Author: Liam Otten

This fall, Washington University will present “Ethnic Profiling: A Challenge to Democracy,” a semester-long series exploring the history, impact and ethical issues surrounding ethnic profiling through lectures, readings, performances, panel discussions and other events.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received a $50,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. to support the exhibition “Sharon Lockhart — Lunch Break.” Organized by Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition will open Feb. 10, 2010, and remain on view […]

Live performance has always been a multidisciplinary event, its three great streams — theater, music and dance — forever shifting and combining in new and unpredictable ways. For its 2009-10 season, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present a handful of works that together highlight both the boundless possibility and transformational power of the stage.

Dripping or flinging paint; flipping coins to compose musical scores; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition — since the early 20th century avant-garde artists have used these processes and many others to explore the creative possibilities of chance and its attendant release of authorial intent. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Chance Aesthetics, a major loan exhibition investigating the use of chance as a key compositional principle in modern art.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis has received a $50,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., to support the exhibition Sharon Lockhart—Lunch Break. Organized by Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., the museum’s director and chief curator, the exhibition will open Feb. 10, 2010, and remain on view through April 19.

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 re-enactment, along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions, to redo, restage and refigure […]

Courtesy PhotoThe Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present this fall “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.

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.