Arts & Culture

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.

Featuring more than 100 students from the WUSTL Choirs and WUSTL Symphony Orchestra, the annual Chancellor’s Concert is among the university’s largest performances of the year. “American Voices,” the 2013 concert, which takes place April 7, will feature music by Leonard Bernstein, Randall Thompson, Aaron Copland and Howard Hanson.

Daniel Libeskind, one of the most celebrated architects working today, will discuss “The Future of Cities” as part of the Assembly Series at Washington University in St. Louis. His presentation, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Architecture Student Council, will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in Graham Chapel.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, author of the Tony- and Pulitzer-nominated In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), will discuss her work for the Performing Arts Department April 3. The PAD will produce Ruhl’s provocative, critically acclaimed comedy as its spring Mainstage production April 19-28.

Zombies at the convenience store. An apocalyptic beauty pageant. Tap-dancing bank robbers and self-aware television characters who turn out to be real. The worlds of Kelly Link are quirky, smart and frequently haunted. On Thursday, March 21, Link, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing, will read from her work for The Writing Program Reading Series in Arts & Sciences.

In the political realm, climate change remains a point of debate. But for those charged with managing its effects — the storms and floods followed, whiplash style, by drought and water scarcity — the evidence is in. From March 22-25, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington, D.C., will present MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers, an international symposium investigating climate adaptation strategies in the Mississippi and Missouri basins.

If American war films are characterized by large-scale combat and appeals to valor, French war cinema is arguably more intimate and psychologically driven. From March 19-21, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present three iconic films as part of its France at War Film Series.

Brett skips class. He disappears for hours at a time. He nurses a disturbing secret: Brett is an Elvis impersonator. Welcome to “If I Were You” and Other Elvis Presley Songs, an original play by senior Leah Barsanti, and winner of the A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition.