Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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.

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

In this video, artist Tim Portlock, chair of undergraduate art at the Sam Fox School, discusses his use of visual effects and 3D animation software, his new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the state of the American dream.

Penina Acayo Laker, assistant professor of communication design, discusses the Sam Fox School’s new interdisciplinary minor in creative practice for social change.

De Nichols has been working at the intersection of art and social justice since she was a student at Washington University. Now, after completing her Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, she’s working on her first book and helping St. Louis’ Griot Museum of Black History.

John Whitaker, a master’s candidate in landscape architecture and advanced architectural design, has won an Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Photographer Jess T. Dugan will serve as the 2020-21 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles.

“Amnesia is not the right word,” said Geoff K. Ward, “because we’ve forgotten without ever really knowing.” In “Truths and Reckonings,” the show he curated for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, Ward confronts histories of racist violence with the aim of untangling their continuing legacies.

Nationally renowned artists, architects, designers and scholars will discuss their work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s “In Conversation” series. Events begin Sept. 12 with art historian Natilee Harren, followed by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Walter J. Hood, landscape designer for the International African American Museum Sept. 26. Combined, the series will feature 18 virtual presentations.

While the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum remains closed to the general public due to COVID-19, the museum will be open to Washington University students, faculty and staff by appointment beginning Sept. 14.