Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

The Washington University Gallery of Art will host An Evening With Comic Artists Charles Burns and Gary Panter at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27, in Steinberg Auditorium.

Iain Boyd Whyte, professor of architectural history at the University of Edinburgh, will speak for the Washington University Gallery of Art at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in Steinberg Auditorium.

Wang Haichen, *Garden Blues* (2002), porcelainChina boasts one of the world’s oldest and richest pottery traditions, yet only in recent years have Chinese ceramicists begun to emerge as individual “studio artists,” rather than collective practitioners. The Washington University School of Art’s Des Lee Gallery explores this burgeoning “new age” in Chinese Ceramics Today: Between Tradition and Contemporary Expression, an exhibition of works by 23 contemporary ceramicists from mainland China and Hong Kong.

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.