Arts & Culture

St. Louis piano legend Ptah Williams will join Washington University in St. Louis guitarist William Lenihan and drummer Steve Davis to launch the fall Jazz at Holmes Series Thursday, Sept. 8.

Coloratura soprano Amy Owens will perform Richard Strauss’ notoriously difficult “Amor” Sept. 18 as part of Washington University’s annual Liederabend. Also on the program will be music of Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert, Antonin Dvořák and Carl Millöcker.

For all the advances of modern medicine, health-care architecture has long been guided by custom and intuition rather than research and testing. That’s changing, thanks to an emerging field known as evidence-based design, said Xiaobo Quan, director of Washington University’s newly formed Center for Health Research & Design.

A collection is not a static thing, a project to be finished. A collection lives and breathes and evolves over time. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum — one of the oldest university museums in the nation — will mark the 10th anniversary of its Fumihiko Maki-designed facility with an ambitious, building-wide installation. “Real / Radical / Psychological: The Collection on Display” steps back from a decade of thematic presentations and, for the first time, presents the esteemed permanent collection in chronological fashion.

The paintings of Adam Turl climb the walls like a rocket hitting exit velocity – an image slyly reinforced by the telescope installed at their base. Collectively titled “Red Mars,” the group of 10 canvases is currently on view in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum as part of the Sam Fox School’s annual MFA Thesis show.

Embedded in the sidewalks along the Delmar Boulevard Loop are bright brass stars honoring 140 great St. Louisans. This who’s who of St. Louis has among its honorees more than 30 people affiliated with Washington University: professors, alumni, former chancellors and co-founders among them. Test your knowledge of university luminaries in this quiz.

It began as an experiment. Three decades later, the University City Public Art Series is the nation’s longest-running public art collaboration between a university and a local municipality.

Washington University in St. Louis will welcome three of the brightest stars in the classical firmament — Jonathan Biss, Yefim Bronfman and Nathan Gunn — to the 560 Music Center as part of its new Great Artist Series.

An ongoing experiment — an “architectural twin study” — conducted by students, faculty and staff at Washington University on two 100-year-old St. Louis brick buildings produced some remarkable results.