Arts & Culture

Four years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita led to devastating floods, the city of New Orleans still lacks a comprehensive plan for dealing with water, argues Derek Hoeferlin, a senior lecturer in the College and Graduate School of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Hoeferlin has led a series of Post-hurricane architecture and urban design studios, including most recently Gutter to Gulf, which explores spatial strategies for a potential water plan. He outlined his views in an Aug. 30 commentary for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and is available for further discussion of planning and recovery issues.

Jazz at Holmes will open its fall series of free Thursday night jazz concerts Sept. 10 with an outdoor jazz tribute to the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. The concert will feature a six-person jazz ensemble led by William Lenihan, director of jazz performance in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. “The connections between rock music and jazz of the era of Woodstock are many,” Lenihan explained, “and not just that which the sonic possibilities of electric and electronic musical instruments brought to the stage.”

World-renowned artist and computer scientist John Maeda will serve as opening speaker for “Economies: Art Architecture,” the first joint conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the National Council of Art Administrators. The conference, which takes place Nov. 4-7, will be hosted by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. In conjunction with the event, the Sam Fox School and the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies are collaborating to present three Skandalaris Awards in art and design.

Students who learn history by watching historically based blockbuster movies may be doomed to repeat the historical mistakes portrayed within them, suggests a new study.

The fall 2009 Assembly Series will start off on a light note with comedic filmmaker and Washington University alumnus Harold Ramis. The series continues through mid-November covering topics on entrepreneurship, equal rights, human rights, government and the environment. 

  “Embattled Israeliness, Embedded Jewishness: Jewish Influences on Israeli Music” is the focus of a lecture by visiting Israeli scholar Assaf Shelleg at 8 p.m., Sept. 2, in the Whitaker Hall Auditorium at Washington University.  

Amidst the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s, avant-garde artists and architects began embracing biological and scientific models as well as the potentials of emerging technologies to explore radical new directions in urban design, developing projects that were at once fanciful, complex and conceptually serious. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Metabolic City, an exhibition surveying work by the British collective Archigram; the Japanese Metabolists (whose members include Fumihiko Maki, architect of the Kemper Art Museum); and the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, an early member of the Situationist International.

Ethnic profiling is illegal in the United States, prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, which requires probable cause for searches and seizures, and by the Fourteenth Amendment, which calls for equal protection under the law. And yet as the recent arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates demonstrates, the issue remains far from settled. This fall Washington University in St. Louis will present “Ethnic Profiling: A Challenge to Democracy,” a semester-long series exploring the history, impact and ethical issues surrounding ethnic profiling through lectures, readings, performances, panel discussions and other events.

Live performance has always been a multidisciplinary event, its three great streams — theater, music and dance — forever shifting and combining in new and unpredictable ways. For its 2009-10 season, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present a handful of works that together highlight both the boundless possibility and transformational power of the stage.

Dripping or flinging paint; flipping coins to compose musical scores; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition — since the early 20th century avant-garde artists have used these processes and many others to explore the creative possibilities of chance and its attendant release of authorial intent. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Chance Aesthetics, a major loan exhibition investigating the use of chance as a key compositional principle in modern art.