Arts & Culture

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.

Who is Mónica de la Torre? A disappeared subversive? A funk-dancing cheerleader? In “Doubles,” the poet and visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing asks that very question, in the form of a sly email exchange.

With its saw-tooth façade and 9,000-square-feet of windows, the $12 million UMSL at Grand Center building is at once dramatic and nimble, a light-filled and light-footed new home for St. Louis Public Radio. We sat down with architects Sung Ho Kim and Heather Woofter, both associate professors in the Sam Fox School, to discuss the project, St. Louis and the role of technology in architecture today.

The Blues and the Abstract Truth by St. Louis saxophonist Oliver Nelson (1932-1975) is among the most influential jazz albums of the 1960s, a masterpiece of blues structure, modern arrangement and post-bop cool. On Thursday, Sept. 12, Washington University will pay tribute to this distinguished alumnus with a free concert at 8 p.m. in Holmes Lounge as part of the Jazz at Holmes series.

Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was drawn to the itinerant musicians known as chorões, whose improvised concerts filled the streets and cafes. On Sept. 16, the Danforth University Center will launch its fall Chamber Music Series with Villa-Lobos’ Choros No. 2, as well as works by Emmanuel, Debussy, Schmitt and Saint-Saëns.