Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Architecture students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have built dozens of outdoor benches for Patrick Henry Academy in downtown St. Louis. Constructed of cedar, oak and walnut, the benches are simply designed yet boast a telling detail: Legs attach to seat via “wedged through tenons,” a complicated form of joinery long associated with fine furniture-making. The benches are one facet of an award-winning, two-semester studio designed to help the historic elementary reinvent itself as a green school.

Architect Jason Mrdeza has won Washington University in St. Louis’ 2012 Steedman Fellowship in Architecture International Design Competition. Sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the biennial competition is open to young architects from around the world and carries a $50,000 first place award to support study and research abroad — making it one of the largest competition prizes in the United States. Mrdeza’s winning design was chosen from among 120 entrants representing more than 20 nations.

Poor Jerome. A talented young artist, he escapes high school with earnest dreams and Picasso posters only to founder on the rocks of a small East Coast art school. So begins Art School Confidential, the withering comedy by writer Dan Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff. On Friday, June 8, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present a free outdoor screening of Art School Confidential as part of its summer Friday Nights at the Kemper series.

Tingting Wu, the Record’s Outstanding Graduate in architecture from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has a strong interest in blending natural wilderness with man-made wilderness. A native of Shanghai, China, she creates architecture at the intersection of art and landscape.

More than a dozen architecture students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts tested a series of experimental handmade kites along the windy slopes of Art Hill in Forest Park April 26. The kites were designed and built as part of an undergraduate studio on architectural representation led by Sung Ho Kim, associate professor of architecture.

It was a night of glitz and glamour, as an audience of more than 200 gathered in Plaza Frontenac April 29, for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ 83rd annual Fashion Design Show. Titled Leaving a Legacy, the show was coordinated by Jennifer Ingram, the W. H. Smith Visiting Assistant Professor of Fashion, and featured dozens of students wearing scores of outfits by the Fashion Design Program’s nine seniors and ten juniors.

Mara MacMahon, who graduates May 18 with a bachelor’s of arts in biology in Arts & Sciences and of fine arts in communication design, continues a tradition that dates back to the Renaissance of seeking lifelike portrayals of the human body. But she goes way beyond the Renaissance masters, and is the Record’s Outstanding Graduate in Art from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

The College of Arts and University Libraries hosted the 15th annual open house of the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book May 1 in Walker Hall. During the open house, students display their work from the academic year and compete for the Nancy Award, which recognizes outstanding student achievement in book design. 

Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present its annual MFA Thesis Exhibition in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum May 4 to Aug. 6. Curated by Meredith Malone, associate curator at the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition will feature projects by 23 graduating master of fine arts candidates in the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art.

During World War II, young lieutenant Frederick Hartt was assigned a jeep and a driver and charged with locating, securing and repatriating hundreds of works of art. Later, as a curator at Washington University from 1949-60, the famed Renaissance scholar helped to build one of the nation’s finest university collections of 20th-century modernism. This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present 27 of those works in Frederick Hartt and American Abstraction in the 1950s.