Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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.​

​Barry R. Schactman, professor emeritus of drawing and painting in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, died at his home Friday, July 3, 2015, surrounded by family and friends, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

Nine Washington University in St. Louis alumni have been selected to conduct research or teach English this year as participants in the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The program recognizes talented students who are committed to promoting global collaboration and understanding through research and teaching.

​​The International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) has announced the winners from its 2015 call for proposals. This year, the center awarded funds to 10 projects involving nearly 30 Washington University faculty from four schools.

Kristina Kleutghen, PhD, has been selected as the inaugural David W. Mesker Career Development Professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis. A specialist in early modern and modern Chinese art, Kleutghen’s research investigates Sino-foreign interaction, the imperial court, optical devices and connections to visual culture, science and mathematics.