Author: Liam Otten

Bob Smith was a Renaissance man — a talented painter, designer and bookmaker who trained generations of students while earning national renown for his sculptural fountain designs. In “Robert C. Smith: An Eclectic Studio & A Remarkable Career,” the Sam Fox School will showcase more than 100 works by the longtime professor, who died last fall at the age of 92.

Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, will present “Infinite Abstraction,” an exhibition of new printed paintings, at the Bruno David Gallery beginning Jan. 24.

James (Jim) C. Fetterman, senior lecturer in landscape architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, died at home Jan. 19, 2019. He was 68.

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.

Monique Bedasse, assistant professor of history and of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2018 Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history.

Six faculty members from Washington University in St. Louis have won Emerson Excellence in Teaching awards.

The Black Rep will present the world premiere of the drama “Canfield Drive” in Edison Theatre Jan. 9. The play, some four years in the making, runs through Jan. 27 and explores how two powerful journalists from very different ideological perspectives grapple with the 2014 death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

Fashion icon Gabriel Asfour, architect Georgina Huljich and artist David Humphrey are among the international array of cutting-edge visual thinkers who will visit Washington University in St. Louis as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ spring Public Lecture Series.

Henry W. Berger, professor emeritus of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Dec. 10. He was 81.

Margaret Garb, professor of history in Arts & Sciences and co-director of the Washington University Prison Education Project, died Dec. 15 after a long battle with cancer. She was 56.