Arts & Culture

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.

The “Pina Colada Song” guy wrote a musical? Yes, he did, and a good one, too. In 1986, Rupert Holmes’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood won the Tony Award “triple crown” of best musical, best book and best score. This week, the WUSTL Opera Workshop will present experts from Drood and five other works as part of its semester’s-end performance.

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.