Author: Liam Otten

Ian Weaver, who earned a master of fine arts degree from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts in May, has won a $15,000 MFA Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York. Weaver was one of 15 students nationwide to receive the award, and the first ever from Washington University.

Four faculty members from the 2008 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops will read from their poetry and fiction at 7 p.m., Aug. 6 in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge. The event is free and open to the public.

Lorser Feitelson, *Dichotomic Organization*From painting and architecture to music, film, furniture and the graphic arts, 1950s Los Angeles was an epicenter of American modernism. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury, a sprawling multimedia exhibition that investigates how the sleek West Coast aesthetic — at once playful and poised, laid-back and sharply articulated — emerged as cultural shorthand for crisp sophistication.

The News & Information Web site at Washington University in St. Louis provides the images below for free use by media for purposes of news coverage of the exhibition Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture, on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Sept. 19, 2008, to Jan. 5, 2009. All […]

James RichardsThe Gateway Festival Orchestra begins its 45th season of free Sunday-evening performances July 6 with a program of American music designed to celebrate the Independence Day weekend. The concert — featuring works by Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Henry Mancini, John Williams and John Philip Sousa — begins at 7:30 p.m. in Washington University Brookings Quadrangle.

The Big Read is a national program designed to encourage literary reading by helping communities come together to read and discuss a single book. In January 2009 Washington University in St. Louis — supported by a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts — will coordinate a St. Louis Big Read focusing on Harper Lee’s 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird. The month-long series of community-based events will include a wide variety of reading programs, read-a-thons, book discussions, lectures, performances, movie screenings and other activities.

Karl Benjamin, *Black Pillars,* 1957.From retail furnishings to international auction houses, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in midcentury modernism, an influential design aesthetic that flourished between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. During the 2008-09 academic year the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will host two major exhibitions exploring both the breadth and the cultural impact of midcentury modernism, through such mediums as painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, film, music and the graphic arts.

Elsie Parker and The Poor People of Paris will launch the summer Jazz at Holmes series with a free performance at 8 p.m. Thursday, June 12. The concert will feature French popular music and jazz, including works by Vanessa Paradis and Herve Vilard. Also on the program will be music of French favorites Edith Piaf, […]

The Gateway Festival Orchestra begins its 45th season of free Sunday-evening performances July 6 with a program of American music designed to celebrate the Independence Day weekend. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Brookings Quadrangle.

Courtesy ImageThe Sheldon Art Galleries at 3648 Washington Blvd. currently is hosting an exhibition of recent projects by Jen Maigret and Don Koster, both Cynthia Weese Teaching Fellows in the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design.