Arts & Culture

In 2004, Arden Farhi, AB ’07, was a student volunteer for the Bush-Kerry debate. He was assigned to work with CBS and knew he’d found his calling. Now he travels the country and the world producing segments for CBS News’ chief White House correspondent.

With “Here Be Dragons,” his new exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Sam Fox School dean Carmon Colangelo examines the limits of knowledge and the precarious social and political states that define our contemporary moment.

How do we define ourselves? What traits do we admire, what talents do we cultivate? And what happens if we pick the wrong things? In “Thinking It,” playwright-in-residence Carter W. Lewis examines the intoxicating power of love as well as the choices — deliberate and otherwise — that shape who we are and who we become.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, millions of Americans watched Donald Trump play the successful businessman on NBC’s hit reality show “The Apprentice.” Both the exposure and the experience served him well, said Richard Chapman, senior lecturer in film & media studies in Arts & Sciences.

More than three dozen alumni of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have contributed works to “Ontology of Influence,” an exhibition paying homage to sculptor Ron Leax, the Halsey C. Ives Professor of Art.

New conductor Horst Buchholz and new director of strings Amy Greenhalgh will make their debuts with the Washington University Symphony Orchestra Oct. 30. The concert will take place at The E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall in the 560 Music Center.

Cakes typically evoke birthday parties and celebrations. But a recent project by Ebony G. Patterson — a 2006 alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts — transformed the idea of the cake into something entirely more serious.

South Central Los Angeles, 1976. The lawns are manicured, the palm trees sway, the savings bonds are tucked optimistically away. But the Youth is restless. In “Passing Strange,” the singer and playwright Stew offers a semi-autobiographical account of his journey to artistic self-discovery. The Performing Arts Department will present the Tony Award-winning rock musical Oct. 21-30 in Edison Theatre.

Thousands of photographers, videographers and writers will descend on Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 9 to cover the presidential debate. But in mid-20th-century America, another sort of journalist was part of the media mix — the illustrator. The Douglas B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library features hundreds of images of politicians, the electoral process and American voters.

Mark Sparks, principal flute for the St. Louis Symphony, and pianist Peter Henderson will launch the Danforth University Center’s fall Chamber Music Series Sept. 27 with music of Max Bruch, Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.