help Black women in the South create a source of secure, independent income. As the group grew, so did its commissions and the recognition of its work, but the collective fell apart in the 1990s. Now, that grant will be used to restore the group’s original headquarters and preserve its legacy.

H/t to Hyperallergic

A Hispanic group in Santa Fe sues the mayor over a monument’s toppling

The Union Protectíva de Santa Fé is reportedly suing the mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, over protests last year that left a 152-year-old obelisk destroyed. The Soldier’s Memorial obelisk was damaged during protests over racial injustice last summer; the stone monument was a memorial to the Hispanic Union troops who lost their lives fighting both the Confederacy and Indigenous Americans. Now, Mayor Alan Webber plans on removing what remains of the obelisk, and the group is suing to stop that from happening.

H/t to the Houston Chronicle