Author: Liam Otten

In “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo,” senior Sophie Tegenu explores themes of family, romantic love and the difficulties of saying “I do.”  This weekend, the play will be one of three to receive world premier staged readings as part of the Performing Arts Department’s annual A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival.

More than 5,000 plants form a literal wall of green that rises 30 feet in the air. Welcome to the Kuehner Court, located in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ new Anabeth and John Weil Hall. The new space will be dedicated Oct. 2 as part of Washington University’s east end dedication.

The newly expanded and renovated Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will reopen to the public Sept. 28 with “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life,” a major exhibition collecting dozens of artworks by the renowned Chinese dissident artist and activist.

Artist Anne Schaefer, a 2001 alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, discusses “it comes and it goes,” a new 12-panel mural she recently installed in the school’s Anabeth and John Weil Hall.

The Kemper Art Museum will present more than a dozen events this fall relating to the exhibition “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life.” Tickets to a Sept. 26 Q&A with the world renowned artist and activist will be available to museum members and students beginning Aug. 29.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its fall Public Lecture Series Sept. 19 with Swiss architect Patrick Gmür. Other events will include a Q&A with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the symposium “Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital.”

Lingchei Letty Chen, associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures in Arts & Sciences, has received a three-year, $195,000 grant from the Taiwan Ministry of Education.

Rhaisa Williams, assistant professor of performing arts in Arts & Sciences, remembers Toni Morrison’s “magnificent wield of imagination.”

Toni Morrison, who died Aug. 5 at the age of 88, was among the most powerful, popular and influential writers of her generation. Introducing her to a packed Graham Chapel in 1991, William Gass, professor, declared that “Beloved,” which had won the Pulitzer Prize three years earlier, “has the old roar of the great work, back in the days when great works roared.”

Eileen G’Sell, senior lecturer in writing and in the Prison Education Project, both in Arts & Sciences, was a finalist in the 2019 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation grant program for visual art journalists.