Author: Liam Otten

It was a night of glitz and glamour, as an audience of more than 200 gathered in Plaza Frontenac April 29, for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ 83rd annual Fashion Design Show. Titled Leaving a Legacy, the show was coordinated by Jennifer Ingram, the W. H. Smith Visiting Assistant Professor of Fashion, and featured dozens of students wearing scores of outfits by the Fashion Design Program’s nine seniors and ten juniors.

Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present its annual MFA Thesis Exhibition in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum May 4 to Aug. 6. Curated by Meredith Malone, associate curator at the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition will feature projects by 23 graduating master of fine arts candidates in the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art.

During World War II, young lieutenant Frederick Hartt was assigned a jeep and a driver and charged with locating, securing and repatriating hundreds of works of art. Later, as a curator at Washington University from 1949-60, the famed Renaissance scholar helped to build one of the nation’s finest university collections of 20th-century modernism. This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present 27 of those works in Frederick Hartt and American Abstraction in the 1950s.

Covered in both graffiti and secrets, a simple brick wall alternates between playground and refuge from the world. On Saturday, May 5, Montreal’s Dynamo Theatre will return to St. Louis with Mur-Mur (The Wall), an acrobatic exploration of friendship and young love, as part of Edison’s ovations for young people series.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis honored seven outstanding architecture and art alumni at its fifth annual Awards for Distinction dinner April 26. The awards recognized graduates who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership and vision through their contributions to the practices of art, architecture and design, as well as to Washington University and the Sam Fox School. In addition, architect Juhani Pallasmaa of Helsinki, Finland, received the Dean’s Medal.

Take three parts standard operatic repertoire, add two contemporary masterpieces, one not-so-standard bel canto and a dash of musical theater. The result is Opera Scenes, the semester-end program by Washington University Opera. This year’s performances, directed Tim Ocel, will take place at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, April 24 and 26, in the Ballroom Theatre of the 560 Music Center.

As a Washington University undergraduate, Aimee Lagos tutored kids from East St. Louis and later interned with a neighborhood stabilization project. Now a film director based in Los Angeles, Lagos will return to campus Monday, April 23, for a free screening of 96 Minutes, her feature-length debut. Inspired by true events, the film portrays four teenagers from two different worlds — until those worlds collide in the course of a carjacking.

Ah, spring. The rains rain, the flowers bloom, and the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences presents its annual Chancellor’s Concert. The performance — which takes place Sunday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center — is among the largest-scaled of the year, featuring well over 100 musicians from the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and the Washington University Choirs.

It is a moment of rising inequality. The widening gap between aristocratic haves and discontented have-nots threatens to replace the social contract with a powder keg. As You Like It is among Shakespeare’s most popular works, but it is more than just a pastoral romance. So says Annamaria Pileggi, senior lecturer in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, who will direct the show April 20-29 in Edison Theatre.

In his latest book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012), sociologist Richard Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. On Wednesday, April 18, Sennett will lecture on “The Architecture of Cooperation” for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.