Arts & Culture

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.

The method is strange at first, disconcerting, but new rules and rhythms are quickly internalized. Soon the machines seem almost to speak. In “Telegraph,” recent alumnus Will Jacobs — winner of the 2014 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition at Washington University in St. Louis — explores the wonder and shortcomings of communication technology.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will recognize seven outstanding alumni and friends of the school at its seventh annual Awards for Distinction dinner April 9.

Soprano Kate Reimann, a cofounder of Gateway Opera, and tenor Keith Boyer, named Best Male Opera Singer for 2014 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, will join the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and the Washington University Choirs for the annual Chancellor’s Concert April 12.

In a career spanning more than 40 years and nearly 50 albums, John Abercrombie has established himself as one the masters of jazz guitar. At 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 7, the John Abercrombie Quartet will perform as part of the Jazz at Holmes Series at Washington University in St. Louis.