Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

A search is under way to fill a new vice provost position in the Office of the Provost whose initial focus will be on diversity and faculty development, among other areas of university-wide importance. An advisory committee has been formed that will identify and recommend candidates from within the Washington University community.

Architect Julie Eizenberg and visual artist Ann Hamilton will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series with a pair of talks Sept. 13 and 15.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will host a traveling exhibition of design concepts by five architectural teams vying to reshape the area surrounding Eero Saarinen’s iconic Gateway Arch. The teams — which among them include seven faculty from the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — are finalists in an international competition organized by the CityArchRiver 2015 Foundation. Titled “Framing a Modern Masterpiece,” the competition aims to improve connections and transitions between the Arch grounds, downtown St. Louis and the Mississippi riverfront.  

Ashley Pearson, a graduate architecture student in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, miters lumber to length for a new shade pavilion in University City’s Heman Park. The pavilion is the centerpiece of a summer design/build class led by Carl Safe, professor of architecture.

A new degree, the bachelor of science in sustainability, that provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and resolving today’s most pressing and complex environmental, economic and social challenges, has been developed at University College, the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences. The program, which will be offered beginning with the start of the semester Aug. 31, treats sustainable living from multiple perspectives — scientific, political, economic, social, historical, philosophical, anthropological and literary. 

In the decades following the Second World War, European and American artists developed a wide range of strategies and approaches to abstract painting and sculpture. This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection, showcasing more than a dozen large-scale yet rarely seen works that span gestural and lyrical abstraction, color-field painting, hard-edge abstraction and assemblage.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Joe Deal, who served as dean of Washington University’s School of Art from 1989-99, died in hospice Friday, June 18, in Providence, RI, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 62.

Film and photography are in many ways defined by the tensions between them: narrative vs. static, still vs. moving images. This summer, in conjunction with the exhibition Focus on Photography, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present a pair of feature-length films, Andy Warhol and In the Land of the War Canoes, that highlight connections between the two media.

Internationally acclaimed silversmith Heikki Seppä, professor emeritus in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art’s College of Art, died Tuesday, May 18, at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash. He was 83. One of the most innovative and influential silversmiths of the latter 20th century, Seppä helped introduce the technique of reticulation to the United States while also developing and popularizing new methods for shaping sheet metal into three-dimensional shell structures.

John Witty, the Record‘s 2010 Outstanding Graduate in Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has studied the Renaissance and could be called a bit of a Renaissance man. He’ll earn a bachelor of fine arts in printmaking from the Sam Fox School with majors in art history and German, both in Arts & Sciences.