This fall, the Sam Fox Arts Center began construction of two buildings designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. When completed in 2006, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Earl E. and Myrtle E. Walker Hall will be integrated with the adjacent Bixby, Givens and Steinberg halls to form a state-of-the-art, five-building arts complex.
Yet already, “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 in the School of Architecture.
Next week, the center and its five founding partners — the schools of Art and Architecture, the Kemper Art Museum, the Art & Architecture Library and the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences — will launch a series of collaborative exhibitions and special events that together provide a glimpse of the future of visual art and design at the University.
On Sept. 30, the Kemper Art Museum (currently located in Steinberg Hall) will present The Washington University School of Art Faculty Show. The all-media exhibition, curated by Philip Slein, director of the School of Art’s Des Lee Gallery, will open with a reception from 5:30-7:30 p.m. and will remain on view through Dec. 5. (See accompanying story for more details.)
Also opening, 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 & archaeology, and students in her seminar “Caricature: The Art and Politics of Satire.”
The exhibition is drawn from a collection — given to the museum in Childs’ honor by Eric G. Carlson of New York — of more than 440 French caricatures. The show will include works by Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville, Philipon, Gil, Travies, Vernier, Beaumont and Le Petit, among others.
For museum hours or more information, call 935-4523.
On Oct. 1, the Fox Arts Center will present a “Festival of the Arts” from 5-7 p.m. on the grounds of Bixby, Givens and Steinberg. The festival will feature a wide range of arts activities as well as music and performances. Food and beverages will be available.
Highlights will include students erecting a freestanding lighthouse structure, and students and other volunteers painting the plywood fence surrounding the construction site.
Also opening Oct. 1 is The Rubber Frame: Culture and Comics, a pair of complimentary exhibitions (and accompanying book) tracing the evolution of comic books from early precursors in England and Switzerland to turn-of-the-last-century newspapers, the raucous undergrounds of the 1960s and ’70s and contemporary alternative comics.
The first of The Rubber Frame exhibitions, The Visual Language of Comics From the 18th Century to the Present, is curated by D.B. Dowd, professor of visual communications. It will open with a reception from 6-8 p.m. and will remain on view through Nov. 30 in Olin Library’s Grand Staircase Lobby and Special Collections.
The second show, American Underground and Alternative Comics, 1964-2004, is curated by 2002 alumnus M. Todd Hignite, editor of the award-winning Comic Art magazine. It will open with a reception from 7-9 p.m. and will remain on view through Oct. 30 in Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Ave.
Shuttle service will be available between the festival and The Rubber Frame exhibitions.
For more information about the festival, call 935-9347.
For more information about The Rubber Frame, call 935-5495 or 621-8537.
Subsequent Fox Arts Center events this semester will include a lecture on “Constructing the Ephemeral” by New York artist and sculptor James Carpenter (Oct. 20); and a talk on “Public Art and Social Sculpture” by German artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock (Nov. 4).