Arts & Culture

Arts & Sciences doctoral candidates Sayed Kashua and Olivia Lott have won literary honors for a pair of recent books.

A van gleams darkly in the seedy neon of 1970s Times Square. Taxis queue for gas amidst a global oil crisis. In “The Autonomous Future of Mobility,” the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis explores how car culture shapes American cities, energy consumption and popular notions of freedom and independence.

“Aperture,” the 2020 Washington University Dance Theatre concert, will begin streaming via the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 18. Typically presented in Edison Theatre, the annual event has been reimagined for this year as a “Dance for the Camera” film festival.

Comedian Julia Lindon writes, hosts a podcast and acts. She also recently created a TV pilot inspired by her own ‘coming-of-age and coming out’ experiences in New York. The show, Lady Liberty, is streaming now.

The university Society of Professors Emeriti group will hold its regular monthly meeting at 12:30 p.m. Dec. 14 via Zoom. Judith W. Mann, curator of European Art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, will discuss the work of artist Sebastiano Luciani.

In a new solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, alumna Ebony G. Patterson explores beauty, tragedy and what lies beneath it all.

Protest and contagion. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Anti-maskers and contact tracing. In “Remember… That Time Before the Last Time,” students from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences join forces with Ron Himes and The Black Rep to reflect on the year that has been and to explore their own experiences of social protest, law enforcement, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“All the Flowers Kneeling,” the debut collection by Paul Tran, a senior poetry fellow in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will be published by Penguin Books as part of the Penguin Poets Series.

The most powerful aspect of the Whitney Museum’s 2018 retrospective ‘David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night’ was not hanging on a wall, but rather was vibrating through the air. In an empty room the artist’s voice consumed all who entered, its crushed granite timbre almost tactile to the ear.

Dmitri Jackson, BFA ’08, draws the award-winning comic Blackwax Boulevard for music nerds — and everyone else, too.