Arts & Culture

As a young sculptor, Chakaia Booker collected scraps of ruined tires from the streets of lower Manhattan. The material was ubiquitous, malleable and symbolically resonant. Now “Shaved Portions,” one of Booker’s largest and most ambitious projects to date, has been installed on WashU’s Danforth Campus.

In “FIELD-STATION,” a new mural for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Houston-based architectural practice HOME-OFFICE explores the confluence of forestry, activism and place-based research.

Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson will serve as the Sam Fox School’s next Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art, the appointment is sponsored in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum, which will present a solo exhibition of Johnson’s work in fall 2023.

Architects Hilary Sample and Thomas Phifer; artists Katharina Grosse, Derrick Adams and Meleko Mokgosi; and fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg are among the internationally known visual thinkers who will discuss their work as part of the fall Public Lecture Series sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

The Sam Fox Ambassadors Graduate Fellowship Program, which each year provides full-tuition waivers for 10 outstanding graduate candidates in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has been permanently endowed thanks to a new $10 million pledge from the Sam and Marilyn Fox Foundation.

Leah Nixon, BFA ’11, survived a construction accident that severed her spinal cord. Illustrating the children’s book “Best Day Ever,” became part of her recovery.

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, will debut “Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988-2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions.” The first major survey to focus on Grosse’s studio-based paintings, the exhibition will investigate the important role large-scale canvases have played throughout her career, from the late 1980s to the present day.

“Philia,” a short film by rising senior Jack Mayer, has been named Best LGBTQ Film at the 2022 Experimental Forum in Los Angeles.

Artist Amy Hauft, director of the College of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has the most complex exhibition of her career on view at Mass MoCA in Massachusetts. She discusses “700,000:1 | Terra + Luna + Sol,” her working process and humanity’s place in a dangerous universe.