Arts & Culture

Piano prodigy, social activist, folksinger and chart-topping recording artist — Judy Collins has done it all. This fall, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” will launch WUSTL’s 2013-14 Edison Ovations Series. Featuring almost a dozen events by nationally and internationally known artists, the season will range from athletic contemporary dance and incisive one-man shows to hip-hop violin and the world’s first live-action graphic novel.

Ovations 2013-14

A young man in suit and tie gazes warily at the camera, taking its measure, betraying nothing, sly wit reserved for the title. In Self Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass (2003), Rashid Johnson pays homage to the renowned 19th-century abolitionist while also crafting for his own myth of artistic self-creation. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, the first major solo museum exhibition to survey the career of this Chicago-born, New York-based artist.

On their recent album You’re Everything, jazz vocalist Feyza Eren and drummer Steve Davis swing through a range of jazz and pop standards. On July 11, the pair will launch WUSTL’s Jazz in July series with a free concert in Holmes Lounge.

Pagedale, Mo, is a small community but emblematic of the challenges facing many inner-ring suburbs. Yet in recent years, city officials and local nonprofits have sparked waves of improvements as well as new development. Last month, the city installed a monumental welcome sign conceived and designed by architecture students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

What you see often depends on where you stand. For Sarah Theis, a senior in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, this simple truth served as starting point for A Play of Perception. Now installed in Mooney Park, the sculpture is one of five featured in this year’s University City Sculpture Series.

Has a painting or drawing ever stopped you in your tracks? Have you ever circled a sculpture, collating angles and comparing views? Have you ever been challenged, or simply amused, by an installation or performance? If so, you’re not alone. On May 18, the Kemper Art Museum and more than 100 other institutions across North America will celebrate Art Museum Day.

Tony Award-winning Broadway star Norbert Leo Butz will headline a benefit concert for The Angel Band Project at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 9, in the 560 Music Center. The Angel Band Project, which supports survivors of sexual violence, was founded in memory of Butz’s sister, Teresa, who was murdered in 2009.

Painters have studio visits. Musicians have backstage passes. And museums? Well, museum’s have vaults. On April 12, the Kemper Student Council showcased dozens of rarely seen works from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s acclaimed permanent collection as part of the group’s third annual Vault Party.

He’s dashing, debonair and fluent in at least six languages. He’s escaped the insides of balloons and roller-bladed on Letterman. He can honk Beethoven’s Fifth in a space-suit of bicycle horns. He is Michel Lauzière, the Master of Unusual Comedy, and he’s coming to Edison Theatre.