Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

The show features more than 50 works by 23 of China’s finest contemporary practitioners; it opens with a reception from 6-8 p.m. today.

“Cohen’s world is a world of ongoing catastrophe, in which natural and manmade disasters seem to radiate triumphant,” said guest curator Lutz Koepnick.

Photo by Constantine E. MichaelidesChurches and chapels comprise the Aegean Islands’ most distinctive architectural forms.The history of architecture is largely the history of official buildings commissioned by ruling elites. Yet with the home improvement market expected to reach record-high levels in 2003, it is worth remembering that the true character of any city or town rests largely on the vernacular traditions of ordinary, often architecturally untrained citizens. In his forthcoming book The Aegean Crucible, Constantine E. Michaelides, emeritus dean and professor of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, explains how many of the Greek island’s most defining forms were developed by local builders responding to particular climatic, cultural and political circumstances.

Harriet Hosmer, Portrait of Wayman Crow, Sr., 1866, Carrara marbleSince its founding in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis has grown from a small private school to one of the nation’s premiere research universities. Influence 150: 150 Years of Shaping a City, a Nation, the World, which opens Sept. 5 at the Gallery of Art, celebrates that journey with hundreds of archival photographs, drawings, posters, letters, scrapbooks and other materials chronicling key events, people and discoveries in the life of the university.

*Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, 2002*Chicago photographer Alan Cohen has traveled the world tracing overlapping waves of stone, earth, asphalt, brick and concrete — the geologic and manmade ground — that demark physical and perceptual “sites” such as national borders, the path of the equator and places of historic violence. This fall, the Gallery of Art at Washington University in St. Louis will survey Cohen’s work since the mid-1990s as part of its Contemporary Projects Series.

*Big Baby* by Charles BurnsGreat art, of course, can speak for itself, but like any other social activity, it can also spur strong opinions, heated debate and intellectual illumination. This fall, the Washington University Gallery of Art will present a series of special Friday evening events — including films, lectures, tours, concerts and artists’ talks — designed to compliment its fall exhibitions.

Nationally speaking, high school-level courses in graphic design, as opposed to general art or special projects such as yearbooks or student newspapers, are surprisingly rare. So when venerable University City High School, 7401 Balson Ave., launched a new graphics class last year, a group of visual communications majors from Washington University’s School of Art readily agreed to help tutor students in the fledgling program.

Philip TidwellArchitecture junior Philip Tidwell has won the 2003 Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence. Tidwell’s essay was selected from a field of 130 entries by students representing 31 countries and 81 undergraduate architecture programs on six continents.

A page from *Selected Poems* by MorrisAmerican poet John N. Morris never achieved widespread public acclaim in his lifetime, but those who knew him well — including some of the nation’s most distinguished poets and critics — expect his star to rise with publication of two books showcasing both his life and his life’s work. “Read him and you cannot live your own life innocently again,” suggests Helen Vendler, one of the nation’s leading literary critics. Morris, who died in 1997, was a professor of English literature in Arts & Sciences for 30 years at Washington University in St. Louis.

Photo by Joe AngelesFashion Show May 4Art in Motion, the 74th annual School of Art Fashion Show, will take to the catwalk at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 4, at Saint Louis Galleria. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza features dozens of professional and volunteer models wearing more than 100 outfits created by the School of Art’s 11 senior and nine junior fashion design majors.