Arts & Culture

As director of the Digital Art History Lab, Betha Whitlow provides work experiences to students that are both fruitful and fairly compensated. She wants the same for her WashU colleagues. On the Danforth Staff Council, she successfully advocated for parental leave. 

Architecture critic and theorist Aaron Betsky, conceptual artist Mark Dion and prominent collector Komal Shah will discuss their work this fall for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Monika Weiss, a professor of art at the Sam Fox School, is featured in exhibitions at the Silas von Morisse Gallery Viewing Room and the A.I.R. Gallery, both in New York.

Alumna Louise Smythe’s magical career journey started at WashU.

This fall, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present “Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection.” Spanning nearly eight decades and featuring nearly 70 artists, the survey places leading contemporary practitioners in dialogue with an earlier generation of artists whose work anticipated current discussions of figuration and abstraction as well as identity and power.

St. Louis is known nationally for its excellent (and free) art. Here, staff, faculty, students and alumni of WashU share their favorite places to view visual art around St. Louis during the summer.

Kahan Chavda, BSBME ’16, co-founder of Inversa, a company pioneering the field of ethically harvested leathers, workshops with Sam Fox School students on how engineering and fashion design can support endangered ecosystems.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has announced the theme for its 2026 James Harrison Steedman Fellowship in Architecture. The competition, which will mark the Steedman’s 100th anniversary, invites early-career architects from around the world to investigate and reimagine the fundamental systems, facilities and services that underlie contemporary life.

Philanthropists Nancy Kranzberg and Ken Kranzberg received the 2025 Dean’s Medal from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts April 10 as part of the school’s annual Awards for Distinction ceremony. Also recognized during the ceremony were six outstanding alumni in art, architecture and design.

“Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” an exhibition catalog published by WashU’s Kemper Art Museum, has been named best monograph of 2024 by the Midwest Art History Society.