Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Artists Margaux Crump, Alison McNulty and Yvonne Osei have each won the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards. The awards are presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Winners will receive $25,000 each to advance their studio practices.

Segregation has shaped St. Louis as surely as the waters of the Mississippi River. In “The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson,” 18 scholars follow that troubled course through physical traces, oral histories, fragmented communities and continuing grassroot struggles.

Architecture inspired by biology is not a new concept. But typically, “architecture has imitated the imagery of biology and nature without awareness of the underlying mechanisms,” argue Ram Dixit and Sung Ho Kim in “Cellular Transformations: Between Architecture and Biology.”

With creativity and determination, alumna Jillian Shatken is leading her fashion line, Saylor, toward a most important trend: sustainability.

Cotton fabric is natural, renewable, biodegradable and at least theoretically sustainable. With her patented RECLEM process, WashU fashion associate professor Mary Ruppert-Stroescu hopes to revolutionize how recycled fabrics are processed and used to create new garments.

Meredith Lehman, head of museum education for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, has won a 2021 IDEA Award from the Arts and Culture Accessibility Cooperative.

Aggie Toppins, associate professor and chair of undergraduate design at the Sam Fox School, has won the 2021 SECAC Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement in Graphic Design.

Barcelona collaborative H ARQUITECTES will launch the Sam Fox School’s spring Public Lecture Series Feb. 3. In all, the series will feature 18 talks by nationally and internationally renowned figures, from architects Tatiana Bilbao and Thomas Phifer to artists Maya Muchawsky Parnas and Chitra Ganesh.

Mackenzie Llewellyn, a junior pursuing dual degrees in fashion design and in entrepreneurship, is among the winners of the 2022 Fashion Scholarship Fund competition.

In cynical times, optimism gets a bad rap. But in her new book “Infrastructural Optimism,” Linda C. Samuels argues that optimism is not simply a reflexive emotional state, but a critical driver of public investment, societal progress and — perhaps — democracy itself.