Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

The newly expanded and renovated Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will reopen to the public Sept. 28 with “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life,” a major exhibition collecting dozens of artworks by the renowned Chinese dissident artist and activist.

Recently appointed to the university’s board of trustees, alumna Vicki Match Suna serves the university in numerous ways. She has particularly enjoyed being involved in the university’s recent capital project to transform the east end of the Danforth Campus.

Artist Anne Schaefer, a 2001 alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, discusses “it comes and it goes,” a new 12-panel mural she recently installed in the school’s Anabeth and John Weil Hall.

The Kemper Art Museum will present more than a dozen events this fall relating to the exhibition “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life.” Tickets to a Sept. 26 Q&A with the world renowned artist and activist will be available to museum members and students beginning Aug. 29.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its fall Public Lecture Series Sept. 19 with Swiss architect Patrick Gmür. Other events will include a Q&A with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the symposium “Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital.”

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will dedicate its new William A. Bernoudy Architecture Studio, thanks to a $1.5 million gift from the Gertrude & William A. Bernoudy Foundation. Located within Anabeth and John Weil Hall, the 6,580-square-foot space will provide state-of-the-art facilities for the school’s nationally ranked Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design.

Images of children locked in prison-like conditions have sparked heated debates about U.S. immigration policy, the role of the built environment, and the line between legitimate security and intentional cruelty. But underlying such debates is a simple question: “Is it possible to design a border architecture that is welcoming rather than foreboding?”

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ 2019 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition features work by 17 graduating students. Works in various media explore themes such as the politics of race, the role of gender, the poetics of the everyday, and utopian or dystopian futures.

With speeds of nearly 700 miles per hour, hyperloop technology has the potential to revolutionize land-based transportation. But with that revolution comes new challenges for both urban destinations and rural environments. This spring, students and faculty from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts worked with Virgin Hyperloop One to investigate the impacts and potentials of the proposed Missouri route from St. Louis to Kansas City.

As a kid biking the streets of Kinloch and Ferguson, Mo., Ryan A. Wilson was drawn to construction sites. Now the Sam Fox School master’s candidate is working on ambitious projects and exploring architecture’s capacity for rebuilding community.