Arts & Culture

Oskar Eustis, one of the most admired figures in contemporary American theater, will present the annual Helen Clanton Morrin Lecture March 26 for the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

The 2018 African Film Festival at Washington University in St. Louis will not feature any movies about Wakanda, the fictional setting of the blockbuster “Black Panther.” But it will showcase Nigeria, Senegal and the Congo. The free festival runs March 23-25.

Opera star Susan Graham, dubbed “America’s favorite mezzo” by Gramophone magazine, will perform “Frauenliebe und-leben: Variations,” a solo recital pairing Robert Schumann’s beloved song cycle with related works by Edvard Grieg, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and others.

The Washington University Choirs, Wind Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra will join forces March 2 for the 2018 Chancellor’s Concert — the university’s largest musical event of the year.

Poet Eileen G’Sell and guitarist William Lenihan will join pianist Jay Oliver and drummer Steve Davis for an evening of music and spoken word as part of the Jazz at Holmes Series.

Multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson and sculptor Jill Downen have won the 2018 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards. The awards are presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Artists receive $25,000 to advance their studio practices.

For China’s Dai minority, the peacock is a symbol of both grace and power. That’s why choreographer Kristine Xu chose a traditional Dai peacock dance for this year’s Lunar New Year Festival, which will take place Feb. 2 and 3 in Edison Theatre.

For more than a century, the area between Brookings Hall and Skinker Boulevard has served as a welcoming “front door” to Washington University’s Danforth Campus. This spring, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will explore the area’s evolution, as well as the complex relationship between planning, building design and construction, with “Transformative Visions: Washington University’s East End, Then and Now.”

South African artist Diane Victor, who is known for her delicate, ephemeral-seeming portraits of missing children, AIDS clinic patients and other vulnerable populations, will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art’s spring Public Lecture Series with a free talk Monday, Feb. 5.

Sibling pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque — praised by The New York Times as “the best piano duet in front of an audience today” — will perform four-hand works by Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass and Bryce Dessner (known to many as guitarist for The National) Jan. 28 as part of the Great Artists Series at Washington University in St. Louis.