Arts & Culture

From mordant humor and exuberant defiance to love and war and existential anguish, the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will scale the heights and plumb the depths of our shared mortal coil with its 2010-11 season.

Multimedia solos and structured improvisations will share the stage with Flamenco and classical Indian works in Dance Close Up, the biennial concert of new and original choreography by faculty in the Dance Program in Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will host a traveling exhibition of design concepts by five architectural teams vying to reshape the area surrounding Eero Saarinen’s iconic Gateway Arch. The teams — which among them include seven faculty from the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — are finalists in an international competition organized by the CityArchRiver 2015 Foundation. Titled “Framing a Modern Masterpiece,” the competition aims to improve connections and transitions between the Arch grounds, downtown St. Louis and the Mississippi riverfront.  

In the decades following the Second World War, European and American artists developed a wide range of strategies and approaches to abstract painting and sculpture. This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection, showcasing more than a dozen large-scale yet rarely seen works that span gestural and lyrical abstraction, color-field painting, hard-edge abstraction and assemblage.

Classic vs. contemporary, emerging vs. established, traditional vs. cutting-edge. Every year, the Edison OVATIONS Series bridges such dichotomies with groundbreaking presentations by some of today’s most critically acclaimed performing artists. The 2010-11 season will feature a range of innovative events, from Philip Glass’ modern take on Antonio Vivaldi to uproarious re-conceptions of works by William Shakespeare and Mary Shelley.  

A closer look at each presentation of the 2010-11 Edison OVATIONS season.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Joe Deal, who served as dean of Washington University’s School of Art from 1989-99, died in hospice Friday, June 18, in Providence, RI, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 62.

Celebrated jazz pianist, composer and arranger Linda Presgrave and her quintet will launch “Jazz in July,” a series of free summer concerts presented by Washington University’s Jazz at Holmes, from 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday, July 8. Subsequent performances will feature guitarist Tom Byrne and his quartet (July 15), drummer Maurice Carnes and friends (July 22) and guitarist Chris Burchett and his quartet (July 29).

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will launch its 47th season of free Sunday-evening concerts July 11 with “Music for the Night,” a program of works on nocturnal themes. The series will then continue July 18 with a concert titled “Bach to Basics: July 25 with “Gotta Dance” and Aug. 1 with “Souvenir of Moscow.”

Film and photography are in many ways defined by the tensions between them: narrative vs. static, still vs. moving images. This summer, in conjunction with the exhibition Focus on Photography, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present a pair of feature-length films, Andy Warhol and In the Land of the War Canoes, that highlight connections between the two media.