Author: Liam Otten

​The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will launch its fall season Friday, Sept. 12, with “Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association,” the first public museum exhibition of drawings from the private collection of one of the 20th century’s most influential design educators. Also opening Sept. 12 will be “Encountering the City: The Urban Experience in Contemporary Art” and “Picturing Narrative: Greek Mythology in the Visual Arts.”

Participants in the free summer workshop Theatre for Social Change used their own experiences as well as the ideas of Brazilian director Augusto Boal to explore ways of effecting positive social change. Here, spectator Frances Hubbard-Smith (left) works with Annamaria Pileggi, who directed the workshop.

The sukkah is a small temporary dwelling constructed each autumn for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. This fall, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, in partnership with St. Louis Hillel at Washington University, will sponsor “Sukkah City STL 2014: Between Absence and Presence,” a national design competition and exhibition.

Jeffrey McCune, PhD, has been named director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, the program aims to increase diversity in higher education by encouraging talented but underrepresented students to pursue doctorates in the humanities and social sciences.

Renowned saxophonist Jay Hutson has performed with everyone from Frankie Valli and Aretha Franklin to the Pointer Sisters and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. On Thursday, July 10, Hutson and his band da Wolvez will launch WUSTL’s Jazz in July series. Subsequent concerts will feature San Francisco trumpeter Erik Jekabson (pictured) and the university’s own Kara Baldus, among others.

One in three American adults has high blood pressure. Jessica Wagenseil, DSc, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is investigating how mechanical properties of the cardiovascular system contribute to this widespread disease.

Internationally acclaimed landscape architect Rod Barnett has been appointed chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. He will join the program Aug. 1.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis has honored Kansas City architect Theodore H. Seligson (BArch ’53) with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

It’s been a good run, but eventually the house lights come up. Since 1973, the Edison Ovations Series has brought nationally and internationally known performing artists to Washington University in St. Louis and the community. But the 2014-15 season will be the Ovations’ last.

From Daedalus to da Vinci, from Kitty Hawk to Cape Canaveral, the dream of flight has powered some of the world’s most ambitious feats of design and engineering. On April 28, freshman architecture students from the Sam Fox School launched their own aeronautical experiments from the top of Art Hill in Forest Park.