Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Mike Peters, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning and creator of the award-winning cartoon strip Mother Goose & Grimm, has been selected to give the 2012 Commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. The university’s 151st Commencement will begin at 8:30 a.m. Friday, May 18, in Brookings Quadrangle on the Danforth Campus. Peters earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from WUSTL in 1965.

Fracture, fragmentation and juxtaposition. Over the course of the 20th century, such modernist techniques would become defining traits of both popular and avant-garde film, which in turn would profoundly influence the work of the contemporary British artist John Stezaker. Later this month, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present three classic films — all selected by Stezaker himself — as part of its Fringe Figure Film Series.

As a young child, Josef Albers watched his handyman father paint houses. He grew up to become a famous artist, studying color and reducing images to their simplest shapes. On March 31, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host its spring Community Day, a free afternoon of all-ages activities. Events will include tours, performances, art-making and a reading from the children’s book An Eye for Color: The Story of Josef Albers.

Todd Gitlin, PhD, a noted 1960s cultural scholar and book author, will visit Washington University in St. Louis Wednesday and Thursday, March 28 and 29, to keynote a two-day mini-colloquium exploring the counter-cultural movements of the year 1968, including a special focus on the many literary, social, political and artistic theories spawned by these movements. 

“The goal of our work is to create parks that are intrinsically urban — not places to escape from the city, but places to escape within the city.” So observes landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, currently leading the design team charged with reimagining the 91-acre park surrounding St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch. On March 19, Van Valkenburgh will discuss his work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ spring Public Lecture Series.

Wang Shu, the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, discusses his work with WUSTL architectural historians Robert McCarter, the Sam Fox School’s Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, and Seng Kuan, assistant professor of architecture.

Kathryn A. Dean, director of the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design and professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, was installed as the JoAnne Stolaroff Cotsen Professor of Architecture. The ceremony was held Dec. 2, 2011, in Steinberg Auditorium.

Distinguished architectural historian and critic Robert Bruegmann, author of The Architecture of Harry Weese (2010), Sprawl: A Compact History (2005) and The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chicago 1880-1918 (1997), will deliver the annual AIA St. Louis Scholarship Trust Lecture for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 7.

“Someone at Washington University in St. Louis just hit the lecture jackpot.” So quipped Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s influential architecture critic. On Monday, Feb. 27, just two days before his scheduled talk for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, architect Wang Shu became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, generally considered the profession’s highest honor.

Art may be subjective, but it is not entirely so. Aesthetic interest also can be understood in terms of a work’s power to engage cognitive and perceptual systems common to all human brains. This is the central premise of neuroaesthetics, an emerging field that draws on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to explore questions relating to beauty, artistic expression and art history. It is also the premise behind Art and the Mind-Brain, now on view in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Teaching Gallery.