Author: Liam Otten

Susan T. Morgan, AIA, LEED AP, is a senior project architect with Bruner/Cott & Associates, a Cambridge-based design firm focused on architectural preservation, sustainability, and collaborative design. Born into a family of architects in Minnesota, Morgan earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, magna cum laude, from Washington University in 2001 and a Master of […]

Ebony G. Patterson is a mixed-media artist who frequently investigates issues of culture, identity, gender, and the female body in her work. She also is an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the University of Kentucky. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Patterson earned an Honors Diploma in Painting from Edna Manley College of the Visual […]

A husband goes missing. A celebrated writer fights to form words. Two young men embark on a pharmaceutically enhanced museum tour while a shell-shocked veteran wanders the streets. Welcome to Chris Kammerer’s The Stroke Scriptures, winner of Washington University’s biennial A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, which will receive its world premiere in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.  

The Washington University Opera Workshop will perform excerpts from five beloved operas at 8 p.m. Friday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center Ballroom. The program will highlight comedy and romance with scenes from works by Gaetano Donizetti, Benjamin Britten, Otto Nicolai and Leo Delibes. 

In the beginning was the fig leaf. The first garment. Eden couture. “Our students always start with a leaf-inspired project because that is the beginning of fashion,” quips Jeigh Singleton, director of the Fashion Design program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. “It is the original inspiration for color, line, shape, structure, texture — all the things that we think of when we think of clothing.” On May 1, those qualities and more will be on full display as part of the Sam Fox School’s 82nd Annual Fashion Design Show.

Pliable, durable and lightweight, aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, used to make everything from soda cans to airplane wings to electrical transmission lines. Yet even this most versatile of elements is put to the test by The Aluminum Show, the international sensation coming to Edison Theatre April 30. Aluminum is puffed into pillows, shot out of cannons, sewn into costumes, wrapped around audience members and transformed into living creatures of astonishing warmth and complexity.

From literature, philosophy and ethics to history, law and musicology, the humanities are central to our understanding of ourselves, our communities and the larger world around us. On Wednesday, April 27, the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences will present talks by Richard J. Franke, founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, president and director of the National Humanities Center, as part of “Celebrating the Humanities Day.”

Between them, Dan Presgrave, conductor of the Washington University Symphony Orchestra, and John Stewart, director of the Washington University Concert Choir, have taught in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences for a combined total of almost 60 years. On April 17, the pair — both of whom are retiring at the end of the semester — will join forces one last time for the 2011 Chancellor’s Concert. 

Based in Cologne, Germany, conceptual artist Cosima von Bonin is among the most influential yet elusive artists of her generation. At once playful, seductive and satirical, her wide-ranging creative practice interweaves sculpture, installation, video, textiles, performance and electronic music with a diverse network of collaborators. Beginning Friday, May 6, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the American Midwest.

Remember Hurricane Katrina? In the five years since the storm struck — overwhelming levees, killing hundreds and putting 80 percent of New Orleans under water — the terrible images have receded from headlines and popular memory. Yet lives remain broken in the hurricane’s wake.This month, cutting-edge poetry collective Universes will return to the Edison Ovations Series with Ameriville Unplugged, their furious homage to “The Queen of the South.”