Arts & Culture

Art, of course, can be challenging, engaging, uplifting and enlightening. It also can be fun. On Saturday, Sept. 24, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host Community Day, an all-ages afternoon of games, storytelling, art-making, workshops and tours led by museum curators and Washington University student docents. The event, which runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is free and open to the public.

Environmental designer Mitchell Joachim — one of Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 People Who Are Changing America” — and Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney will join Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, as jurors for Sukkah City STL, a design competition that reimagines traditional Jewish Sukkahs through the lens of contemporary art and architecture. Rounding out the jury will be Hyim Shafner, former Chief Rabbi of India; Nancy Berg, PhD, professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature; and Bruce Lindsey, dean of architecture.

Compression. Suspension. Torsion. Failure. The language of dance finds surprising echoes in the language of engineering. This fall, Lucy Guerin Inc., one of Australia’s premiere young dance companies, will launch the Edison Ovation Series with Structure and Sadness, an award-winning, evening-length work inspired by the 1970 collapse of Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge.  

German artist and photographer Thomas Demand will discuss his work Wednesday, Sept. 14, as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series. The talk is held in conjunction with the exhibition Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany, which opens at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Sept. 9. Also opening Sept. 9 is Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific. Additional museum events this fall will include a talk by Saraceno as well as film screenings, panel discussions and an all-ages Community Day.

Richard Meyer, associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7. The series continues through Nov. 9.

Joseph R. Passonneau, who served as dean of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis from 1956-67, died in his sleep Monday, Aug. 22, at his home in Washington, D.C., following an extended illness. He was 90.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received an extraordinary gift from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation to support the acquisition of new works by artists living and working in Germany. This fall, the Kemper Art Museum will present Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art From Germany. The exhibition will feature the first five works acquired thanks to the Kemper gift — monumentally scaled pieces by Franz Ackermann, Thomas Demand, Sergej Jensen, Charline von Heyl, and Corinne Wasmuht — along with significant works already in the permanent collection by Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as a major installation, on loan for the exhibition, by Hans-Peter Feldmann.

He may not run with scissors, but Mark Nizer is the juggler your mother always warned you about. Buzzing chainsaws, electric carving knives, 16-pound bowling balls, even a flaming propane tank — all are tossed aloft and twirled about with gleeful abandon. On Sept. 17, Nizer will launch Edison’s ovations for young people series with 3-D, his latest draw-dropping one-man show. 

The Sukkah is an ancient yet ephemeral form of architecture. In Jewish tradition, these small temporary structures — places to share meals, entertain, sleep and rejoice — are erected each autumn during the weeklong holiday of Sukkot. In October, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, in partnership with St. Louis Hillel at Washington University and The Museum of ImaJewnation, will host Sukkah City STL, a design competition and exhibition that reimagines the Sukkah through the lens of contemporary art and architecture.

With utopian ambition and scientific precision, Tomás Saraceno redefines both the built environment and the role of the artist. His spectacular, gravity-defying installations and visionary sculptural models — inspired by clouds, bubbles, spider webs and other natural structures — explore connections between complex social and ecological systems while raising pointed questions about our own relationships to an increasingly fragile natural world. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, an exhibition highlighting the breadth of Saraceno’s cross-disciplinary practice.