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Webster University Department of Art, Design & Art History

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Webster University Department of Art, Design & Art History

Imagine an art program that suits your needs and interests through a wide variety of courses, studio specialties, and career options.

Webster University offers you all that and more starting with a rich curriculum and many areas of specialty.

10/05/2026

We want to welcome you all the the VAScape! 🌷

VAScape is a student-faculty collaborative project that takes a neglected, weedy, exterior plot of land on the south side of Webster University’s Visual Arts Studios, and transforms it into it into a curated, living ecosystem. 🐝 The location of this installation parallels a daily walkway for students and faculty, presenting an improved first impression that reflects the creativity and intentionality cultivated within out studio walls.

This garden space is designed with year-round visual interest, beginning with the installation of predominately native perennials that supports pollinators and seasonal blooms. By showcasing species that thrive in our local St. Louis environment, we aim to inspire the campus community to pause and become curious about local ecology.

This project perceives natural spaces as an artistic medium; exposing the overlap between ecological, aesthetic, and pedagogical approaches to artmaking. In addition to serving local wildlife, the plants double as art-making materials, such as cyanotype, lumen prints, natural dyes, and subject matter for photography, drawing, and painting. 🍁

By addressing environmental consciousness, we shift education toward an active, experiential, and collaborative format that emphasizes sustainability and place-based learning. Ongoing tending of the garden will be documented through photography, video, and performance, creating a record of the project’s evolution over time.

Ultimately, VAScape serves as a metaphor for the self-evolution of the artist, growth of the department, and for the patient, iterative nature of all creative work. To nurture a landscape is to practice the same sustained attention that art demands.

Thank you to student Annalisa Kercher and professor Natalie Baldeón for making this vision come to life! They recieved the student/faculty grant to install this! ✨🌻

10/03/2026

📣New Spring Class Just Dropped 👀

DESN 3050.01 Topics
DESIGN LAB
Advanced Studio Course Exploring Identity, Ideas, Experimentation & Visual Expression
Spring 2027
Thursdays 5:30-8:30pm
Taught by Sofya Karash ([email protected])

What makes a visual identity feel distinctive, memorable, and alive? In this course, you’ll investigate how ideas become visual languages— and how those languages can take shape across many forms.

Start with a real-world identity project, using research, concept development, typography, image-making, and visual systems to create a cohesive identity and its broader design expression. Then turn inward with a self-directed project driven by your own interests, questions, and ideas. Experiment with image, type, form, narrative, and process.

Whether you’re interested in illustration, graphic design, art, image-making, or visual storytelling, this course gives you space to build a stronger creative voice, expand your practice, and explore where your ideas can take you.

Make the kind of work your portfolio has been waiting for!

10/01/2026

✨TOMORROW✨

Join us for the latest installment of the DADAH Lecture Series hosted by our very own Sofya Karash!

Sofya Karash is a graphic designer, educator, and Partner & Design Director at The Narrative, an award-winning multidisciplinary visual communication design studio she has co-led for over a decade. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and raised in the United States, she holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work combines research, curiosity, and experimentation to create brand identities, digital experiences, and communication systems that engage diverse audiences and endure over time.

⏰ | 12 pm
📍 | Sverdrup 123
🗓️ | Oct 2 (This Friday)

After the lecture, Sofya is hosting a demo at 1pm in VAS 1 where she will be exploring the design process of translating text into visual narrative through typography, collage, and fragmentation using a poem by Daniil Kharms. If you are interested, the sign up sheet is right outside VAS 1. (and yes, lunch is included 😉)

This is Sofya’s first year at Webster so let’s give her a big crowd and a warm welcome! 🫂

Our Friday Lecture Series is generously sponsored by Regional Arts Commission. ❤️

09/30/2026

⚠️ IMPORTANT INFORMATION ⚠️

Registration opens NEXT WEEK for everyone. Get in contact with your advisor and figure out what classes work best for you! You can find the classes offered next semester on MyWebster in the Interactive Class Search menu.

09/26/2026

Illustrating Slaughterhouse Five
October 2 - November 21, 2026 | Opening Reception October 2, 5-8pm

Dive into the semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, known for his satirical and darkly humorous writings. This exhibition features a series of commissioned illustrations our very own Igor Karash completed for the limited edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, published by Easton Press, 2025.

Go check it out and support one of our highly esteemed professors!

Congrats, Igor, keep up the good work!

09/25/2026

VAS has been feeling a little emptier the past two weeks and there’s a big reason for that. Our very own Racheal Bruce has been off in Spain making wonderful things!

Racheal was an artist-in-residence with Valencia Print Workshop for two weeks. During her time, Racheal created a chess set based on iconic 15th century Valencia tiles called Socarrat tiles.

Here is what Racheal has to say about her inspiration behind the chess set:

“In researching the city of Valencia, I came across a 15th century poem by three Valencian authors called Scachs d'amor ("Chess of Love"). This poem uses chess as an allegory for courting/romance, but more importantly, it's the earliest documented game of chess that empowers the Queen piece, meaning it can move any number of squares in any direction. In this poem, the movement of the bishop piece is also extended. Two decades later, another Valencian author published these new rules, which spread across Europe thanks to the printing press. This is the origin of modern chess.”

Everything was drawn, designed, printed, and constructed in a week and a half. They hosted a chess tournament to exhibit the sets.

“Seeing the pieces move about the board felt like a dance - it really brought them to life.”

What a wonderful opportunity, congratulations, Racheal!

09/24/2026

You heard it right folks, the first potluck of the year will be THIS FRIDAY at 12 in VAS 2! 🥗

What does this mean? Bring yourself, a dish to share (dessert, side, entree, drinks, etc.) and join the art department for a beautiful lunch.

Food signup sheets are located on Noriko’s door in the hunt house and in VAS 3.

This is always such a fun event that allows our students and staff to mingle over some delicious food. 🥘 Since the school year is still young, this is a great way to meet peers and chat with your classmates and professors outside of class.

This event is open to ALL DADAH STUDENTS. Bring all your artsy friends and classmates and let’s make this potluck one for the books! 🥪

09/23/2026

✨ We wanted to give a huge CONGRATULATIONS to Professor Natalie Baldeón! She recently opened her solo show at the Bill Ford Gallery in Paducah KY on August 27. 🎉

What You Seek explores the ways we search for guidance, belonging, and meaning in moments of uncertainty. Drawing from mythology, ecology, and practices of divination, the paintings consider how humans have long turned to stories, rituals, and the naturals world to orient themselves through change. Rather than offering certainty, these acts of seeking become invitations to pay closer attention to our relationships with one another and the living world.

Throughout the exhibition, bodies intertwine with plants, fungi, forests, and celestial forms, dissolving boundaries between the human and other. Botanical cycles of growth, decay, and renewal become metaphors for grief, transformation, and resilience, while gardens and forests emerge as spaces of memory, reflections, and reciprocity.

Ultimately, this work proposes that the answers or guidance we search for elsewhere may already exist within everyday acts of care, ecological connection, and marvel of the mundane. This exhibition invites viewers to embrace uncertainty, cultivate wonder, and imagine more reciprocal ways of belonging to the world around them.

If you find yourself in Paducah KY, go check it out before Oct. 2!

Natalie teaches drawing, painting, and anatomy here at DADAH. Not only are her skills sharp with a paintbrush, but she is also a phenomenal instructor. (You should take one of her classes 🫵)

Congrats again, Natalie, we are so proud of you and all the incredible work you make.

09/22/2026

Have you heard of the Great Rivers Biennial❓ If you’re an artist of any kind in the STL area, you have got to check it out! 🧑‍🎨

The Great Rivers Biennial (GRB)—a collaborative initiative between CAM and the Gateway Foundation—recognizes and fosters artistic talent in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. The artists selected receive $25,000 in unrestricted funding and are featured in the Great Rivers Biennial exhibition every two years at CAM. Since 2003, the GRB has recognized the standout creative voices of 36 local artists in our region.

For the 2026 Biennial, artists Vaughn Terrell Davis Jr., Lauren dela Roche, and Vincent Stemmler have proposed ambitious exhibitions that explore figuration, gesture, materiality, and color through painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, video, and digital media. Their thoughtful considerations of repair and regeneration offer visions of resilience.

The three award winners were unanimously selected by a distinguished panel of independent jurors: Leslie Hewitt, artist and Associate Professor of Art at Rice University in Houston; Margot Norton, Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley; and Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The jurors made the selection after visiting the studios of ten semifinalist artists who were chosen from a pool of 93 applicants.

Great Rivers Biennial 2026 is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator, and Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.

✨ Vaughn Terrell Davis Jr. is a Webster University DADAH alum. 🤞 He and Vincent have also recently spoken and led creative workshops here at Webster. 🥇🎨

The show runs until Feb 7, 2027 so go check it out while you can! The Contemporary Art Museum is free and their hours are:

Wed | 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Thu | 10:00 am–7:00 pm
Fri | 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Sat | 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Sun | 10:00 am–5:00 pm

09/21/2026

✨ DADAH's First Friday was AMAZING! ✨

We're still feeling the excitement and want to take another moment to thank the incredible departments across Webster University, along with local organizations and businesses, who generously donated raffle prizes. Your support helped make this event an even more memorable experience for our students and community.

Today we are spotlighting Saint Louis Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum, amd Webster University Office of Admissions.

Saint Louis Art Museum
📍1 Fine Arts Dr, St. Louis, MO 63110
🕛 Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am–5 pm | Friday, 10 am–9 pm | Closed Monday
💲Access for All Free Fridays. Museum admission is always free, on Friday there is free admission to ticketed exhibitions as well!
✨Current Exhibitions:
- Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan
- Women Impressionists and the Land
- Juanita McNeely
- Visions on Antiquity
- Picturing Independence

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
📍3750 Washington Ave, St. Louis, MO
🕕 10-5 Wednesday, Friday-Sunday | 10-7 Thursday
💲Admission is FREE!!
✨ Current Exhibition: The Great River Biennial - a collaborative initiative between CAM and the Gateway Foundation—recognizes and fosters artistic talent in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Since 2003, the GRB has recognized the standout creative voices of 36 local artists in our region. Go check out Vaughn Terrell Davis Jr., Lauren dela Roche, and Vincent Stemmler’s works. The show runs until Feb 7, 2027

Webster University Office of Admissions
📍470 E Lockwood Ave, Webster Groves, MO
✨ Whether you’re a first-year student, transfer student, international student, graduate student, attending evening or online, plan to study abroad or are active military, there's a program for you here at Webster.

💛💙 A huge THANK YOU to all of our raffle donors! Your generosity, partnership, and commitment to supporting the arts make events like this possible. We are truly grateful for everyone who helped make First Friday such a success.

Address

470 E Lockwood Avenue
St. Louis, MO
63119

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	8am - 5pm

Telephone

+13149687171

Website

http://www.webster.edu/art/index.php

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