Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Richard Meyer, associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7. The series continues through Nov. 9.

Joseph R. Passonneau, who served as dean of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis from 1956-67, died in his sleep Monday, Aug. 22, at his home in Washington, D.C., following an extended illness. He was 90.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received an extraordinary gift from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation to support the acquisition of new works by artists living and working in Germany. This fall, the Kemper Art Museum will present Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art From Germany. The exhibition will feature the first five works acquired thanks to the Kemper gift — monumentally scaled pieces by Franz Ackermann, Thomas Demand, Sergej Jensen, Charline von Heyl, and Corinne Wasmuht — along with significant works already in the permanent collection by Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as a major installation, on loan for the exhibition, by Hans-Peter Feldmann.

The Sukkah is an ancient yet ephemeral form of architecture. In Jewish tradition, these small temporary structures — places to share meals, entertain, sleep and rejoice — are erected each autumn during the weeklong holiday of Sukkot. In October, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, in partnership with St. Louis Hillel at Washington University and The Museum of ImaJewnation, will host Sukkah City STL, a design competition and exhibition that reimagines the Sukkah through the lens of contemporary art and architecture.

With utopian ambition and scientific precision, Tomás Saraceno redefines both the built environment and the role of the artist. His spectacular, gravity-defying installations and visionary sculptural models — inspired by clouds, bubbles, spider webs and other natural structures — explore connections between complex social and ecological systems while raising pointed questions about our own relationships to an increasingly fragile natural world. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, an exhibition highlighting the breadth of Saraceno’s cross-disciplinary practice.

The world today feels increasingly globalized and interconnected, yet also increasingly precarious, as old certainties — historical, ideological and material — give way to ever-present threats of climate change, economic collapse and terrorism. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany, one of four major exhibitions slated for the 2011-12 academic year. Also opening in the fall will be Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, followed in the spring by John Stezaker, the first major solo museum exhibition of works by this contemporary British artist, and Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time.

Praised as “a sly satire of celebrity, consumerism, and the art world” by the Los Angeles Times, the Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop has been one of the year’s most talked-about films, capturing the notoriously elusive Bansky and other prominent street artists at work and in their own words. At 8:30 p.m. Monday, July 18, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host an outdoor screening of Exit Through the Gift Shop in the museum’s east parking lot. 

Hungarian installation artist Balázs Kicsiny is the 2011-12 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Based in Budapest, Kicsiny is among Hungary’s most highly regarded contemporary artists, known for large-scale sculptural installations, or “frozen performances,” that draw equally on the languages of theater, philosophy and the visual arts. 

It is among the most indelible images of Cold War-era film: Slim Pickens, as Major “King” Kong, riding an atom bomb to extinction, cowboy hat waving in the wind. The scene is from Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black political satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). On June 17, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present a free outdoor screening of Dr. Strangelove in conjunction with the exhibition Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is one of the oldest university museums in the country. This summer, the museum will resume its Lunch & Learn program, a popular series of lunchtime tours open to any campus department or group.