Author: Liam Otten

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.

This summer, Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences, presented two world-premiere compositions at major venues for contemporary classical music.

Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and of African and African-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, has been named co-editor of the inaugural “New Sexual Worlds” book series.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will dedicate its new William A. Bernoudy Architecture Studio, thanks to a $1.5 million gift from the Gertrude & William A. Bernoudy Foundation. Located within Anabeth and John Weil Hall, the 6,580-square-foot space will provide state-of-the-art facilities for the school’s nationally ranked Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design.

Images of children locked in prison-like conditions have sparked heated debates about U.S. immigration policy, the role of the built environment, and the line between legitimate security and intentional cruelty. But underlying such debates is a simple question: “Is it possible to design a border architecture that is welcoming rather than foreboding?”