Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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.

In the graphics art world, Natalie Sklobovskaya is that rare commodity — a triple threat. Sklobovskaya is not only a driven illustrator, but she also enjoys computer programing, writing and playing music, and creating websites. Those talents enable a nice collision of creativity that have allowed her to draw comics, animate them, score a soundtrack and upload them to a website she designed.She’ll graduate May 20 with a double major in communication design and computer science.

Architecture is a global profession. Just ask Aaron Plewke, who will receive his master’s degree May 20 from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. In recent months, Plewke, a Danforth Scholar in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, and his fiance, fellow graduate student Meredith Klein, have designed and managed construction of WUSTL’s new East Asian Study Center in Shanghai — all from their studios in Givens Hall.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present two new exhibitions beginning Friday, May 6, and running through Monday, Aug. 1. Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation is the first solo museum exhibition in the American Midwest for the influential conceptual artist, who lives and works in Cologne, Germany. The 2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition will feature projects by 24 graduating master of fine arts candidates in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Mark S. Weil, PhD, the E. Desmond Lee Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences and one of Washington University’s most prominent and long-serving professors, is providing the institution with a gift of $2,525,000 to support Arts & Sciences and programs in the humanities. From this gift, an endowed fund of $250,000 will be established to support the University Libraries.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts honored eight outstanding architecture and art alumni at its fourth annual Awards for Distinction dinner April 28 at the Coronado Ballroom in St. Louis. The awards recognized graduates who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership and vision through their contributions to the practices of art, architecture and design, as well as to WUSTL and the Sam Fox School.