Arts & Culture

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will launch its 48th season of free Sunday-evening concerts July 10 with Various Variations, a program exploring the use of variations by a handful of composers from the Baroque period through the 20th century. Subsequent performances will take place July 17, 24 and 31.

It is among the most indelible images of Cold War-era film: Slim Pickens, as Major “King” Kong, riding an atom bomb to extinction, cowboy hat waving in the wind. The scene is from Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black political satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). On June 17, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present a free outdoor screening of Dr. Strangelove in conjunction with the exhibition Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is one of the oldest university museums in the country. This summer, the museum will resume its Lunch & Learn program, a popular series of lunchtime tours open to any campus department or group.

Architecture is a global profession. Just ask Aaron Plewke, who will receive his master’s degree May 20 from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. In recent months, Plewke, a Danforth Scholar in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, and his fiance, fellow graduate student Meredith Klein, have designed and managed construction of WUSTL’s new East Asian Study Center in Shanghai — all from their studios in Givens Hall.

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.