The Sam Fox Arts Center at Washington University in St. Louis will present its first annual Festival of the Arts from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 1.
The event, which will feature a variety of student-led arts activities, is free and open to the public and takes place on the grounds of Bixby, Givens and Steinberg halls, located adjacent to one another near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Food and beverages will be available. For more information, call (314) 935-9347.
The Festival of the Arts will spotlight the site of two new Sam Fox Arts Center buildings — The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Earl E. and Myrtle E. Walker Hall — both of which begin construction this fall. When completed in 2006, the buildings, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, will be integrated with the neighboring Bixby, Givens and Steinberg to form a comprehensive five-building “arts campus.”
Yet parallel to new construction, “The Sam Fox Arts Center is moving to initiate a growing program of public lectures and symposia, of exhibitions and reviews of work, and of collaborative coursework and curricula,” said Peter MacKeith, associate director of the Fox Arts Center and associate dean of Architecture. The festival, he explained, will begin to introduce both the campus and the surrounding community “to the idea and the reality of the Sam Fox Arts Center and its emerging activities, programs and events.”
WHO: Sam Fox Arts Center at Washington University in St. Louis WHAT: First annual Sam Fox Arts Center Festival of the Arts WHEN: 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 1 WHERE: Grounds of Bixby, Steinberg Hall and Givens halls, located adjacent to one another at the intersection Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. COST: Free and open to the public INFORMATION: (314) 935-9347 |
Activities at the festival will include students erecting a freestanding lighthouse; students and other volunteers painting the plywood fence surrounding the construction site; and a variety of music and performances.
In addition, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will feature The Washington University School of Art Faculty Show, curated by Philip Slein, director of the School of Art’s Des Lee Gallery. Also on view, in the lower-level Teaching Gallery, will be Human Comedies: 19th-Century French Caricature, organized by Elizabeth Childs, Ph.D., associate professor of art history and archaeology in Arts & Sciences, and students in her seminar “Caricature: The Art and Politics of Satire.”
Shuttle service will be available between the festival and a pair of simultaneous exhibition openings: The Rubber Frame: The Visual Language of Comics from the 18th Century to the Present, at Washington University’s Olin Library; and The Rubber Frame: American Underground and Alternative Comics, 1964-2004, at the Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Ave.
The Sam Fox Arts Center
The Sam Fox Arts Center is a campus-wide umbrella organization committed to furthering critical thinking and visual literacy within the larger St. Louis community. It will link Washington University’s three visual arts and design academic units — the School of Architecture, School of Art and Department of Art History & Archaeology — with the university’s Art & Architecture Library and nationally recognized Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (formerly Gallery of Art). This integration will produce new opportunities for research, interdisciplinary study and teaching in the visual arts and design.