Kemper Art Museum announces 2025 exhibitions
Uncertain times can challenge things we take for granted but also can create productive instabilities, opening the door to new ideas and new visions of the future. In this spirit, the Kemper Art Museum’s 2025 exhibition lineup will question canonical narratives, interrogate colonial imaginaries and reexamine complex historical entanglements.
The Engaged City initiative to launch
This fall, WashU will launch The Engaged City. Building on the long-running Divided City initiative, and funded in part by a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, The Engaged City aims to highlight St. Louis’ cultural resources.
‘Design Agendas’ symposium Oct. 25-26
The “Design Agendas” public symposium, presented by WashU’s Kemper Art Museum and Sam Fox School, will explore the past, present and future of St. Louis urban design Oct. 25 and 26.
Design Agendas
Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s
An examination of the complex connections in St. Louis among modern architecture, urban renewal, and racial and spatial change.
Sam Fox School fall Public Lecture Series begins Sept. 9
Architect Mimi Hoang, urban planner Toni Griffin and artist Josephine Halvorson are among the internationally renowned creative professionals who will discuss their work for the Sam Fox School’s fall Public Lecture Series.
The Neronian Grotesque
Image, Text, and Culture in Classical Antiquity
During the reign of Nero, Roman culture produced some of its most spectacular works of art and literature, and some of its strangest. This study explores these effects across textual and visual media in an integrated way. Weiss’ analysis allows for appreciation of the shared strategies of composition, overlaps between literary and visual rhetoric, the […]
Thinking through Graphic Design History
Challenging the canon
Graphic design has a paradoxical relationship to history. While it claims to promote originality and innovation – ideas that emphasize the new and unique – design practice is deeply embedded in previous ideals. Too often, design students encounter the past in brief visual impressions which seduce them to imitate form rather than engage with historical contexts.
‘Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s’
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present “Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s” beginning Sept. 13. With nearly 300 architectural drawings, models, photographs, films, digital maps and artworks, “Design Agendas” is the first major exhibition to examine how interlocking civic, cultural and racial histories, as well as conflicting ideological aims, reshaped the city.
The infrastructure of fragmentation
In “Radical Atlas of Ferguson USA,” Patty Heyda charts the forces that have shaped Ferguson and other first-ring American suburbs since the early 1980s. Tax incentives, housing codes, roadways, policing, philanthropy, even landscaping — all can work against the fundamental betterment of residents’ lives.
‘Reframing the 19th Century’
In “Reframing the 19th Century,” the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum places works from its permanent collection alongside six long-term loans from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to highlight diverse themes and broaden our understanding of 19th-century art.
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