Arts & Culture

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received a $10,000 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

John Hendrix, a professor and founding chair of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program, was installed Jan. 26 as the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art.

The writers and illustrators of many beloved picture books are from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

What changes and trends could we see this year? WashU experts in areas from artificial intelligence to climate to fashion share their insights.

Celebrated sculptor Chakaia Booker will launch the Sam Fox School’s spring Public Lecture Series with a free talk Jan. 19. Subsequent speakers will range from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré to author and illustrator Deb J.J. Lee, avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson and fashion technologist Anouk Wipprecht.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has acquired a major recent work by artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Titled “Illumination” (2019), the piece reconstructs, in colorful Lego blocks, an iconic selfie the artist took during his 2009 arrest in Chengdu, China.

“Color can appear anywhere,” says Katharina Grosse. “It is independent from any location.” In this video, Grosse, one of Germany’s most celebrated artists, explores the nature of color, the visceral reactions it prompts and its power to override pictorial relationships and hierarchies.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host a preview of “Lest We Forget,” a large-scale public art installation featuring monumental portraits of Holocaust survivors, beginning at 3:15pm Thursday, Oct. 20. The exhibition will include 12 portraits of survivors now living in the St. Louis area.

Fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg will discuss her life and work in a free talk at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 12, in Graham Chapel. The event is hosted by the Saint Louis Fashion Fund, in partnership with Caleres and WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

As a young sculptor, Chakaia Booker collected scraps of ruined tires from the streets of lower Manhattan. The material was ubiquitous, malleable and symbolically resonant. Now “Shaved Portions,” one of Booker’s largest and most ambitious projects to date, has been installed on WashU’s Danforth Campus.