Arts & Culture

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present two new exhibitions beginning Friday, May 6, and running through Monday, Aug. 1. Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation is the first solo museum exhibition in the American Midwest for the influential conceptual artist, who lives and works in Cologne, Germany. The 2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition will feature projects by 24 graduating master of fine arts candidates in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts honored eight outstanding architecture and art alumni at its fourth annual Awards for Distinction dinner April 28 at the Coronado Ballroom in St. Louis. The awards recognized graduates who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership and vision through their contributions to the practices of art, architecture and design, as well as to WUSTL and the Sam Fox School.

Annelise Mertz, professor emerita in the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences, died Friday, April 28, at her home in Clayton, of pancreatic cancer. She was 93.

It is perhaps a cliché that solving the environmental issues of the 21st century will require creativity, but the reverse is also true. For professionals in design or the visual and performing arts, the modern environmental movement is a source of both professional challenge and increasing opportunity. At 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, Washington University’s Edison Theatre and Office of Sustainability will host a panel colloquium on “Environmentalism and the Arts.”  

A husband goes missing. A celebrated writer fights to form words. Two young men embark on a pharmaceutically enhanced museum tour while a shell-shocked veteran wanders the streets. Welcome to Chris Kammerer’s The Stroke Scriptures, winner of Washington University’s biennial A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, which will receive its world premiere in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.  

The Washington University Opera Workshop will perform excerpts from five beloved operas at 8 p.m. Friday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center Ballroom. The program will highlight comedy and romance with scenes from works by Gaetano Donizetti, Benjamin Britten, Otto Nicolai and Leo Delibes. 

In the beginning was the fig leaf. The first garment. Eden couture. “Our students always start with a leaf-inspired project because that is the beginning of fashion,” quips Jeigh Singleton, director of the Fashion Design program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. “It is the original inspiration for color, line, shape, structure, texture — all the things that we think of when we think of clothing.” On May 1, those qualities and more will be on full display as part of the Sam Fox School’s 82nd Annual Fashion Design Show.

Pliable, durable and lightweight, aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, used to make everything from soda cans to airplane wings to electrical transmission lines. Yet even this most versatile of elements is put to the test by The Aluminum Show, the international sensation coming to Edison Theatre April 30. Aluminum is puffed into pillows, shot out of cannons, sewn into costumes, wrapped around audience members and transformed into living creatures of astonishing warmth and complexity.

From literature, philosophy and ethics to history, law and musicology, the humanities are central to our understanding of ourselves, our communities and the larger world around us. On Wednesday, April 27, the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences will present talks by Richard J. Franke, founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, president and director of the National Humanities Center, as part of “Celebrating the Humanities Day.”

Between them, Dan Presgrave, conductor of the Washington University Symphony Orchestra, and John Stewart, director of the Washington University Concert Choir, have taught in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences for a combined total of almost 60 years. On April 17, the pair — both of whom are retiring at the end of the semester — will join forces one last time for the 2011 Chancellor’s Concert.