Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Large-scale redevelopment is often pitched as a strategy for reviving struggling downtowns. Yet such projects — with their acres of asphalt and tenuous connections to surrounding environs — are usually poor substitutes for the organic neighborhoods they displace, argues Patty Heyda, an associate professor of urban design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

In the years after World War II, a series of global shifts, including African decolonization and the U.S. civil rights movement, led artists to explore a new politics of form, synthesizing and integrating different visual and cultural traditions. This spring, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present “African Modernism in America,” the first traveling survey to examine the diverse aesthetic strategies, and complex relationships, between African artists and American artists, scholars, patrons and cultural organizations.

Dana Ostrander has been appointed assistant curator of modern art at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. She will begin March 13.

This Is Not My Home is the first children’s book from Eugenia Yoh, BFA ’22, and Vivienne Chang, an economics and strategy student at Olin Business School. It’s a story of a young girl coming to grips with a family’s move from Taiwan.

Kristina Grimm, BArch ’06, uses her architecture degree to cobble together a career at Reebok.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received a $10,000 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

John Hendrix, a professor and founding chair of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program, was installed Jan. 26 as the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art.

Vivienne Chang and Eugenia Yoh met back in 2018 at a Washington University hotpot party hosted by the Taiwanese Students Organization. The two students soon learned, not surprisingly, they both loved the food, culture and people of Taiwan, where they both had family. They also discovered another, more unusual passion – children’s books. Their debut book, “This is Not My Home,” was released in January.

The writers and illustrators of many beloved picture books are from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Paul J. Donnelly, the Rebecca and John Voyles Chair in Architecture Emeritus at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, died Jan. 17 in Boston. He was 78.