Arts & Culture

The Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has received a full, six-year term of accreditation from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board.

In Green and Gray, his fearlessly experimental second collection, Geoffrey G. O’Brien fashions poetry from neighborhood flyers and political speeches, mixing phrases from Dante, the Patriot Act and Jean Genet. That audacious mingling of personal and political continues to inform People on Sunday, O’Brien’s latest, and most autobiographical, collection. On Oct. 10, O’Brien will read from his work for The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series.

American produce is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before reaching its point of sale. In St. Louis, the 14-acre Magic Chef complex sits empty and unused. Graduate student Haley O’Brien wants to address both problems by growing hydroponic tomatoes on The Hill, an historic Italian-American enclave that boasts some of the finest pasta sauces in the Midwest.

Mongolia is a hard land, a place of extremes, of mountains and deserts, of lost empires and tough survivors. On Oct. 20, the “blood brothers” of AnDa Union will bring the stirring, demanding and infectious Music of Inner Mongolia to St. Louis as part of the Edison Ovations Series.

Playwriting is hard. But in recent years, the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Science has emerged as a national incubator for young playwriting talent. We sat down with Carter W. Lewis, playwright-in-residence, to discuss drama versus prose, the upcoming A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival and the difficulties of letting go.

The sarabande. The gavotte. The minuet. On Saturday, Sept. 28, The Kingsbury Ensemble, one of the Midwest’s premier early music groups, will celebrate these and other Baroque dance forms in the 560 Music Center’s Ballroom Theatre.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have announced that the Los Angeles-based artist Won Ju Lim and the Brooklyn-based artist Mariam Ghani will serve as Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows for the 2013-14 and 2014-15 academics year, respectively.

In a career stretching more than five decades, Judy Collins has been a piano prodigy, an anti-war activist and a chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning pop icon. On Oct. 12, the Edison Ovations Series at Washington University in St. Louis will welcome Collins for a special, one-night-only performance.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will launch its 2013-14 exhibition season with Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks and American Places: Painting the Landscape in the Nineteenth Century, both opening Sept. 20. Next spring, the museum will feature In the Aftermath of Trauma, a survey of contemporary video installations, and On the Thresholds of Space-Making, which explores the work of the influential architect Shinohara Kazuo.

Think of it as reverse camouflage. In the wild, animals use color and pattern to disguise themselves from predators. But last spring, a team from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts flipped the calculus. How, they asked, do we keep human observers from disturbing animals in their natural environments?