Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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.

A still from *Having a Ball*, one of three circus-themed e-cards by Kristine Ng.For the estimated 7 to10 million blind and visually impaired Americans, the Internet has proven to be the most powerful — and most empowering — tool since Braille. Widely available software programs such as JAWS for Windows and Windows-Eyes can read aloud online newspapers and magazines and other previously inaccessible materials. Yet as bandwidth and memory improve, businesses have increasingly sought to drive customers to glitzy, graphics-heavy Web sites that are more difficult, if not impossible, for blind users to navigate. Thanks to a group of senior design students at Washington University in St. Louis, blind and visually impaired Web users can now experience some of the Internet’s increasingly expansive potential. The 23 students — design, illustration and advertising majors in the School of Art — have created some of the first Web sites showcasing new accessibility components of Macromedia Flash MX, the increasingly popular authoring tool for Web interfaces, interactive video, Web-based games, streaming music and other multimedia content.

Stephen Murray, a leading authority on medieval art and architecture and founder of the Visual Media Center at Columbia University, will speak on “Medieval Architecture and the New Media: Representing and Creating Humanistic Content” at 6 p.m. Nov. 18 at the Gallery of Art. A reception for Murray will immediately follow the talk. A specialist […]

Photo by Mary ButkusTwo benches honoring architecture Dean Cynthia Weese were installed recently outside of Givens Hall.