Arts & Culture

The Kemper Art Museum will present “Ansel Adams: Reverence for Life,” an exhibition of photographs showcasing works from the personal collections of the Adams family, in conjunction with the International Symposium on Energy and Environment, sponsored by the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.

The Supreme Court’s decision April 30 to raise the bar for patents on products combining elements of pre-existing inventions is a landmark in the battle against so-called “nuisance patents” and just one more sign that the tide is turning against overly restrictive and costly intellectual property right protections, suggests a pair of economists from Washington University in St. Louis.

Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg, passionate supporters of artistic, educational and cultural organizations throughout the St. Louis region, received the eighth annual Jane and Whitney Harris Saint Louis Community Service Award at a ceremony at the Harbison House on Feb. 20. Their prize, a $50,000 cash gift, will be distributed to six non-profit organizations of their choice. The award is the gift of the late Jane Freund Harris and Whitney Harris. In 1999 they established the award, to be given to a husband and wife who are dedicated to improving the St. Louis community.

Dickson Street stationA collaborative light-rail master plan involving close to 50 architecture students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the University of Arkansas has won a national Education Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. The award, one of only three given this year, will be presented in May during the AIA National Convention in San Antonio.

Photo by Joe AngelesThe Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present The 78th Annual Fashion Design Show featuring student works at Saint Louis Galleria May 6. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza will feature more than 50 professional and volunteer models wearing more than 150 outfits created by 19 seniors and 12 juniors from the school’s Fashion Design program.

From the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now to Elmer Fudd singing “kill da wabbit” in What’s Opera, Doc?, “Ride of the Valkyries” by Richard Wagner (1813-83) is one of the most recognized motifs in Western music. The Washington University Opera will perform “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1870) as part of its “Evening at the Opera” concert at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 4 and 5,

The Washington University Concert Choir and the Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present the 2007 Chancellor’s Concert at 3 p.m. April 29 in the University’s E. Desmond Lee Auditorium at 560 Trinity Ave.

“A Temple of Texts” by William H. Gass, Ph.D., the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is the 2007 winner of the $30,000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The Capote Award, the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language, is administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

*White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, AZ*Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is celebrated as one of the world’s foremost landscape photographers. In May, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Ansel Adams: Reverence for Life, an exhibition of photographs showcasing works from the personal collections of the Adams family.

*Untitled (Pollock/Titian) #4*Over the last two decades, Andrea Fraser has dramatized the relationship between art and its audiences through a series of performances, videos, and photographs. In May, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Andrea Fraser, “What do I, as an artist, provide?,” the artist’s first Midwestern solo exhibition. The exhibition will include performance-based videos, photographs, and other works dating from the mid-1980s to the present.