Author: Liam Otten

As a young child, Josef Albers watched his handyman father paint houses. He grew up to become a famous artist, studying color and reducing images to their simplest shapes. On March 31, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host its spring Community Day, a free afternoon of all-ages activities. Events will include tours, performances, art-making and a reading from the children’s book An Eye for Color: The Story of Josef Albers.

Playwright, actor and theater scholar Ashley Lucas, PhD, assistant professor of dramatic art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will speak on “Prisoners, Families and Performance: Community Engagement Through the Arts” at 4 p.m. Monday, March 26 in Eliot Hall. Lucas is the 2012 Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship Speaker.

Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist. Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning. Annabel is desperate to pursue the indulgences of ordinary American life. Misfit and motherless, these three teenage girls traverse a surreal desert landscape of eccentric characters, air-conditioning and darkly illuminating signs and portents. Welcome to The Quick and the Dead, the fourth novel by acclaimed fiction writer Joy Williams, who will read from her work March 21 for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

“The truth is puddles of predictability. This is going to have music and dancing and people dying, and it’s going to be amazing.” So observes Lilly, a 14-year-old novelist whose latest story may or may not be based on her own recently deceased mother. But the line could well serve as a statement-of-purpose for Camden & Lilly, the new play by Carter Lewis, which will receive its world premiere later this month at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The goal of our work is to create parks that are intrinsically urban — not places to escape from the city, but places to escape within the city.” So observes landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, currently leading the design team charged with reimagining the 91-acre park surrounding St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch. On March 19, Van Valkenburgh will discuss his work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ spring Public Lecture Series.

A lone tenor takes the stage. Her voice is hushed and plaintive over a pair of drums but quickly grows full and strong as she’s joined by a score of fellow singers. The song is Jesu Ngowethu, a traditional Zulu spiritual, and it marks the beginning of African Grace, the new program by Soweto Gospel Choir. On March 23, the Grammy Award-winning ensemble will return to Washington University as part of the Edison Ovations Series.

Wang Shu, the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, discusses his work with WUSTL architectural historians Robert McCarter, the Sam Fox School’s Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, and Seng Kuan, assistant professor of architecture.

Distinguished architectural historian and critic Robert Bruegmann, author of The Architecture of Harry Weese (2010), Sprawl: A Compact History (2005) and The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chicago 1880-1918 (1997), will deliver the annual AIA St. Louis Scholarship Trust Lecture for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 7.

“Someone at Washington University in St. Louis just hit the lecture jackpot.” So quipped Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s influential architecture critic. On Monday, Feb. 27, just two days before his scheduled talk for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, architect Wang Shu became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, generally considered the profession’s highest honor.

Art may be subjective, but it is not entirely so. Aesthetic interest also can be understood in terms of a work’s power to engage cognitive and perceptual systems common to all human brains. This is the central premise of neuroaesthetics, an emerging field that draws on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to explore questions relating to beauty, artistic expression and art history. It is also the premise behind Art and the Mind-Brain, now on view in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Teaching Gallery.