Author: Liam Otten

As a young sculptor, Chakaia Booker collected scraps of ruined tires from the streets of lower Manhattan. The material was ubiquitous, malleable and symbolically resonant. Now “Shaved Portions,” one of Booker’s largest and most ambitious projects to date, has been installed on WashU’s Danforth Campus.

The Foreign Language Association of Missouri’s 2022 conference, “Embracing Our Diversity Through Languages,” will take place at Washington University Friday and Saturday, Oct. 7 and 8.

John Griswold, a staff writer at the Common Reader, a publication of Washington University, has published a new book, “The Age of Clear Profit: Essays on Home and the Narrow Road.” He will have an event at Left Bank Books Oct. 10.

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians blended jazz with experimental music while staging concerts in unusual venues. In “Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM,” Paul Steinbeck, associate professor of music in Arts & Sciences, uncovers the group’s surprising rise to become international touring artists.

Zachary Stern’s frenetic comedy “Democratic Airlines” and Melia Van Hecke’s contemporary folktale “The Fern” will receive world premiere staged readings as part of the 2022 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival. The festival is named for alumnus A.E. Hotchner, who famously bested Tennessee Williams in a campus playwriting competition.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host a press preview of the exhibition “Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988-2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions” at 2 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22. The exhibition opens to the public the following evening.

In “FIELD-STATION,” a new mural for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Houston-based architectural practice HOME-OFFICE explores the confluence of forestry, activism and place-based research.

Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson will serve as the Sam Fox School’s next Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art, the appointment is sponsored in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum, which will present a solo exhibition of Johnson’s work in fall 2023.

The Black Rep will launch its 46th season with “The African Company Presents Richard III.” The story, based on true events, chronicles the popular success of William Brown’s African Grove Theatre, established in New York in 1821, and the malicious campaign to shut it down.

Architects Hilary Sample and Thomas Phifer; artists Katharina Grosse, Derrick Adams and Meleko Mokgosi; and fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg are among the internationally known visual thinkers who will discuss their work as part of the fall Public Lecture Series sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.