Author: Liam Otten

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.

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.