This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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September 8, 2026 | Ready. Set. Site Visit! What to expect and how to prepare for our CSWE Site Visit with Marcia H. Ford, MSW, LCSWOctober 13, 2026 | 2026 Environmental Racism Report: Vacancy and Illegal Dumping in St. Louis Neighborhoods with Eric Connors, PhDNovember 10, 2026 | How the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Can Support MSW StudentsDecember 8, 2026 | Social Work & Psychedelics: A Case for Equity, Access, and Evidence-Based Care with Tonya Edmond, PhDAdditional Topics Coming Soon!February 9, 2027March 9, 2027April 13, 2027If you have a request for a "Hot Topic" or would like to present a Hot Topic seminar this academic year, please reach out to the MSW Program.

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Register to attend.

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Mary Jo Bang​, professor of English, will introduce Canto IX of Dante’s Commedia, followed by readings of the canto and a Q&A session.

Also join us before and after the reading, from 3–4 pm and 5–6 pm, to explore a showcase of Special Collections materials related to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Space is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Free and open to all, registration encouraged.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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During this College Search & Financial Aid 101 webinar, we’ll share information about navigating the college admissions and financial aid process, both nationally and for students considering applying to WashU. We’ll be joined by an expert from Human Resources who will discuss the WashU Dependent Child Tuition Assistance benefit for faculty and staff.

Questions can be submitted in advance to UAReception@wustl.edu. While this session will be of particular interest to families with students in high school, all faculty and staff are invited to attend.

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This series is designed to spark dialogue, reflection, and shared learning across disciplines and sectors. Participants will gain valuable insights into innovative methods, practical challenges, and the evolving role of system dynamics in addressing today’s most pressing social issues.

Joining us on September 9th is Katherine Marçal, an Associate Professor at Rutgers University’s School of Social Work and a member of the Child Well-Being Research Network.

Dr. Marçal will discuss the application of community-based system dynamics to addressing inequities in housing security and health outcomes for low-income families both in the U.S. and globally. Her work integrates qualitative insights with computational simulation to understand complex drivers of housing insecurity and homelessness, maternal depression, and child maltreatment, as well as developing user-designed intervention and policy insights.

Seminary from 12 - 1 p.m.; Discussion and Networking from 1 - 1:30 p.m.
Box lunches will be provided to the first 40 guests (first come, first serve).

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Free and open to all.

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Laure Gouraige is a French novelist based in Paris. She is the author of four novels: La Fille du père (P.O.L, 2020), Les Idées noires (P.O.L, 2022), Le livre que je n’ai pas écrit (P.O.L, 2024), and Grave (Les Intranquilles, 2026). Her work explores questions of identity, memory, family, and the ways fiction transforms lived experience. She is currently completing Mirapolis, a novel inspired in part by her six-month writing residency in the United States. In 2026, she is awarded the Jules Verne Writing Residency.

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Members also can enjoy complimentary drinks (two drink tickets per household).

Join or renew your membership here.

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Join us at the Gephardt Institute for Civic & Community Engagement for our upcoming Civic Café where we’ll hear from Blake Hamilton, President and CEO, International Institute of St. Louis; Gilberto Pinela, Director, City of St. Louis Office of New Americans; and Suzanne Sierra, Executive Director, St. Louis Mosaic Project. Over dinner, we’ll learn from our speakers as they describe the work they and their organizations do, share insights on immigration dynamics specific to St. Louis, and evaluate how transformations in immigration policy have affected their missions.

About our speakers:

Blake Hamilton is the President and CEO of the International Institute of St. Louis. He leads a team dedicated to creating opportunities for refugees and immigrants to thrive in order to create a more welcoming, healthy and prosperous region for all. With over more than 16 years at the Institute, Blake has guided workforce, education, and immigration services, expanded immigration legal support, and championed small-business growth through the Institute’s Community Development Corporation. Blake is known for his work in inclusive economic development and immigrant advocacy, partnering closely with civic, business, non-profit and neighborhood leaders to make St. Louis a welcoming home for all. He is an alumnus of FOCUS St. Louis’ Leadership St. Louis program, holds a nonprofit management certificate from Washington University’s Olin Business School, and earned his B.A. from the University of Missouri–Columbia. Blake’s work has been recognized by the St. Louis Partnership’s Arcus Awards and FOCUS St. Louis’ What’s Right with the Region Awards. He is also a recipient of a 2026 Michael & Barbara Newmark Institute for Human Relations Pluralism Award, as part of Jewish Community Relations Council’s Tzedek Awards.

Gilberto Pinela serves as the Director of the Office of New Americans in Mayor Cara Spencer’s administration. In this capacity, he leads initiatives to establish St. Louis as a welcoming environment for foreign-born residents and their families. Established in 2023, the Office of New Americans serves as a critical partner for global talent, immigrants, and refugees, helping them navigate the city’s services.

Under Mr. Pinela’s leadership, the office plays an essential role in bridging the gap between the city government and direct service providers. Its mission focuses on fostering communication and collaboration, developing a welcoming strategy for both the city and the broader region, creating a comprehensive language-equity policy for city operations, and facilitating the integration of foreign-born entrepreneurs into the diverse opportunities available in St. Louis.

A proud Puerto Rican and a first-generation college graduate, Mr. Pinela brings extensive experience in communication and business to his role. He holds a Master’s degree in Communications and an MBA from Webster University. His professional background includes co-owning a landscaping design firm, serving as the President of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis, and leading the communications office at Cortex Innovation District. Notably, he made history as the first Puerto Rican not born in Missouri to host Spanish-language programs such as “Ahora San Luis” and “Entérate,” and to co-host the live show “Best of the STL.”

As an ardent advocate for both foreign-born individuals and the LGBTQ+ community, Mr. Pinela serves on various civic boards, including the St. Louis City Commission for the Missouri History Museum Sub-Tax District, PROMO, and the Tower Grove Park Members Council. Furthermore, he is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and has lived in Tower Grove South since the early 1990s.

Personal mantra: ¡Sí se puede!

Suzanne Sierra is the Executive Director of the St. Louis Mosaic Project, an initiative of the World Trade Center-St. Louis within the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership. She leads a regional effort with employers, universities, and civic leaders to drive economic growth by attracting and integrating internationally trained, work authorized talent into the St. Louis workforce and civic fabric.

Suzanne is a frequent speaker on the economic impact of immigration, advancing the idea that a welcoming region is a more competitive one, and that real growth happens through coordinated collaboration.

She was named a Champion for Diversity by the St. Louis Business Journal (2021) and received the Civic Award from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (2023). In 2026, she was included in St. Louis Magazine’s Business 500 Influential, Impactful and Innovative Leaders. She serves on the board of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Cortex Inclusion Committee

Earlier in her career, Suzanne held roles at Fleishman-Hillard, a global public relations firm, and Anheuser-Busch. She is an alumna of FOCUS Leadership St. Louis, a former Olivette City Council person, and holds a Journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin.

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Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series.

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Buenos Aires Modern, 1935–1950 is the first exhibition in the United States to examine the inventive activities of a thriving, cross-disciplinary artistic community of locals, exiles and immigrants living in Argentina's capital during the early twentieth century. Exploring this vibrant creative laboratory, the exhibition traces how modernism was not merely adopted but actively transformed in Buenos Aires.

Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots is a solo exhibition of new and recent work by the Los Angeles–based Colombian artist. Drawing on environmental justice frameworks, traditional knowledge systems, and ecofeminism, Caycedo’s multidisciplinary artistic practice challenges viewers to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living entity to which we are deeply accountable.

Free and open to the public.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Dawn Beraud, PhD, Executive Director of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), will speak on Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 4:00 pm Central Time in Whitaker 100.

Abstract: Biomedical researchers are advancing breakthroughs that improve human health and quality of life, yet the federal policy and funding environment that supports this work is increasingly uncertain. Shifting priorities, budget pressures, and evolving agency strategies are reshaping the research funding landscape across NIH, NSF, ARPA-H, DOD, and others.

In this seminar, the AIMBE Executive Director will provide timely updates on federal research policy and funding trends, offering insight into recent and proposed changes that are impacting biomedical research, infrastructure, and innovation. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how these developments may affect their work and the broader research ecosystem.

The session will also explore why advocacy is a critical responsibility for today’s research community and how individuals can engage effectively without becoming policy experts. Practical guidance will be shared on communicating research impact, engaging during key policy moments, and leveraging professional societies like AIMBE to amplify individual and collective voices.

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Inspired by her book "How We Thrive: Caring for Kids and Ourselves in a Changing World," this event explores rehumaning, toxic tech, and what it takes to help children and youth thrive.

Light refreshments to follow and books sales available, courtesy of The Novel Neighbor.

Sponsored By: The Brown School, The Brown School Alumni Association, Connecting at Brown, The Clark-Fox Policy Institute, and the Center for Education Research & Policy (CERP®)

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The Longest Table, a civic dialogue event featuring (you guessed it) a long table and guided discussion, has taken place in communities across the US.

This year, WashU will host its fourth annual Longest Table event to kick off the Gephardt Institute’s weekly civic dialogue and learning events, Civic Café.

The Longest Table brings together people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and interests not just to share a meal but to envision ideas for social change and build relationships that support working towards a shared vision. Attendees join a table, and Gephardt Institute staff and campus partners serve as dialogue facilitators to create an intentional, supportive, and creative space. Participants are encouraged to sit with guests they don’t know for the best experience.

Event registration is strongly recommended. Unregistered participants will be permitted to join the event until we reach capacity. Register here.

We are grateful to our 2026 event partners, Dialogue Across Difference (DxD), the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI), the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, and the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

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in Steinberg Hall Gallery Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Modeling Alternatives brings together historian Candace Borders and community-based developer Sarah Rose to discuss the past, present, and future of social housing in the city of St. Louis. Candace will speak to her dissertation research on Black women’s activism for public housing in mid-20th century St. Louis. Sarah will draw on her own experience developing housing in St. Louis to describe how affordability is produced and maintained in the present. Together, the panelists will put forward ideas for social housing which overcome the narrow focus on prominent failures and draw lessons from the deep history of local tenant-led housing activism.

This event takes place on the opening night of Counterplanning from St. Louis, an exhibition on how housing affordability shapes, and is shaped by, construction practices. This event and affiliated exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy, Stacey Dash, Donald Faison

PG-13 • Length 97 min • Year 1995

Doors open at 7:30pm

Unless otherwise noted, admission is:

Free for Washington University students with proper ID.

$7 for the general public
$5 for seniors, Washington University alumni and students from other schools
$4 for Washington University staff and faculty

We offer general admission seating with payment of cash or credit.

Note: Last-minute changes may occur.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Radar imaging is a powerful technique in Earth Observation (EO) and remote sensing that can provide novel insights into the physical processes that shape and govern the Earth system. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active source microwave imaging technique that exploits the relative motion of the instrument platform – including satellites, aircraft, and drones – to generate a synthetic long aperture phased array, which enables coherent phase and backscatter imaging at fine (~1-10 m) spatial resolution. SAR enables detailed, non-invasive mapping and exploration of surface and near-subsurface features, with applications in geological hazard mitigation, environmental resource management, land surface dynamics, hydrology, and geospatial intelligence collection. In this seminar, I will provide a brief overview and introduction to the field of SAR and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), with an emphasis on applications in the realm of environmental geophysics. I will also discuss emerging trends in InSAR time series analysis, error and uncertainty quantification, SAR focusing algorithms.

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From electronic skin to NeuroString

Abstract: Human skin is a remarkable interface that combines mechanical compliance with a rich array of sensory functions, enabling continuous perception of the physical and chemical environment. Inspired by these capabilities, we have developed materials and device platforms that impart skin-like properties to electronics, progressing from electronic skin (e-skin) for robotics and wearable sensing toward soft bioelectronic interfaces capable of communicating with the nervous system and monitoring physiology deep inside the body.
A central challenge is to create electronic materials that simultaneously provide high performance, mechanical softness, stretchability, and intimate contact with biological tissues. We have developed molecular and materials design strategies for intrinsically stretchable semiconductors, conductors, dielectric materials, and sensors, and integrated them into mechanically compliant electronic systems. These advances have enabled e-skin platforms capable of detecting pressure, strain, temperature, and chemical signals while conforming to dynamic surfaces. For robotics, such multimodal sensing can provide information that vision alone cannot capture, including contact, force, texture, and slip, creating opportunities for more dexterous manipulation and physical intelligence.
We are extending these principles from two-dimensional skin-like electronics to three-dimensional interfaces with the body through NeuroString, a soft, flexible, fiber-shaped bioelectronic platform. By rolling highly integrated two-dimensional sensor arrays into a small-diameter fiber, NeuroString combines the mechanical advantages of a soft thread with high-density, multimodal sensing. The platform can incorporate electrophysiological recording and stimulation together with electrochemical and physical sensors for neurotransmitters, hormones, pH, pressure, and other physiological signals. Its small size and tissue-like mechanics enable intimate interfaces with organs and neural tissues while minimizing mechanical mismatch and motion artifacts.
These developments illustrate a broader evolution of electronic skin: from mimicking the sensory functions of human skin, to providing robots with a sense of touch, to creating bidirectional interfaces that interrogate communication between the brain and body. Ultimately, integrating soft materials, multimodal sensing, high-density electronics, and artificial intelligence may enable a new generation of systems that seamlessly connect the physical, biological, and digital worlds.

Bio: Zhenan Bao is the K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and, by courtesy, Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and Bioengineering. She directs the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR) and served as Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2018 to 2022 and in 2025.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, Professor Bao was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies (1995–2004). She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995.

Professor Bao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is widely recognized for her work on artificial electronic skin, which is enabling a new generation of skin-like electronics for restoring the sense of touch in neuroprosthetics, advancing human-friendly robotics, enhancing human–machine interfaces, and enabling seamless health-monitoring devices. Nature has named her a “Master of Materials.”

Her honors include the VinFuture Prize for Female Innovators (2022), the ACS Chemistry of Materials Award (2022), the Gibbs Medal (2020), the Wilhelm Exner Medal (2018), and the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award (2017).

Professor Bao is a co-founder of two start-ups, which have developed materials used in commercial smartphones and FDA-approved blood pressure monitors used in hospitals. In addition, research from her group has been licensed as foundational technology for multiple startups founded by her students.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Fall Webinar (all programs) :September 11 at 11 AM register:https://wustl.zoom.us/meeting/register/sX5NQGvTRT2izvwZahghOg#/registration

In-Person Info Session (all programs): September 15 at 11 AM in Danforth University Center 276

Transcend-Specific InfoSession:Wednesday, September 16 at 11AM DUC 276

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Incorporating sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and video, Caycedo draws on environmental justice frameworks, traditional knowledge systems, and ecofeminism to examine the social and ecological consequences of extractive development while imagining more sustainable futures. Works from several of Caycedo’s ongoing series are featured alongside new commissions informed by the artist’s research into Midwestern prairie grasses and perennial agriculture systems.

Led by student educators, the Museum’s public tours encourage visitors to learn and discover through close looking, conversation, and creative engagement with artworks on view.

Free and open to the public. Please check in at the Welcome Desk when arriving for the tour.

Parking is available in the East End Garage, and is free on weekends and daily after 5 pm.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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Each student’s project is drawn from a process of critical research and creative engagement with archival materials. Exploring themes of self-expression, nature, and the metaphysical, this exhibition provides new interpretations of archival materials and repurposes the collection to inspire new research. Through analysis and response, students developed an ideation process using library materials within their sketchbooks. From there, they selected the material and subjects they were interested in and created their own artworks inspired by these pieces. They then organized individual exhibitions that present these works alongside the collection items to illustrate the potential of archival research within creative practice.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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This event is open to WashU faculty, staff, students and external collaborators.

If you plan on attending, please register. Lunch will be provided to those who attend in person; Zoom link will be sent in the registration confirmation email.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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Some knowledge of ArcGIS Pro recommended but no prior knowledge of GeoAI is required. Exercises can be completed on your own machine with ArcGIS Pro or attendees may use computers in Instruction Room 2 of Olin Library.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/17322124.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Fall Webinar (all programs) :September 11 at 11 AM register:https://wustl.zoom.us/meeting/register/sX5NQGvTRT2izvwZahghOg#/registration

In-Person Info Session (all programs): September 15 at 11 AM in Danforth University Center 276

Transcend-Specific InfoSession:Wednesday, September 16 at 11AM DUC 276

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Reading is suggested but not required. Refreshments will be provided.

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Register to attend.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Fall Webinar (all programs) :September 11 at 11 AM register:https://wustl.zoom.us/meeting/register/sX5NQGvTRT2izvwZahghOg#/registration

In-Person Info Session (all programs): September 15 at 11 AM in Danforth University Center 276

Transcend-Specific InfoSession:Wednesday, September 16 at 11AM DUC 276

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Kemper Creative Break is an ongoing program offering short, 30-minute experiences with art. Open to all and held on the third Wednesday of each month, activities range from guided conversations with works of art to facilitated gallery explorations and hands-on art-making.

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Add sources to your Zotero libraryOrganize your library with collections and subcollectionsUse the notes featureCreate in-text citations and bibliographiesBring your questions to the follow-up Zotero Fix-It Session on October 1 for personalized help. You can also find answers on the Zotero Documentation page. Please download the Zotero desktop app and create an online account before the session.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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Andrea Katz, Professor, WashU Law

Book signing and reception to follow

Presented by:
WashU Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series
Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series
Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government & Public Policy
Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement

MCLE 1.5

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Join us on September 16th as we host Steven Jacques, a WashU alum and former Obama administration staffer, who has led hundreds of presidential campaign advance teams over thirty-six years in national politics. Over a shared meal, Mr. Jacques will discuss his book “Advance: On the Presidential Campaign Trail” and shed light on the little-known but incredibly significant role that advance teams play in political campaigns. Be ready to hear intriguing stories and engage in thoughtful discussion as we explore the inner world of political campaign events.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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Over 35 events will be taking place from September 17-30. Full schedule is listed here.

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in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Presented by:
WashU Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series
Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government & Public Policy
Gephardt Institute for Civic & Community Engagement

MCLE 1.0.

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You’ll leave knowing how to move from “I have no idea where this is” to “I found it!”—and you’ll discover how the library can be a place to explore your interests, not just complete assignments. Perfect for anyone who wants to get more comfortable using the library, find better sources for papers, or simply reconnect with the joy of reading print books.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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Abstract: Innovations that deliver precise and tunable physical forces on hydrogels are of great interest for generating and manipulating biomimetic cellular constructs, including mechanosensitive cell models (e.g., endothelial cells, immune cells, and stem cells). This scalable innovation is necessary, from the cellular to tissue level, for advancing research into the fundamental biology of immune cell activation for immunotherapies or for guiding stem cell fate for tissue engineering-derived therapies. Various physical-force-based methods are currently under investigation for enabling these active biomaterials. These methods employ fluidic, tensile, viscoelastic, electromagnetic, optical, thermal, and acoustic forces. However, previous in vitro physical material deformation models have been limited by the lack of precise control of the resulting 3D distribution of forces or the absence of a biologically relevant scaffolding for scaling to relevant biomimetic tissue engineered models.

In this study, we present the development of an acoustic traveling wave induced shear torsion (A-TWIST) platform to precisely control the 3D deformation distribution of a biomimetic hydrogel. We quantified and characterized, for the first time, the macromaterial shear stress response of a hydrogel to the applied surface acoustic waves (SAWs) of the A-TWIST platform via rheometry. We then investigated how different hydrogel properties, including density and crosslinking, affected the SAW shear response. Next, we numerically simulated and experimentally verified the 2D and 3D deformation distribution induced by A-TWIST. Finally, we employed A-TWIST to strain a biomimetic hydrogel loaded with endothelial colony forming cells (ECFC) to demonstrate the biocompatible nature of A-TWIST to activate mechanosensitive cell models.

We found that with A-TWIST we could simulate and demonstrate controlled 3D deformation of biomimetic hydrogels. We also found that the different material properties of the hydrogel, density and crosslinking density, can also tune the desired shear stress response of the biomimetic matrix. Finally, we demonstrated that a 30% enhancement of volume of vascularization of ECFCs is achieved with tuned strain from A-TWIST. Overall, these results demonstrate a rigorous characterization and a novel application of acoustic forces for the precise and biocompatible 3D deformation of a biomaterial loaded with mechanosensitive cells and the resulting enhancement in tissue-level vascularization via A-TWIST. We anticipate future applications of this work to investigate custom deformation distributions and the impact of these extracellular strains on cellular pathways effecting their growth and organization. This will enable precisely engineered biological functions with other mechanosensitive cell models for unique applications in the field of biomedical engineering, tissue engineering, mechanobiology, and immunology.

This work was presented at BMES 2025, will be presented at MicroTAS 2026, and is currently under review in Nature Communications1.

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Agentic Web: Prototyping the Infrastructure for an AI-Driven Communication NetworkHaptic Interface Systems for Motor Vehicle PilotingArtificial Intelligence (AI) for Implementing Evidence-Based Family Wellbeing & Health Programs in Community SettingsDecoding Synergistic Comorbidity Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease Progression via AI-Driven Trajectory PerturbationAI-Guided Video-Based Facial Rehabilitation Using Computer Vision & Machine LearningConsortium for Biomedical Research and AI in Neurodegeneration (C-BRAIN)TWAIN: The WashU AI-Assisted Platform for Simulation from NarrationColdwater Creek Cancer Susceptibility DashboardCultural Asset Mapping with The Engaged CityCreating a Global, AI-Competent Image Library of Human Skeletal 3D Models

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This event is part of AI Perspectives Week.

The Civil Society Initiative’s Dinner & Dialogue series present debates on timely ethical and political questions that model reasoning about value questions and the positive side of disagreement.

This event is sponsored by the Frick Initiatives at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

Please register here if you plan to attend!

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Understanding how membrane proteins function requires imaging approaches that can bridge molecular structure with their organization in native cellular environments. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to develop and apply cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), and volume electron microscopy to study membrane proteins across spatial scales.

At the molecular level, high-resolution cryo-EM enables visualization of membrane protein structure, conformational states, and molecular interactions. Cryo-ET extends these studies into native membranes, cells, and tissues, where proteins can be examined within their physiological environment. Volume electron microscopy further expands the accessible field of view and provides three-dimensional cellular and tissue context. I will highlight examples from our work integrating these imaging modalities and discuss emerging computational and AI-assisted approaches for identifying and analyzing macromolecular structures within complex biological specimens.

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Arts & Sciences welcomes faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students from across all schools and disciplines to attend this half-day session. In the spirit of the A&S principles on Artificial Intelligence and Undergraduate Student Learning, this symposium considers how we can prioritize, support, and enhance student learning in the age of AI. As artificial intelligence technologies evolve, they present us with fundamental questions about whether, how, and to what extent these tools can or ought to be used in educational settings. When AI is employed thoughtfully by students and instructors it facilitates rather than bypasses the learning process.

The keynote lecture will be provided by Jeff Greene, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and McMichael Professor at the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading expert on self-regulated learning, epistemic cognition, and digital literacy. In addition, A&S faculty will share how they are responding to and integrating AI in the classroom and a panel of A&S undergraduate and graduate students will discuss AI and learning.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Towards sustainabile, bio-source polymers

Polymeric materials are a key innovation that has greatly impacted our society, yet their production presents challenges from beginning to end: materials synthesis overwhelmingly originates from fossil-derived feedstocks and incurs high energy use, while the end products accumulate in the environment and are harmful to ecosystems. We have taken a collaborative approach to addressing this challenging by seeking to design biodegradable materials that can be produced from bio-derived monomers. This talk will describe opportunities and obstacles for both synthesis and biodegradation.

BIO: Kristala L.J. Prather is the Arthur D. Little Professor and Department Head in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She received an S.B. degree from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1999), and worked 4 years in BioProcess Research and Development at the Merck Research Labs prior to joining the faculty of MIT. Her research interests are centered on the design and assembly of recombinant microorganisms for the production of small molecules, with additional efforts in novel bioprocess design approaches. Prather’s honors include the Charles Thom Award of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (2017), the Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE, 2021), and the Marvin J. Johnson Award (BIOT Division, American Chemical Society, 2024). Additional honors include selection as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2014-2015), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 2018), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE; 2020), and AIChE (2020), and election to the National Academy of Engineering (2025).

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This event is part of WashU’s Fall 2026 AI Perspectives Week.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Program Schedule:

10–10:35 am: Storytime in the Kemper Art Museum Lobby with Snuggle Up for Literacy

10:40–11:40 am: Facilitated gallery exploration and hands-on activities focused on how to become the change you’d like to see in the world. Various break-out sessions will be offered designed for specific audiences, including teenagers, adults, and families and intergenerational groups.

11:40 am–noon: Closing remarks

Snuggle Up for Literacy is a signature initiative of the Be the Change Foundation that brings literacy to life through storytelling, creativity, and community connection. Designed for all ages, the program goes beyond simply reading books by encouraging participants to discover their voices, share their stories, explore their creativity, and see literacy as a powerful tool for confidence, connection, and change. At its heart, Snuggle Up for Literacy reminds us that every story matters, every voice has power, and literacy can inspire us to be the change we wish to see.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Join us for a free screening and panel discussion of the documentary We Bear Witness: African American Legacy of Hadley Township, Mo. Hadley Township is a historically Black community founded in 1907 and once home to notable figures such as Henry Hampton and Arthur Ashe, as well as local artist and filmmaker Margie Hollins. Hollins’s film examines the history of Hadley Township and the forces that led to its transformation and decline. Following the screening, a panel featuring the director, historians, and former residents will provide additional context and insight into the community’s legacy.

Free and open to all, registration is requested.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

in Steinberg Hall Gallery
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Housing programs, from the FHA mortgages that made the American suburbs to international 20th-century experiments in public housing, redistribute societal wealth through the construction of housing. Counterplanning from St. Louis examines housing programs that produced particular building cultures. Through regulatory standards and institutional structures, policy shapes not only what is built, but how housing is designed, financed, and constructed. Construction is socially and ecologically demanding, conscripting landscapes, materials, and labor toward the production of singular assemblies. The exhibit uses the architectural detail—a drawing that coordinates activity on and beyond the building site—to open an inquiry into the ways housing policy materializes as building culture. At stake is architectural design as the hinge between policy objectives and the realities of large-scale construction. Exhibiting over 175 construction details from 20th-century housing programs, the exhibit takes local successes and failures as a starting point to consider how the design of the smallest details connects policy objectives, the experience of construction workers, and the delivery of beautiful and durable social housing.

The exhibition will open with Modeling Alternatives, a panel discussion in the gallery with Candace Borders, a historian, and Sarah Rose, a community developer and housing organizer. Borders and Rose will discuss social housing and organizing in St. Louis from the 1969 rent strike to the present. Their conversation will consider how the city and its residents can foster institutions capable of building and maintaining equitable housing.

This exhibition is made possible by the James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and AIA St. Louis.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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The magnetoelastic effect, also known as the Villari effect, describes the modulation of a material’s magnetic state in response to mechanical deformation. Although first discovered in 1865, this phenomenon remained largely confined to rigid metals and alloys operated under external magnetic fields, leaving its vast potential in soft, dynamic, and biological environments essentially unexplored.

In 2021, we discovered a giant magnetoelastic effect in a soft polymer system and subsequently extended this concept to a liquid permanent fluidic magnet, establishing an entirely new family of soft magnetoelastic materials and fundamentally redefining the field. These breakthroughs opened a new scientific paradigm in which mechanics, magnetism, and soft matter converge to create intrinsically waterproof, compliant, and biocompatible electronic systems.

At the Chen Research Group, we are pioneering this frontier to develop self-powered, robust soft magnetoelastic bioelectronics for active sensing, therapy, and energy harvesting. Our vision is to establish soft magnetoelasticity as a new building block for personalized healthcare and sustainable energy, shaping the next generation of intelligent systems at the interface of materials, biology, and medicine.

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Free and open to all, registration is required for Zoom link.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Ten years, billions of data points, and a community rewriting the rules of medicine. Over the last decade, the Institute for Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics has relentlessly pushed the boundaries of data-driven health. Now, it’s time to celebrate where we’ve been.

Please join us as we reflect on ten years of shared achievements and reconnect with friends and collaborators, featuring guest speaker Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft.

Registration closes at 5 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 14. Register here.

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Two tutorials will follow the presentations. The first will focus on developing AI agents. The second will introduce the AgentNet, an Internet of Agents architecture that enables users to request AI agents and agent teams to complete a variety of tasks such as image classification, text summarization, manuscript reviewing and others. AgentNet also lowers the barriers for tool and agent developers to make these available for broad use.

RSVP

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Register to attend.

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In this keynote lunch, Randy will introduce the ABT framework, demonstrating how it applies across grants, talks, abstracts, and everyday scientific communication.

Whether you are a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, faculty member, or staff researcher, this training gives you a practical, immediately applicable tool to sharpen how you tell the story of your science. Registration is required.

Learn more about the series ABT (And, But, Therefore) Narrative Framework Training with Randy Olson, PhD.

Hosted by Jay Piccirillo, MD, FACS, the TL1 Program, and the R25 Program, in partnership with the Center for Health & Science Communication at Becker Library.

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Free and open to all, registration is requested.

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In this interactive workshop, you will build your own ABT with live coaching from Randy and his team, learning how to strengthen your grant proposals, manuscript abstracts, presentations, and everyday scientific communication.

Please note: You can choose whether to actively engage in workshopping your ABT as a participant or witness progression of other’s scientific communication as an observer. Participants will be assigned prior to the start of the workshop and are required to attend in-person.

These sessions teach the same ABT method; select the time that works best for your schedule. Registration is required.

Learn more about the series ABT (And, But, Therefore) Narrative Framework Training with Randy Olson, PhD.

Hosted by Jay Piccirillo, MD, FACS, the TL1 Program, and the R25 Program, in partnership with the Center for Health & Science Communication at Becker Library.

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A fireside chat, facilitated by Philip Payne, Chief Health AI Officer.

Eric Horvitz, MD, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft where he leads initiatives at the intersection of science, technology, and society, with emphases on artificial intelligence, biosciences, and healthcare. His research contributions have advanced AI through innovations in perception, reasoning, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Dr. Horvitz is known for his contributions to AI theory and practice, with a focus on principles and applications of AI amidst the complexities of the open world. His direction-setting research efforts include harnessing probability and utility in machine learning and reasoning, developing models of bounded rationality, constructing systems that perceive and act via interpreting multisensory streams of information, and pioneering principles and mechanisms for supporting human-AI collaboration and complementarity. His efforts and collaborations have led to fielded systems in healthcare, transportation, ecommerce, operating systems, and aerospace.

Beyond his scientific work, he has pursued programs, organizations, and studies on ethics, values, and safety with applications and influences of AI. He founded and chairs Microsoft’s Aether committee on AI, effects, and ethics in engineering and research. He established the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford University and co-founded and served as board chair of the Partnership on AI (PAI). He served as a Congressionally appointed commissioner on the National Security Commission on AI, where he chaired the line of effort on ethical and trustworthy AI.

Dr. Horvitz received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for his fundamental contributions to the science and practice of AI. He received the CHI Academy honor for his work at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence(AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Philosophical Society.

Dr. Horvitz currently serves on the advisory boards of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). He served as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), president of the AAAI, as a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC), and on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

He received PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. Before moving into the role of Chief Scientific Officer, he served as director of Microsoft Research overseeing research labs in Redmond, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, New York; Montreal, Canada; Cambridge, United Kingdom; and Bangalore, India.

REGISTER HERE

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

In this interactive workshop, you will build your own ABT with live coaching from Randy and his team, learning how to strengthen your grant proposals, manuscript abstracts, presentations, and everyday scientific communication.

Please note: You can choose whether to actively engage in workshopping your ABT as a participant or witness progression of other’s scientific communication as an observer. Participants will be assigned prior to the start of the workshop and are required to attend in-person.

These sessions teach the same ABT method; select the time that works best for your schedule. Registration is required.

Learn more about the series ABT (And, But, Therefore) Narrative Framework Training with Randy Olson, PhD.

Hosted by Jay Piccirillo, MD, FACS, the TL1 Program, and the R25 Program, in partnership with the Center for Health & Science Communication at Becker Library.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/17299989

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Attendees will hear from investors, startup founders, faculty and industry leaders, discover emerging technologies and connect with collaborators working to shape the future of AI in health. The event offers opportunities to learn, connect and engage with emerging ideas in health AI, whether through research, entrepreneurship, investment or industry.

The event is designed for faculty, students, investors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals and community members interested in the intersection of AI and health.

AIHealth Venture Day is co-organized by the AI for Health Institute, the Office of Technology Management/Tech Transfer (OTM), Olin Business of Health, Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics (I2DB) and the Skandalaris Center.

AIHealth Venture Day is part of WashU's AI Perspectives Week Fall 2026.

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This event is free and open to the public, with reception to follow panel discussion.

Co-sponsored by American Culture Studies, the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics, and Film & Media Studies.

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Celebrate this incredible achievement with our WashU scholar-champions. WashU has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup for the first time in program history—awarded to the athletic program with the most success across all sports—and only the eighth Division III school ever to win it.

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We will grapple with these topics and more at the upcoming Civic Café on September 23, 2026, at the Gephardt Institute for Civic & Community Engagement in conjunction with The Cordell Institute. Over a shared meal, we will hear from a panel of experts from across campus as they share the most current questions and newest developments related to governing AI. Join us as we welcome Neil Richards, Koch Distinguished Professor in Law, Co-Director at the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law and Ted Enamorado, Associate Professor of Political Science to discuss how AI is shaping and will shape our civic world.

This event is part of WashU’s AI Perspectives week, which is co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Digital Intelligence & Innovation (DI2) Accelerator, and the Office of the Provost. We encourage you to check out other events in the series!

About our speakers:

Neil Richards is an internationally-recognized expert in privacy law, information law, and freedom of expression. He is the Koch Distinguished Professor in Law at Washington University School of Law, a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and a consultant and expert in privacy cases. He graduated in 1997 from the University of Virginia School of Law, and served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

Professor Richards’ many writings on privacy and civil liberties have appeared in prominent legal journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the California Law Review, among others. He has written for a more general audience in Wired Magazine UK, CNN.com, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is the author of two books: Why Privacy Matters (Oxford 2021) and Intellectual Privacy (Oxford 2015).

Professor Richards appears frequently in the media, and he is a past winner of the Washington University School of Law’s Professor of the Year award. At Washington University, he teaches courses on privacy, free speech, and constitutional law. He was born in England, educated in the United States, and lives with his family in St. Louis. He is an avid cyclist and a lifelong supporter of Liverpool Football Club.

Ted Enamorado is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity and the Division of Computational & Data Sciences. He holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University (Political Economy Program) and specializes in Political Economy and Political Methodology, focusing on probabilistic record linkage and improving probabilistic methods. Substantively, his research examines the impact of criminal justice inequities on political participation. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Inter-American Development Bank and as a Consultant at the World Bank.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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Leadership Up Close gives WashU students the opportunity to step outside the classroom and experience leadership firsthand. Through small-group excursions to local organizations, students get an inside look at how different organizations operate, what shapes their culture, and how leaders navigate the people, challenges, and decisions that come with their work.

At the heart of each experience is a conversation with a leader whose journey offers a unique perspective on what it means to lead with purpose, character, and impact.

Our next Leadership Up Close experience: KMOV

Join us at KMOV for a behind-the-scenes look at a St. Louis newsroom and a conversation with Paige Hulsley about her leadership journey.

Explore what it takes to lead in a fast-paced, constantly changing environment. Learn about the culture and work of a local news organization, then hear directly from Paige about the experiences, values, and lessons that have shaped her career.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, engage in conversation, and think about your own approach to leadership along the way. Register for the event here.

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Yichun Wang, PhD, Keating-Crawford Collegiate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Notre Dame, will speak on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 10 am Central Time in Whitaker 218.

Abstract: Coming soon.

In person attendance is requested. To attend online, register here.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/17300001

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This event brings together colleagues, alumni, mentees, and distinguished guests from across the country to celebrate Dr. Avidan’s profound dedication to medicine, scientific discovery, and institutional leadership.

In honor of his leadership in academic medicine, the inaugural theme, “Clinical Trials: From Concepts to Populations,” highlights his work in moving new scientific discoveries through clinical trials and into real-world patient care.

The exceptional lineup of national leaders and clinicians featured in this symposium stands as a testament to the vibrant, world-class research community Dr. Avidan continues to inspire.

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No stranger to political turmoil and the ravages of the imperious ego, calling listeners toward an ethic of love, care and reverence. Alive with dazzling images, leaping progressions of thought, and astonishing rhythm and wordplay, Rumi’s poems are not only aesthetic masterpieces but are also spiritual and philosophical works, meant to illuminate and liberate, pointing us toward more harmonious ways of being.

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The Lowry Lecture is held annually to honor the many contributions of the late Oliver Lowry to the field of biochemistry and metabolic regulation, as well as to Washington University. Dr. Lowry came to Washington University in 1947 and chaired the Department of Pharmacology from 1947 to 1976. He was Dean of the School of Medicine from 1955-1958. He became an Emeritus Professor in 1979, and served as acting Department Chair from 1989-1990. He remained an active member of the Department through 1994.

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Designed for faculty.

This talk follows the AICC Showcase (5-6 p.m.). There will be a reception to follow.

Register HERE.

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Please join us for a public lecture with acclaimed translator, educator and performance artist, Haleh Liza Gafori as she presents “Rumi For Our Times”, a selection of poems by the 13th century mystic Rumi; revealing how urgently and tenderly the beloved sage speaks to us in these challenging times.

No stranger to political turmoil and the ravages of the imperious ego, calling listeners toward an ethic of love, care and reverence. Alive with dazzling images, leaping progressions of thought, and astonishing rhythm and wordplay, Rumi’s poems are not only aesthetic masterpieces but are also spiritual and philosophical works, meant to illuminate and liberate, pointing us toward more harmonious ways of being.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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This will use a straightforward workflow and easily accessible tools to create 3D-printed ornamental tiles. It will begin with Louis Sullivan’s vegetal motifs, but any direction of patterning is possible.

Instructor: Matthew Allen teaches architectural history, theory, and creative computation at the Sam Fox School.

This event is part of WashU’s Fall 2026 AI Perspectives Week.

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As the fundamental computational units of the brain, neurons communicate electrochemically via synapses and form extended circuits and networks that underlie diverse mental functions. To understand the brain mechanistically, we need methods capable of monitoring the physiological processes of individual synapses while simultaneously tracking the activity of large populations of interconnected neurons. Drawing on concepts from astronomy, optics, and machine learning, my laboratory develops microscopy methods for imaging the brain at higher spatial resolution, greater depth, and faster time scales. In this talk, I will outline our past and ongoing research efforts, including in vivo population imaging of voltage dynamics from hundreds of neurons.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/17300038

View on site | Email this event

This event is part of WashU’s Fall 2026 AI Perspectives Week.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Free and open to all, registration is requested.

Co-sponsored by WashU Libraries, Office of Cross-Cultural Connections, and Corner 17, and in collaboration with the Asian Multicultural Collective.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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Free and open to all, registration requested.

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The magnetoelastic effect, also known as the Villari effect, describes the modulation of a material’s magnetic state in response to mechanical deformation. Buckling, wrinkling, and crumpling occur across all length scales, from thermal fluctuations in thin sheets of graphene to the large-scale deformation of the Earth's crust. Sometimes these phenomena arise as a feature (such as the energy-dissipating crush of a car during a collision), and other times as a bug (like material failure in industrial processes). If we can learn to predict and control these deformations, they could be exploited to design programmable materials.

We'll explore some results from my PhD research at the intersection of soft matter physics and materials science, as well as the growing importance of simulations in physics. I'll also share some scicomm highlights and how I found a path from PhD to full-time science communicator at one of the most trusted channels on YouTube.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

Register to attend.

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Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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Evaluations are the Operating System for AI
AI is only as trustworthy as the systems we use to evaluate it. Drawing on our research team’s work, we will explore why continuous evaluation must be the operating system for how AI is built, deployed, and improved.

Event Schedule

3– 4 p.m. | Keynote & Fireside Chat 4 – 5 p.m. | Reception To confirm your spot, please register by Friday, Sept. 18.

This event is part of WashU’s Fall 2026 AI Perspectives Week.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Whether you’re just getting started with QuickSearch or you’ve been using it like Google and suspect it can do more, this workshop will help you move from “I’m overwhelmed” to “I can find what I actually need.”

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

Brianne Connizzo, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering at Boston University, will speak on Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 10 am Central Time in Whitaker 218.

Abstract: Musculoskeletal tissues including tendons and ligaments are dynamic structures that continuously remodel in response to mechanical loading and biochemical signals. Accumulating evidence suggests that hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle regulate extracellular matrix (ECM) turnover, yet the temporal dynamics of these changes and their functional implications remain poorly understood. We present recent findings on how estrogen and progesterone modulate collagen and glycosaminoglycan turnover, mechanosensing capacity, and structural properties across different phases of the menstrual/estrous cycle. We will discuss how understanding these cycle-dependent changes in tissue remodeling may inform strategies for optimizing musculoskeletal health and performance in women, and provide insights into tissue aging and menopausal transitions. These findings highlight the importance of considering hormonal status and cycle phase as biological variables in musculoskeletal research and clinical practice.

In person attendance is requested. To attend virtually, register here.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

First convened in 2006, the Norman R. Seay Lecture honors St. Louis civil rights leader, community advocate and supporter of Alzheimer research Norman R. Seay. The annual lecture brings together researchers, health professionals and the public to examine timely issues related to Alzheimer disease and populations at increased risk for dementia.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is requested.

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This session is best for current Zotero users.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/17004951

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Check out Zotero’s Quick Start Guide and Support LinksWatch these updated Zotero 7.0 tutorial videosCan’t make the session? Just reach out—we’re happy to find another time to meet with you!

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

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“They are real Americans and entitled to citizenship: Revisiting the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”

Join us for this Danforth Distinguished public lecture with Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent), highlighting his research and teaching on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States.

Philip J. Deloria opens our Practice of Citizenship series talking on his past and current work and reflecting on questions of Native “citizenship.”

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

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This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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The symposium is built around a two-way scientific opportunity: AI and machine learning can accelerate the discovery, simulation, and characterization of quantum materials, while quantum and nonlinear materials can provide new physical platforms for AI, including sensing, imaging, memory, neuromorphic computing, and information processing.

The meeting will explore nonlinear and emergent quantum phenomena, AI-assisted materials discovery, advanced characterization, intelligent photonics, computational and biomedical imaging, quantum sensing, and materials-enabled computing.

A central goal is to connect researchers across physics, materials science, engineering, photonics, computer science, and imaging science, identify shared challenges, and stimulate new interdisciplinary collaborations. The program will feature invited talks, WashU faculty presentations, a student and postdoctoral poster session, and a forward-looking discussion on future research and funding opportunities.

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The tissue microenvironment is highly complex, with diverse and dynamic structures that vary across space and time. To characterize diverse tissues as completely as possible, imaging methods should capture rich information quickly and efficiently. In practice, however, biological, logistical, and technical constraints often limit what can be measured. Label-free multimodal nonlinear optical microscopy is a powerful imaging approach that provides high-resolution information with biochemical, metabolic, and structural contrast, but often suffers from slow and inefficient acquisition. This can be greatly improved by the integration of both optics-based and computational strategies into the acquisition and processing, enabling more efficient collection of the specific spectral, spatial, and temporal features most relevant to the sample.

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Modern engineering applications such as autonomous robots involve large-scale dynamical systems whose models are complex, uncertain, or only partially known, placing them beyond the reach of traditional model-based control techniques. Data-driven approaches, including machine learning and reinforcement learning, offer powerful tools for learning and decision-making in these settings, but often lack interpretability and provide limited guarantees of correctness and safety—critical requirements. Formal methods address these shortcomings by providing rich languages for expressing complex objectives and safety requirements, algorithmic techniques for verification and synthesis, and proofs that the resulting systems behave as intended. This talk that brings together control theory, formal methods, and machine learning to create control systems that scale and adapt to uncertain or unknown dynamics while remaining safe, correct, and interpretable. Examples from autonomous driving and robotic manipulation illustrate how this integration enables the synthesis of controllers for complex, safety-critical tasks.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Insights from Neutron Scattering into the Catalytic Roles of Surface and Lattice Hydrides in Heterogeneous Catalysis

ABSTRACT: Different from X-ray scatting, neutron scattering is uniquely powerful in detecting light elements such as hydrogen and oxygen. These elements are often involved in catalysis either as surface species, intermediates, spectators, or in the catalyst bulk.

Detecting and understanding the nature and structure of these species in catalysis is significant but often is difficult with regular techniques. However, compared to X-ray techniques, neutron scattering has shown rather limited applications in catalysis research using, mostly due to the scarce neutron sources, low beam intensity, long collection time, low sensitivity and resolution, and large amount of sample needed.

With the commission of the spallation neutron source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a more intense, brighter source of neutrons and world-class instrumentations have become available to the scientific community to carry out neutron measurements with greater sensitivity, faster speed, higher resolution, and in more complex sample environments. We have recently taken advantage of SNS instruments to study a few hydrogen-involved reactions including selective hydrogenation of acetylene, CO2, ammonia synthesis, and preferential oxidation of CO. I will present in this talk the unique insights into catalysis including surface species, catalytic structures and reaction mechanisms obtained from neutron spectroscopy and diffraction, in combination with X-ray absorption spectroscopy, optical spectroscopy, and electron microscopy. New applications are expected to continue to emerge for neutron scattering investigations of heterogeneous catalysis.

This research is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division, Catalysis Science program. The neutron studies used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Part of the work including electron microscopy tests was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

BIO: Dr. Zili Wu is a Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Leader of the Surface Chemistry and Catalysis Group (https://www.ornl.gov/division/csd/surface-chemistry) in the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He serves as Director of the DOE Energy Earthshots Research Center (EERC), Non-equilibrium Energy Transfer for Efficient Reactions (NEETER), and as a Thrust Leader in UNCAGE-ME, one of DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs).

Dr. Wu earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in 2001. During his doctoral studies, he spent one year at the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry in Madrid, Spain. He then spent more than three years at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral associate before joining the staff at ORNL in 2006.

Dr. Wu has extensive expertise in heterogeneous catalysis, applied spectroscopy, and nanomaterials synthesis. His research focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of catalytic active sites at surfaces and interfaces in heterogeneous catalysis, photocatalysis, and electrocatalysis; establishing structure-catalysis relationships in catalytic solids across time and length scales; applying in situ and operando characterization methods; and designing nanomaterials with well-defined structures.

He is an active member of the American Chemical Society and has organized more than 15 ACS symposia on fundamental catalysis and energy materials. His recent honors include the 2023 ORNL Outstanding Research Output Team Award, the 2020 ORNL-CNMS Outstanding Scientific and Technological Accomplishment Award, and the 2019 Excellence in Catalysis Award from the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

Fall break duration may be different for your school, please check your specific school’s calendar for dates.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

Fall break duration may be different for your school, please check your specific school’s calendar for dates.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

Fall break duration may be different for your school, please check your specific school’s calendar for dates.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS:

Distinguished Speakers: 20 confirmed world-class experts from diverse fields including a Day 1 Keynote with Sylvia Boj, PhD—HUB Organoids and Day 2 Keynote with Sergiu Pasca, MD—Stanford University.Trainee Opportunities: Dedicated sessions for posters, short talks, and research awards.Expansive Model Scope: Cutting-edge advances in organoid models for brain, heart, trophoblast, lung, liver, pancreas, adipose and beyond.In-person and virtual options.REGISTER TODAY! Registration is open until Sept. 18 and is limited to 150 in-person participants. Reserve your spot today »

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

Fall break duration may be different for your school, please check your specific school’s calendar for dates.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS:

Distinguished Speakers: 20 confirmed world-class experts from diverse fields including a Day 1 Keynote with Sylvia Boj, PhD—HUB Organoids and Day 2 Keynote with Sergiu Pasca, MD—Stanford University.Trainee Opportunities: Dedicated sessions for posters, short talks, and research awards.Expansive Model Scope: Cutting-edge advances in organoid models for brain, heart, trophoblast, lung, liver, pancreas, adipose and beyond.In-person and virtual options.REGISTER TODAY! Registration is open until Sept. 18 and is limited to 150 in-person participants. Reserve your spot today »

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

Register to attend.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching.

George Orwell’s 1984 has been banned or challenged primarily due to its intense political themes, explicit sexual content, and perceived “pro-communist” or “anti-government” messaging.

Book club will begin with a presentation on banned books, followed by a discussion of 1984.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.

View on site | Email this event

Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching.

George Orwell’s 1984 has been banned or challenged primarily due to its intense political themes, explicit sexual content, and perceived “pro-communist” or “anti-government” messaging.

Book club will begin with a presentation on banned books, followed by a discussion of 1984.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link: https://wustl.libcal.com/event/16838886

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

Check in with a light breakfast begins at 8 am.

Please register here: https://wustl.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4TPmFeVJKBwpOdw

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In the case of inclement weather, the event may be postponed.

Free Tune-Ups Rules:

Bike tune-ups are provided to WashU and UHSP faculty, staff, and students only.Please check in at the sustainability table (look for people wearing the sustainability shirt!)Tune-ups are first-come, first-served. You may drop off your bike into the queue if there is still availability. We will stop accepting bikes once we reach capacity or at 12:45 pm (whichever comes first).Fill out this sign up form to receive a reminder the day before the bike tune up.Free tune-ups cover basic maintenance only; bike owners will be referred to a bike shop if repair needs do not fit within the scope of the basic tune-up.You will be able to leave your bike for repair and receive a text when it is ready for pick up. In the meantime, visit the Farmers Market!All bikes must be picked up by 1:00pm when the event ends. Bike tune up staff do not take responsibility for bikes left after 1:00pm.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Mastering a business pitch requires preparation and practice, practice and more practice. Come and hear from WashU startup founders and OTM experts about the needed skills to master the perfect pitch for your startup. (Will you all lead them through an exercise? What other points do you want to cover in the panelist Q & A that we can mention in the description.) Join OTM for Office Hours: “Practice Makes a Perfect Pitch”

Those of us trained in science are taught to communicate with rigor, novelty, and contribution to knowledge. A pitch to an investor asks for something quite different: in roughly ten slides, you need to name a real market problem, position your technology as the solution, and show how it outclasses what’s already on offer. Our panel has lived through that arc — from pre-company formation through active investor engagement — and will share what the journey has actually taught them.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

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The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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International arbitration faces two simultaneous pressures: users demanding proceedings that are faster, cheaper, and better fitted to their disputes, and technology reshaping how those disputes are built and resolved. Arbitration at the Frontier: Courage, Craft, and Technology convenes arbitrators, counsel, in-house users, and institutional leaders for a keynote and two panels on procedural courage, the enduring craft of advocacy, and the arrival of AI in the arbitral process.

Co-Chairs:
M. Imad Khan, JD ’11, Partner & Vice Chair of International Arbitration for the Americas, Winston Taylor LLP;

MJ Durkee, William Gardiner Hammond Professor of Law, Director, Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute, WashU Law

Sponsored by the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute and the Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Program at WashU Law

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

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organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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As the Fall 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist, Orlovski will complete a week-long residency working alongside students in Island Press, a research-based printmaking workshop at WashU that is committed to creating and publishing innovative prints and multiples, educating students and the broader community about print media, and advancing the printmaking field.

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View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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September 8, 2026 | Ready. Set. Site Visit! What to expect and how to prepare for our CSWE Site Visit with Marcia H. Ford, MSW, LCSWOctober 13, 2026 | 2026 Environmental Racism Report: Vacancy and Illegal Dumping in St. Louis Neighborhoods with Eric Connors, PhDNovember 10, 2026 | How the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Can Support MSW StudentsDecember 8, 2026 | Social Work & Psychedelics: A Case for Equity, Access, and Evidence-Based Care with Tonya Edmond, PhDAdditional Topics Coming Soon!February 9, 2027March 9, 2027April 13, 2027If you have a request for a "Hot Topic" or would like to present a Hot Topic seminar this academic year, please reach out to the MSW Program.

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Register to attend.

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Free and open to all, registration encouraged.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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Free and open to all, registration requested.

Co-sponsored by WashU Libraries and WashU Open Educational Resources (OER) Interest Group.

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

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In the case of inclement weather, the event may be postponed.

Free Tune-Ups Rules:

Bike tune-ups are provided to WashU and UHSP faculty, staff, and students only.Please check in at the sustainability table (look for people wearing the sustainability shirt!)Tune-ups are first-come, first-served. You may drop off your bike into the queue if there is still availability. We will stop accepting bikes once we reach capacity or at 12:45 pm (whichever comes first).Fill out this sign up form to receive a reminder the day before the bike tune up.Free tune-ups cover basic maintenance only; bike owners will be referred to a bike shop if repair needs do not fit within the scope of the basic tune-up.You will be able to leave your bike for repair and receive a text when it is ready for pick up. In the meantime, visit the Farmers Market!All bikes must be picked up by 1:00pm when the event ends. Bike tune up staff do not take responsibility for bikes left after 1:00pm.

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Vendors bring only the freshest produce and products to the market. This year, vendors include:

Mushroom Dave: WashU’s Community Supported Agriculture providerClean Plate PantryGreat Harvest BreadJammie JamKakao ChocolateVan Hoesen House of CheesecakesVom FassTo stay up to date on the farmers market, including weekly vendor attendance and in season produce, sign up for the market newsletter here.

*The market will be closed on university-observed holidays.

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During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

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Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

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The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

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“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event

During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.

The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.

The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.

The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.

An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.

This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

Caycedo’s Plant Portraits (2021–ongoing) highlight systems of reciprocity and collaboration between human and nonhuman entities, specifically the power of people and plants to care for and nurture one another. To create these works on paper Caycedo starts with scientific botanical illustrations but reorganizes them to represent both plant and human anatomy. In calling them “portraits,” she reorients the Western portraiture tradition toward nonhuman living beings, presenting plants as subjects with agency while underscoring the vital and symbolic relationship we share with them.

Building on this exploration of plant life and reciprocity, the exhibition will also feature a new series of Root Portraits that examine not only what is visible above ground but also the equally crucial root-to-soil interactions happening below ground. Focusing on prairie grasses and the biodiversity of the Midwest, this body of work is informed in part by the artist’s conversations with regional plant scientists and community members about perennial agricultural systems and just energy transition. Perennials—plants that return year after year—have deep roots that help control erosion and mitigate climate change while improving soil health and boosting biodiversity. Caycedo will create these new works at WashU’s Island Press as the spring 2026 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist.

In contrast to these artworks centered on reciprocity and care, Caycedo’s Mineral Intensive drawings (2023–ongoing) critique the increased extraction of minerals from the so-called Global South in the name of “clean energy” technologies. Rendered in vibrant colored pencil, these drawings portray global mining industries—such as those involving lead, indium, and molybdenum— juxtaposed with depictions of the labor and environmental implications of the accelerating boom in extracting these critical materials for energy. The exhibition will also highlight Caycedo’s ongoing engagement with rivers and the impact of extractivist infrastructures on both bodies of water and social bodies. With her Cosmotarrayas sculptures, she actively rethinks our exploitative relationship with water. Assembled with fishing nets collected during her field research in diverse riverine communities affected by the privatization of water, these delicate hanging sculptures act as connectors between her activism, community involvement, and studio practice. To create Celestial Autonomy, the Dance of Big Dipper and North Star (2023) Caycedo sourced dipnets, gill nets, floats, and buoys from local fishermen in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as from fishing supply stores and beach clean-up nonprofits. The everyday fishing nets represent, according to the artist, a combination of “porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.”

In an adjacent permanent collection gallery, Caycedo will curate a selection of portraits and landscapes of/by women and nonbinary artists drawn from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection. These artworks will be shown alongside her own My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018), a printed canvas banner depicting portraits of women environmental activists from across the world, many of whom have been killed, incarcerated, or prosecuted for defending the biodiversity of their territories. The dialogue created among these works reflects an intentional alignment central to Caycedo’s practice, fostering connection while underscoring the vital relationship between feminism and environmentalism.

Concurrently, Caycedo will present a new public artwork commissioned by Counterpublic, a local public art triennial. For this commission Caycedo will produce a large-scale sculpture titled Fiesta de las Raíces as part of her Root Portraits series.

Across this visually and materially compelling constellation of artworks, located inside the Kemper Art Museum and in the city of St. Louis, Caycedo asks us to reorient our relationship with the natural world by critically considering our connection to place, to what sustains us, and to what we can do to reciprocate.

Meredith Malone, the Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator and senior curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

View on site | Email this event

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This exhibition was created as an abecedaria about miniature books, focusing mostly on different aspects of the physical book in miniature.

Curated by Curator of Rare Books Cassie Brand with assistance from Curatorial Assistant Danielle Kronmiller.

View on site | Email this event

The Documenting for Democracy exhibition uses the Kartemquin Films Collection to reflect on the impact of the production house’s history, award-winning films, and achievements in the world of independent documentary filmmaking.

This exhibition was organized by Curator of Film and Media Lydia Creech with assistance from MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) 2027 Candidate Maria Pellegrino.

View on site | Email this event

“Like a lot of people, I grew up playing the classics with my friends and family – Hi Ho Cherry-o and Candyland as a young child, and, as an older kid, Monopoly, Life, and Trivial Pursuit. I’ll be honest, I hate a lot of those games now (too much luck and not enough strategy needed), but I still have a lot of the old beat-up boxes in my closet.

“In grad school, I stumbled into a group of friends that introduced me to the new wave of Eurogames and all their deeply convoluted rule books. It was love at first play. I’d call it a hobby, but even though adulthood has made it a lot harder to wrangle a group of friends together for board game night, I still keep buying games. I have over two hundred games now (over twice that if you count expansions), and I’m a sucker for a good component.

“Kickstarter has absolutely ruined my bank account with all the deluxe versions and stretch goals. So given all that, I can’t call this a hobby. It’s a collection that dreams of making it to the table, and if being INSIDE a table is the closest this collection can get, I’ll take it.”

View on site | Email this event

The wealth accumulated through his business success enabled Wulfing to engage in local philanthropy through Park Unity Church and to support German relief efforts and academic causes following World War I. His personal interests focused on archaeology and the classics.

Wulfing is best known for his ancient coin collection, which was donated in 1928 and forms the nucleus of the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. Less known is the substantial collection of Native American artifacts, Japanese tsuba (sword guards), and books that Wulfing collected until his death in 1929.

Wulfing added many objects to his collections during his travels across the United States, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This exhibition highlights some of those travels and the items he acquired along the way. To Wulfing, these were not just objects, but lenses into past times and cultures that served as invaluable teaching aids.

The Jon Max Wulfing’s Passport to the Past exhibition is curated by guest curator Jeremy Haag, courtesy of the Newman Numismatic Portal at WashU.

View on site | Email this event

organized by Andrea Degener, Dowd Illustration Research Archive curator; Douglas B. Dowd, Dowd Illustration Research Archive faculty director; and Cassie Brand, Rare Books curator.

View on site | Email this event

This exhibition was organized by Student Public Historian Duaa Mohamed.

View on site | Email this event