Arts & Culture

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch a new master of fine arts degree in illustration and visual culture in fall 2019. The program — the first of its kind in the Midwest — will combine intensive studio practice with an emphasis on scholarly and theoretical analysis.

The Brooksfields are determined to take a trip. Nothing will stop them — not the blizzard, not the mistress, not even the drug dealers. In “Florida,” Lucas Marschke recounts a dysfunctional family vacation for the ages. This weekend, “Florida” will receive its world-premiere staged reading at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis welcome Dave Hullfish Bailey as their 2018-19 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles, the fellowship consists of two month-long residencies, during which Bailey will lead studios in the Sam Fox School while preparing an exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.

In “The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs,” the Sam Fox School’s Cheryl Wassenaar and Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer explore the ways our distinct inner voices combine to create a “bureaucracy of the mind.”

Paul Tran, a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, is one of five young poets awarded a $25,800 prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.

Kinga Pabjan, project manager for Team WashU at the 2018 Solar Decathlon China, discusses Lotus House, 3D printing and the future of sustainable design.

Two WashU alumni starred in a new off-Broadway production examining the dynamics of a Muslim immigrant family in contemporary England.

Gustavo Lopez permeates the insular, misunderstood world of flamenco, hoping to spread its joys and mysteries.

The transformation of the John M. Olin Library provides a new home for the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections. With more than 1,000 collections, the ­department is among academia’s largest and most diverse.

The 2018 James Harrison Steedman Fellowship in Architecture asks how infrastructure shapes our individual and collective environments. The biennial research competition for early-career architects is organized by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, in concert with AIA St. Louis. Registration opens Aug. 15 and proposals are due Nov 1.