Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Art fulfills many roles. One is to start conversation. Beginning Friday, Sept. 11, and continuing throughout the fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present nearly two dozen free public events, ranging from lectures, gallery talks and panel discussions to concerts, film screenings and all-ages activities.

Weil served on the faculty for 37 years as an art historian, and his contributions as a teacher, scholar, administrator and benefactor have left an indelible mark on the university and generations of students.

Thanks to the alumni network at Washington University, Justin Au, Sam Fox School, Class of 2015, was able to spend his summer working on a music video for the popular band OK Go. The video ended up going viral.

ISSUES Magazine has won the 2015 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals from the Center of Architecture in New York. Launched in 2012, the magazine explores links between architecture, design and social issues.

Architect and structural engineer Guy Nordenson, who began his career as a draftsman for R. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, will launch the Sam Fox School’s fall Public Lecture Series with a free talk Monday, Sept. 14. In all, the series will feature 10 presentations by nationally and internationally known artists, architects, curators and designers.

The gesture is optimistic. The weapon has been removed from the streets, sliced in two and encased in frosted bubbles. In “SMAC” (2014), artist duo CLUB S+S offers an aesthetic antibody to the gun violence epidemic. On Sept. 16, the Sam Fox School will present “SMAC” as part of “Guns in the Hands of Artists,” opening in the Des Lee Gallery in downtown St. Louis.

From the fall of communism to the rise of digital technology, the 1990s were marked by a series of radical transformations. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will explore some of the era’s most pressing social, political and technological issues with “Rotation 2: Contemporary Art from the Peter Norton Gift.”

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents “World War I: War of Images, Images of War.” Drawn primarily from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where it debuted in fall 2014, the exhibition features more than 150 objects that together chart a chronological path from exuberant outbreak through years of grinding combat and into the long, unsettled aftermath.

The city is filled with stories and tells stories of its own. Last fall, the Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School — with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — launched The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative exploring historical and contemporary segregation across the globe and in St. Louis. Funded projects include an oral history of the Ferguson movement, launched this summer by Jeffrey McCune, PhD, Clarissa Rile Hayward, PhD, and Meredith Evans, PhD.

​Victims of chronic flooding, dozens of homes in Baden neighborhood will be demolished this summer. But a team of Washington University in St. Louis researchers, together with the City of St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Missouri Department of Conservation, are determined to help the community create something better in the neighborhood.​