Arts & Culture

Tim Portlock, associate professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a 2019 Artists Fellowship from the Regional Arts Commission. Two alumni, Margaret Keller (MFA ‘89) and William Morris (BFA ‘85), are also among the honorees.

Virtuoso pianist Nikolai Lugansky, praised for his “plush sound and plenty impetuosity” by The New York Times, will open Washington University’s third Great Artists Series Feb. 10 with works by Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Bob Smith was a Renaissance man — a talented painter, designer and bookmaker who trained generations of students while earning national renown for his sculptural fountain designs. In “Robert C. Smith: An Eclectic Studio & A Remarkable Career,” the Sam Fox School will showcase more than 100 works by the longtime professor, who died last fall at the age of 92.

Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, will present “Infinite Abstraction,” an exhibition of new printed paintings, at the Bruno David Gallery beginning Jan. 24.

Xiaohua Fei, MArch ’00, founded X-urban Associates, an architecture firm in China, after earning his master’s in architecture from Washington University.

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and his wife, Risa Zwerling Wrighton, will receive the 2019 Rosa L. Parks Award for their service to St. Louis’ young people at Washington University in St. Louis’ Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 21, in Graham Chapel.

The Black Rep will present the world premiere of the drama “Canfield Drive” in Edison Theatre Jan. 9. The play, some four years in the making, runs through Jan. 27 and explores how two powerful journalists from very different ideological perspectives grapple with the 2014 death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.