Author: Liam Otten

Photographer Jess T. Dugan will serve as the 2020-21 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles.

“Amnesia is not the right word,” said Geoff K. Ward, “because we’ve forgotten without ever really knowing.” In “Truths and Reckonings,” the show he curated for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, Ward confronts histories of racist violence with the aim of untangling their continuing legacies.

I suspect that some people decided to delay watching Michaela Coel’s HBO/BBC One series I May Destroy You for fear that it would, well, destroy them. I did. Many of us choose to forego media that represents sexual violence.

There are lots of kindly encomiums for persons of distinction: brilliant, wonderful, generous and so on. But it is a rare person who can be described as great. Dr. Danforth was such a person. He was great, truly great.

Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian and founding director of the Medical Humanities program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Lindsay Sheedy, a doctoral candidate in art history and archaeology in Arts & Sciences, have both been named 2021 Rome Prize Fellows by the American Academy in Rome.

Nationally renowned artists, architects, designers and scholars will discuss their work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s “In Conversation” series. Events begin Sept. 12 with art historian Natilee Harren, followed by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Walter J. Hood, landscape designer for the International African American Museum Sept. 26. Combined, the series will feature 18 virtual presentations.

In his new book, “Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York,” historian Douglas Flowe at Washington University in St. Louis investigates the meanings of crime, violence and masculinity in the lives of those facing economic isolation, segregation and overt racial attack.

While the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum remains closed to the general public due to COVID-19, the museum will be open to Washington University students, faculty and staff by appointment beginning Sept. 14.

Derek Hoeferlin, chair of landscape architecture and urban design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has been named a University Design Research Fellow for Exhibit Columbus 2020-21.

Robert L. Williams II, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences and founding director of Washington University’s Black Studies program (now the Department of African & African-American Studies) in Arts & Sciences, died Aug. 12, 2020. He was 90.