Arts & Culture

Voice messages sound in a lonely apartment. Robert is turning 35. “Happy birthday,” intone his friends. “You don’t look it.” Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” examines the nature of marriage and commitment through eyes of an aging lothario — the last dangerously unattached member of his social circle.​​​

With “Boîte-en-valise,” Marcel Duchamp created an artistic retrospective the size of a salesman’s sample case. Now the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has acquired for its permanent collection an early example of this important work by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists.

Johannesburg is a modern global city, the second-largest in Africa. Last summer, the students and faculty in the Sam Fox School traveled there to study new efforts to overcome the legacy of apartheid design.

In “The Divine Buoyancy of Being,” Cary Simowitz explores what happens when youthful dreams collide with economic reality, entry-level positions and the unintended consequences of a governmental shutdown.

In response to the Syrian crisis, many in St. Louis have called for the city to increase its acceptance of refugees. Architectural historian Michael Allen says existing housing stock could easily accommodate thousands of new residents.

A play is a text but also a performance. Dance is a discipline but also a communication. To be truly understood, both must be experienced live. For its 2015-16 season, the Performing Arts Department will present classic comedy and contemporary drama as well as original works by faculty and students.

Art fulfills many roles. One is to start conversation. Beginning Friday, Sept. 11, and continuing throughout the fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present nearly two dozen free public events, ranging from lectures, gallery talks and panel discussions to concerts, film screenings and all-ages activities.

The gesture is optimistic. The weapon has been removed from the streets, sliced in two and encased in frosted bubbles. In “SMAC” (2014), artist duo CLUB S+S offers an aesthetic antibody to the gun violence epidemic. On Sept. 16, the Sam Fox School will present “SMAC” as part of “Guns in the Hands of Artists,” opening in the Des Lee Gallery in downtown St. Louis.

From the fall of communism to the rise of digital technology, the 1990s were marked by a series of radical transformations. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will explore some of the era’s most pressing social, political and technological issues with “Rotation 2: Contemporary Art from the Peter Norton Gift.”

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents “World War I: War of Images, Images of War.” Drawn primarily from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where it debuted in fall 2014, the exhibition features more than 150 objects that together chart a chronological path from exuberant outbreak through years of grinding combat and into the long, unsettled aftermath.