Arts & Culture

The School of Medicine’s 9th Annual Art Show opened Jan. 22 and will run through Feb. 17 in the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center. The show features artwork by more than 60 artists within the School of Medicine. Shown is “Tree of Life,” a sculpture carved from black walnut by Gerald W. Dorn II, MD, the Philip and Sima K. Needleman Professor. Admiring it are first-year medical students Linda Ma (left) and Shruti Mishra.​

Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) opens on a melancholy note. Memories of warmth and spring vie with cold anticipation of the road to come. It’s an apt metaphor for Schubert himself, who would die at age 31, shortly after completing the cycle. On Sunday, Feb. 10, musicians from WUSTL and the St. Louis Symphony will present an evening of late works by this most romantic of Romantic composers.

As a young man, Oedipus outwitted the deadly Sphinx but also committed terrible sins — slaying his natural father, marrying his widowed mother. Now the former king of Thebes wanders Greece a beggar, blinded by his own hand. But in Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ melancholy meditation on age and loss, this once-great hero finally concludes his tortured, penitent journey.

Eric Hoffman, professor of practice in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has won a national 2013 Young Architects Award from the American Institute of Architects. Hoffman is both the first Sam Fox School faculty member and the first Sam Fox School alumnus to receive the honor, among the highest available to architects in the early stages of their careers.

With its fractured spaces and multiple viewpoints, Cubism marked a radical break fromWestern painting’s long tradition of naturalistic depiction. But even Cubism had its influences — among them, the visual techniques of early cinema. In February, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and KDHX Media Arts will help contemporary filmmakers return the favor with the Kemper Braque Film Challenge.

At a reading speed of 250 words per minute, it would take the average adult almost three full days (without sleep or bathroom breaks) to complete J.K. Rowling’s mammothly popular Harry Potter series. Now you can do it in 70 minutes flat, thanks to Potted Potter, which comes to Edison Theatre Feb. 15.

The spring 2013 list of Assembly Series speakers begins January 31 with the prominent young American playwright Sarah Ruhl (left), author of “In the Next Room or the vibrator play” and concludes April 17 with a presentation by General Motors’ vice president of global human resources, Cynthia Brinkley.

The air is crisp and cold but the voices will be rich and warm when Winter Opera St. Louis, the youngest of the area’s three professional companies, visits the Danforth University Center Jan. 29. The free performance will launch the spring Chamber Music Series.

Karen K. Butler, assistant curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, discusses Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945. The exhibition, which opens Jan. 25, is the first to explore Braque’s work in the years leading up to, and through, World War II.

In Blue Front (2006), poet Martha Collins draws on news accounts and historical documents to depict the brutal, 1909 lynching in Cairo, IL. On Thursday, Jan. 24, Collins, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing in Arts & Sciences, she will present a free public lecture on the craft of poetry.