Arts & Culture

“Someone at Washington University in St. Louis just hit the lecture jackpot.” So quipped Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s influential architecture critic. On Monday, Feb. 27, just two days before his scheduled talk for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, architect Wang Shu became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, generally considered the profession’s highest honor.

Art may be subjective, but it is not entirely so. Aesthetic interest also can be understood in terms of a work’s power to engage cognitive and perceptual systems common to all human brains. This is the central premise of neuroaesthetics, an emerging field that draws on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to explore questions relating to beauty, artistic expression and art history. It is also the premise behind Art and the Mind-Brain, now on view in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Teaching Gallery.

Chinese architect Wang Shu, who on Monday, Feb. 27, became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize — widely considered the fields’ highest honor, equivalent to the Nobel — will visit the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Wednesday and Thursday.

Wang Shu has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, making him the first Chinese citizen to receive what is generally considered architecture’s highest honor. Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the $100,000 prize, made the announcement Monday, Feb. 27. Two days later, students and faculty in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will be among the first to congratulate Shu when the architect discusses his work for the school’s Public Lecture Series.

Vu Nguyen, who joined the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences last fall as director of winds, will conduct the WUSTL Wind Ensemble in a free concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28, at the 560 Music Center. The performance will feature music by Tielman Susato, Morten Lauridsen, Johann Sebastian Bach, W. Francis McBeth and William Schuman.

It is a harrowing prologue. Teenagers Brooke and Alex, high school sweethearts, panicked by an accidental pregnancy, rent a hotel room to deliver their stillborn child. So opens The Lost Daughter, the sixth and most recent novel by St. Louis native Lucy Ferriss. On Tuesday, March 6, Ferriss, writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Cosima Wagner awoke to the sound of music. Her husband, the composer Richard Wagner, had risen early and arranged a 15-piece orchestra on the stairs outside their bedroom. It was the first performance of his Siegfried Idyll, a birthday gift composed for Cosima and titled for their infant son. On Feb. 24, the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ward Stare will perform the Siegfried Idyll, along with Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Peter Gizzi’s poetry practically vibrates with tensions — between the lyrical and the abstract, joy and grief, interior and exterior. In Threshold Songs, his fifth and most recent collection, the writer is at once elegiac and experimental, building poems and shaping meanings from the rhythms and collisions of words and language even as he mourns a string of personal losses. On Thursday, Feb. 23, Gizzi, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Poetry, will read from his work as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series.

Dance students in the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences get things moving Feb. 6 as part of an advanced master class led by acclaimed improvisational dancer Kirstie Simson. Described as “a force of nature,” by The New York Times, Simson was on campus as the PAD’s 2012 Marcus Residency Dance Artist.

Herbie Hancock is arguably the most influential jazz pianist of the last 50 years. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, Washington University’s Jazz at Holmes series will pay tribute to Hancock with an evening of his music performed by St. Louis’ own Ptah Williams. Now in its 13th year, the series will present free concerts by local and nationally known jazz musicians most Thursday nights throughout the spring.