Arts & Culture

KiberdDeclan Kiberd, one of the world’s preeminent scholars of modern Irish literature, will launch Washington University’s fall Writing Program Reading Series in Arts & Sciences with a pair of talks Sept. 9 and 11.

Harriet Hosmer, Portrait of Wayman Crow, Sr., 1866, Carrara marbleSince its founding in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis has grown from a small private school to one of the nation’s premiere research universities. Influence 150: 150 Years of Shaping a City, a Nation, the World, which opens Sept. 5 at the Gallery of Art, celebrates that journey with hundreds of archival photographs, drawings, posters, letters, scrapbooks and other materials chronicling key events, people and discoveries in the life of the university.

*Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, 2002*Chicago photographer Alan Cohen has traveled the world tracing overlapping waves of stone, earth, asphalt, brick and concrete — the geologic and manmade ground — that demark physical and perceptual “sites” such as national borders, the path of the equator and places of historic violence. This fall, the Gallery of Art at Washington University in St. Louis will survey Cohen’s work since the mid-1990s as part of its Contemporary Projects Series.

*Big Baby* by Charles BurnsGreat art, of course, can speak for itself, but like any other social activity, it can also spur strong opinions, heated debate and intellectual illumination. This fall, the Washington University Gallery of Art will present a series of special Friday evening events — including films, lectures, tours, concerts and artists’ talks — designed to compliment its fall exhibitions.

Martin Luther King, Jr.August 28 marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the most famous and stirring addresses in U.S. history. In commemoration, the International Writers Center (IWC) in Arts & Sciences will host a public roundtable with St. Louis scholars and civil rights activists. The event also includes a video presentation of King’s entire, 15-minute address.

Illustration from a Hans Christian Andersen story.What is “children’s literature?” As we pause between the perfect, all-ages storms of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film adaptation, the answer seems less clear than ever. In the current issue of Belle Lettres, a bi-monthly publication of Washington University’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences, a culture critic and a director of teacher education explain that the genre, always hard to define, remains poorly understood and frequently underestimated.

Workshops will be held weekdays from 9:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. The teachers — John Dalton in fiction, Ruth Ellen Kocher in poetry and Rockwell Gray in creative nonfiction — will provide both instruction in the genre and constructive criticism of participants’ work.

Concerts are at 7:30 p.m. every Sunday night in July in Brookings Quadrangle.

Nationally speaking, high school-level courses in graphic design, as opposed to general art or special projects such as yearbooks or student newspapers, are surprisingly rare. So when venerable University City High School, 7401 Balson Ave., launched a new graphics class last year, a group of visual communications majors from Washington University’s School of Art readily agreed to help tutor students in the fledgling program.

Philip TidwellArchitecture junior Philip Tidwell has won the 2003 Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence. Tidwell’s essay was selected from a field of 130 entries by students representing 31 countries and 81 undergraduate architecture programs on six continents.