Author: Liam Otten

In an unstable world chance events can seem to threaten our claims to self-determination. Yet in the early 20th century avant-garde artists embraced chance as a primary compositional principle. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Chance Aesthetics, a major loan exhibition examining the use of chance in modern art. The exhibition is the first of four major shows slated for the 2009-10 academic year.

Julie SingerThe shooting death last Saturday of Neda Agha-Soltan has emerged, thanks to video widely circulated on the Internet, as a potent symbol of Iran’s antigovernment movement. In the news media and in private postings across the Web, Agha-Soltan has been memorialized as a victim, a martyr and — perhaps most hauntingly to Western ears — as “Iran’s Joan of Arc.” Yet while fitting in some ways, that comparison says less about either Agha-Soltan or the 15th-century French saint than it does about our own need to make sense of the present through comparison with the past, says Julie Singer, Ph.D., assistant professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.

Installation artist Allison Smith will serve as the inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Smith is known for creating large-scale works that critically engage popular forms of historical reenactment along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions to redo, restage and refigure historical memories. Launched in partnership with Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Freund Visiting Artist program joins a similar collaboration between the Sam Fox School and the Saint Louis Art Museum, which was initiated in 1995.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis jointly announce the selection of artists Bruce Yonemoto and Ian Monroe as the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows for the academic years 2009-10 and 2010-11, respectively. The Freund Fellowship consists of two month-long residencies in the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art and a Currents exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The collaboration was established in 1995.

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will begin its 46th season of free Sunday evening performances at 7:30 p.m. July 12 in Brookings Quadrangle with a program celebrating American music.

The Linda Presgrave Quintet will launch Washington University’s summer Jazz at Holmes series Thursday, June 11.

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will begin its 46th season of free Sunday-evening performances July 12 with a concert celebrating American music. The program will include orchestral excerpts from Wicked and other popular musicals as well as the Armed Forces Salute, a medley of official songs representing each branch of the armed forces, and The Stars and Stripes Forever. Subsequent concerts, on July 19 and 26, will highlight Vienna’s classical era with music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; and works by “Old World” and “New World” composers, including Bach, Beethoven, Adler and Dvořák.

The Linda Presgrave Quintet will launch Washington University’s summer Jazz at Holmes Series from 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday, June 11. The series will feature six free concerts — in a relaxed, coffeehouse-style setting — by professional jazz musicians from around St. Louis and abroad. Presgrave, a pianist and former St. Louisan, lives and performs in New York City, where she recently released In Your Eyes, her debut CD.

Like any good architect, Taylor Dover begins each project by investigating the needs of his clients. In this case, butterflies. With classmates Alen Basic and Adria Longenderfer, Dover — who receives a bachelor’s degree in architecture May 15 — spent much of the spring designing a combined bench and shade pavilion for the University’s Elizabeth […]

Theater is challenging, educational and inspiring. It is also, lest we forget, fun. For its 2009-10 season, Edison Theatre will present more than a dozen events by nationally and internationally renowned performing artists.