Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Original cover art, “Love and Rockets” #15There is no shortcut from popular art to cultural respectability, but few have wandered longer than comic book, which has only recently begun to receive its critical and scholarly due. In October, the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis will present The Rubber Frame: Culture and Comics, a book and a pair of complementary exhibitions that together trace the evolution of comics from early precursors in 18th and 19th century England and Switzerland to turn-of-the-last-century newspapers, the raucous undergrounds of the 1960s and ’70s and the literary alternative comics of today.

A portion of Parking Lot No. 2 — at the southeast corner of the Hilltop Campus — will be closed through August 2006.

A $500,000 gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer and the $125,000 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award will bolster the Sam Fox Arts Center.

Manfred Pernice, “Untitled (Bicycle Rack),” 2002.The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis is recipient of a $125,000 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. The award will support Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, the inaugural loan exhibition in the museum’s new facilities, scheduled to open in Fall 2006.

Maki & Associates, TokyoWashington University’s planned Sam Fox Arts Center.A $500,000 gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer, founder and president of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, has established the first permanent endowment fund for the Sam Fox Arts Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

MacKeithPeter MacKeith has been appointed associate director of the Sam Fox Arts Center at Washington University in St. Louis. MacKeith, who also serves as associate dean for the School of Architecture, will be responsible for public programming; collaborative teaching and research; and organization of the planned Whitaker Foundation Learning Lab.

A page entitled, “Rankings of WUSTL by News Media.”

An award-winning author and designer, he also serves as associate dean in the School of Architecture and will serve as academic liaison to the School of Art.

Over the next two years, Exile and Modernism will travel to four German museums and one in the United States.

Detail from Max Beckmann’s “Four Men Around a Table” (1943).H.W. Janson (1913-1982) is among the 20th century’s most influential art historians. Since 1962, his textbook History of Art, now in its sixth edition, has been used in countless college surveys and sold four million copies in 14 languages. Yet Janson, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the mid-1930s to protest Nazi cultural policies, remains little known in his former country. That’s about to change, thanks to Exile and Modernism: H.W. Janson and the Collection of Washington University in St. Louis, a touring exhibition organized by the university’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.