Author: Liam Otten

Voice messages sound in a lonely apartment. Robert is turning 35. “Happy birthday,” intone his friends. “You don’t look it.” Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” examines the nature of marriage and commitment through eyes of an aging lothario — the last dangerously unattached member of his social circle.​​​

What is the relationship between art and activism? How should artists engage questions of racial justice? Have events in Ferguson changed those equations? On Oct. 3, four St. Louis-based artists will discuss these questions and more as part of the Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was among the most popular American composers of the 19th century. On Oct. 4, pianists Mark Tollefsen and Jae Won Kim will perform one of Gottschalk’s most enduring works in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

With “Boîte-en-valise,” Marcel Duchamp created an artistic retrospective the size of a salesman’s sample case. Now the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has acquired for its permanent collection an early example of this important work by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists.

Johannesburg is a modern global city, the second-largest in Africa. Last summer, the students and faculty in the Sam Fox School traveled there to study new efforts to overcome the legacy of apartheid design.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have selected Andréa Stanislav as the 2015-16 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow.

In “The Divine Buoyancy of Being,” Cary Simowitz explores what happens when youthful dreams collide with economic reality, entry-level positions and the unintended consequences of a governmental shutdown.

“Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing” (2014), by Washington University in St. Louis associate professor Jeffrey McCune, PhD, has been named Book of the Year by the National Communications Association’s GLBTQ Communications Studies Division and Caucus on GLBTQ Concerns.

In response to the Syrian crisis, many in St. Louis have called for the city to increase its acceptance of refugees. Architectural historian Michael Allen says existing housing stock could easily accommodate thousands of new residents.

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.