Arts & Culture

In Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, three undergraduate students—the inaugural Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellows—explore the hopes, illusions and realities of China in the Reform Era.

Described by The New York Times as “an artist’s artist,” painter Peter Saul (BFA ’56) has provided lush, lurid and scathingly satirical commentaries on political, social and historical events for more than 50 years. On April 11, Saul will be one of seven alumni recognized by the the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at its sixth annual Awards for Distinction dinner.

Fashion design is both a singular practice and a series of interrelated skills, from sketching and patternmaking to tailoring and construction. But for Washington University fashion majors, the puzzle pieces all come together May 5 when the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts presents its 84th Annual Fashion Design Show.

Performances of Lucky Stiff, a musical starring and directed and produced by students on the Washington University Medical Campus will be April 25, 26 and 27 in Whelpley Auditorium on the St. Louis College of Pharmacy campus. Shown is Greg Bligard, a third-year MD/PhD student, rehearsing a scene from the show.

Acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind discusses the role of drawing in his practice. The conversation centers on a pair of artist’s books he created in the early 1980, which are now in the collection of WUSTL’s Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library.

Born in 1819, Clara Wieck was a musical prodigy and one of Europe’s most successful concert pianists. Though long over-shadowed by her husband, Robert Schumann, recent years have brought renewed attention to Wieck-Schumann’s own compositions. On April 12, the Eliot Trio will perform one of her best-known works, along with compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms.

Medical history, gender studies and comedy: Sarah Ruhl’s acclaimed In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) has it all. WUSTL’s Performing Arts Department will present an all-new staging of Ruhl’s Pulitzer and Tony-nominated play April 19-28 in Edison Theatre.

In Contemporary German Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will highlight 16 large-scale works, all completed within the last 12 years, by artists living and working in Germany. The exhibition compliments the opening of a major expansion to the Saint Louis Art Museum, which will showcase its own holdings of postwar German art.

More than 175 WUSTL volunteers recently did prep work at Gateway STEM High School — priming and taping walls, organizing supplies and competing other tasks. They cleared the way for an even larger undertaking this weekend during the Clinton Global Initiative University meeting. Approximately 800 conference delegates will perform service projects at the school. ​

Parents must learn to accept the people their children are, as opposed to the people we wish them to be. A difficult lesson—all the more so when that child is a centaur. In “Sagittarius,” author Greg Hrbek follows a young couple frantically searching for their missing newborn—who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous, mythological creature.