Arts & Culture

The Black Rep will launch its 2015-16 season with “Tell Me Somethin’ Good” at Washington University Sept. 2-20. The decades-spanning musical revue, one of the company’s most popular shows, is the first of three productions The Black Rep will present this year in the university’s Edison Theatre.

The city is filled with stories and tells stories of its own. Last fall, the Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School — with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — launched The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative exploring historical and contemporary segregation across the globe and in St. Louis. Funded projects include an oral history of the Ferguson movement, launched this summer by Jeffrey McCune, PhD, Clarissa Rile Hayward, PhD, and Meredith Evans, PhD.

​Barry R. Schactman, professor emeritus of drawing and painting in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, died at his home Friday, July 3, 2015, surrounded by family and friends, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

Kristina Kleutghen, PhD, has been selected as the inaugural David W. Mesker Career Development Professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis. A specialist in early modern and modern Chinese art, Kleutghen’s research investigates Sino-foreign interaction, the imperial court, optical devices and connections to visual culture, science and mathematics.

In 1976, as a business major at Washington University in St. Louis, Ron Himes began staging theatrical performances. Thirty-eight seasons later, Himes remains founder and producing director for The Black Rep, one of the nation’s largest and most respected African-American theater companies.

“Rotation 1: Contemporary Art from the Peter Norton Gift” opens Friday, May 1 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The exhibition will offer St. Louis museum-goers their first chance to view highlights from a major recent gift by the renowned arts philanthropist and software entrepreneur.

On a frosty winter’s night in 1909, five members of the Yale Glee Club convened at Mory’s Temple Bar to escape the New Haven cold. Thus was born the world’s oldest and best-known collegiate a cappella group. On Monday, April 27, the Whiffenpoofs will descend on Washington University in St. Louis for a puckish evening of traditional and popular song.

The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will honor professor emeritus Harold Blumenfeld, who died last fall at he age of 91, with a Memorial Concert in Graham Chapel April 19. The performance will feature Blumenfeld’s settings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Arthur Rimbaud as well as works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Paul Hindemith and Franz Schubert.

An inaugural exhibit of images by scientists, titled “Research as Art,” held April 3, included eerie landscapes created by vortices in superfluids, smeared false-color data from satellite-borne instruments, three-dimensional images of grains that exploded out of supernovas and many more enigmatic and colorful images.

​The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present its 86th Annual Fashion Design Show at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 26. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza, which takes place in Union Station, will features dozens of models wearing scores of outfits by 27 sophomore, junior and senior designers.