Author: Liam Otten

Saul Noam Zaritt, PhD, the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has launched a new digital journal of Yiddish studies.

A play is a text but also a performance. Dance is a discipline but also a communication. To be truly understood, both must be experienced live. For its 2015-16 season, the Performing Arts Department will present classic comedy and contemporary drama as well as original works by faculty and students.

Art fulfills many roles. One is to start conversation. Beginning Friday, Sept. 11, and continuing throughout the fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present nearly two dozen free public events, ranging from lectures, gallery talks and panel discussions to concerts, film screenings and all-ages activities.

ISSUES Magazine has won the 2015 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals from the Center of Architecture in New York. Launched in 2012, the magazine explores links between architecture, design and social issues.

Architect and structural engineer Guy Nordenson, who began his career as a draftsman for R. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, will launch the Sam Fox School’s fall Public Lecture Series with a free talk Monday, Sept. 14. In all, the series will feature 10 presentations by nationally and internationally known artists, architects, curators and designers.

The gesture is optimistic. The weapon has been removed from the streets, sliced in two and encased in frosted bubbles. In “SMAC” (2014), artist duo CLUB S+S offers an aesthetic antibody to the gun violence epidemic. On Sept. 16, the Sam Fox School will present “SMAC” as part of “Guns in the Hands of Artists,” opening in the Des Lee Gallery in downtown St. Louis.

From the fall of communism to the rise of digital technology, the 1990s were marked by a series of radical transformations. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will explore some of the era’s most pressing social, political and technological issues with “Rotation 2: Contemporary Art from the Peter Norton Gift.”

Isabel Trautwein, violinist for the Cleveland Orchestra, will launch the Danforth University Center Chamber Music Series at Washington University in St. Louis with a free concert Sept. 21. Also featured this fall will be early music ensemble The Newberry Consort; a world premier by Washington University composer Christopher Stark; and the Songs of Africa Ensemble.

Shannon Wood, principal timpani for the St. Louis Symphony, will debut a new work Sept. 13 in the 560 Music Center at Washington University in St. Louis. Written largely during Wood’s month-long stay in Sicily, the piece seeks to capture the rhythms and flavors of life on the Mediterranean island. The premiere will come as part of “Symphony in Your College,” a free concert presented by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences and the St. Louis Symphony.

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents “World War I: War of Images, Images of War.” Drawn primarily from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where it debuted in fall 2014, the exhibition features more than 150 objects that together chart a chronological path from exuberant outbreak through years of grinding combat and into the long, unsettled aftermath.