Arts & Culture

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.

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.

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.

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?

W​hether it’s Edgar Degas sketching ballerinas or Lou Reed singing about “Romeo and Juliette,” the arts don’t exist in a vacuum. Lines get blurred, influences get shared, inspirations get gloriously tangled. This fall, four WUSTL areas have banded together to create Arts First, a multidisciplinary, campus-wide subscription package.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis has received a $36,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant will support a detailed conservation study of the 337 paintings in the museum’s permanent collection.

Phillip B. Williams, a student in the Master of Fine Arts creative writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of five young poets awarded a $15,000 scholarship from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine.

In 1840, finally free to marry the love of his life, composer Robert Schumann was inspired to a creative frenzy, writing 168 songs. On Sept. 29, baritone Ian Greenlaw will perform 16 of them—from the celebrated Dichterliebe cycle—as part of WUSTL’s annual Liederabend concert.