The independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis since 1878 VOLUME 144, NO. 5
THURSDAY, SEPT 29, 2022
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Katharina Grosse exhibit opens in the Kemper Art Museum
WUPD attempts to combat rising Kia thefts AVI HOLZMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
IZZY SILVER | STUDENT LIFE
Art viewer soaks in the vibrant colors that Grosse’s work typifies.
NATASHA CHUKA CONTRIBUTING WRITER The Kemper Art Museum opened a new exhibition, “Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988-2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions,” by renowned contemporary German artist Katharina Grosse, Sept 23. This new exhibit features 37 large canvases organized into two separate themes: “Returns/ Revisions/Inventions” and “Fissures/Ruptures.” The collection also includes three new fabric pieces featuring photographs of unfinished paintings and behind-the-scenes elements. The museum celebrated the opening of the exhibit with a Q & A led by Grosse and Eckmann. Set in the Steinberg Auditorium, the event brought Grosse’s friends to campus along with Washington University students and faculty members.
Sabine Eckmann, the Kemper Art Museum’s chief curator, shared the significance of housing this exhibit in an interview with Student Life. “This exhibition is the first to explore three decades of Grosse’s studio paintings and their embeddedness in the history of modern and contemporary painting,” Eckmann said. The Q & A expounded upon Grosse’s artistic voice, inspirations, and techniques. Grosse has explored and utilized a variety of approaches throughout her artistic career, a trend visible throughout the works on display in the current exhibit. Grosse experiments with both layering and spraying paint techniques in her pieces; she also studies the effect of applying various natural elements to her work, like tree branches, kelp, and soil, to capture the way they interact with the canvas. To create another one of
her pieces, Grosse walked over wet paint with special rubber shoes to engage with her canvas differently. “The only thing that is constant and recurring in my work is the color; the intensity of the color,” she said. One student who attended the event was junior Jane Whellan, the student social media coordinator for the Kemper Art Museum. Having researched Grosse and her work prior to the event, Whellan said that she is looking forward to witnessing the impact of the color and scale of the new exhibit. “I’m excited to see all of the color in person because color is such a big part of her work and because it’s so hard to capture that on camera,” Whellan said. This exhibit isn’t Kemper’s first partnership with Katharina Grosse. Back in 2016, the University’s Art on Campus initiative partnered with Kemper and commissioned an original
painting for the Gary M. Sumers Recreation Center on campus that can still be seen today. Grosse’s exhibit will go to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and then the Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany. Eckmann said that the artist’s international presence and boundary-breaking artistic style supports the Kemper Art Museum’s legacy to provide students with access to new works in the arts and humanities. “Katharina Grosse hopes to achieve a reorientation, ‘a space where you can finally begin to talk and to think beyond binaries and conventional categories and definitions,’” Eckmann said. “I hope that the viewing of her painting will generate such contemplations and conversations relevant to our lives today.” The exhibit is on display in the museum until January 23, 2023.
The Kia Boyz Tiktok trend, which demonstrates how to steal a Kia or Hyundai in a matter of minutes, took hold over the summer. The Washington University Police Department (WUPD) Chief Angela Coonce believes that the trend has led to three cars being stolen from WashU students living off campus since the start of this academic year. The trend originated in Milwaukee, from a group known on social media as “the Kia Boyz.” In a matter of minutes, wielding nothing more than a USB cord or screwdriver, a person is able to break apart the steering column and drive off with a stolen vehicle. The targeted vehicles are Kias made between 2011-2021 and Hyundais made between 2016-2021. These vehicles use a key and mechanical ignition rather than a button and fob which would protect against the jacking. Coonce described this problem as, “The big story [for us] going into the school year,” and hopes that students will take the proper precautions to avoid their vehicles being stolen. WUPD purchased more than 50 sets of steering wheel locks which prevent a would-be thief from driving off with a vehicle. WUPD is going to distribute them to students, on Friday from 1-5 p.m. in the North Lobby– Lounge 171 in the DUC. Those who own the specific makes and models of Kias and Hyundais that are susceptible to being jacked have already received emails from WUPD. The email states that “Law enforcement agencies across the St. Louis region and nationwide saw a significant increase in thefts involving Kia and Hyundai vehicles…attributed, at least in part, to recent social media postings.” Students who cannot make it to the event but are still interested in obtaining a loan can email Sergeant Geof Himstedt at Geoff_himstedt@wustl.edu or call 314-935-5084.
Wild and Gonzalez speak to SU about space equity and housing GRACE TYAU CONTRIBUTING WRITER The main takeaway from Student Union’s Senate meeting this week is that Washington University’s residential and extracurricular space is more scarce than administrators and students want to see. Student Union Senate brought in Associate Vice Chancellor Rob Wild and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Dr. Anna Gonzalez to speak about the University’s space equity initiative at their Tuesday meeting and to yield other questions from students in attendance. Their conversation turned to residential spaces at one point, which is when Gonzalez spoke to the paucity of housing on campus. “Normally in residential buildings, we would have different spaces for emergencies for things that come up [and] I
don’t know the actual number [we now have], but it is smaller than what we are comfortable with,” Gonzalez said. She said that many students are interested in living on campus largely because they view it as safer than off-campus housing and she also added that transfer students are currently in need of more residential space. “One of the most important factors for transfer students to accept coming to Wash. U. is if they are guaranteed housing space,” she said. “We could have probably filled two or three [houses with transfer students] had there been space for housing [so] we gave them one.” Gonzalez added that the residential needs of transfer students are not guaranteed and are only met if there is space available. Working on the future of residential life on campus is part of the University’s student space
planning efforts, although no concrete steps were presented at the meeting for increasing residential space. The SU meeting was otherwise centered on the University’s space equity initiative. Through the Future of Student Space Planning initiative, the University will evaluate how to more equitably distribute residential, performance, rehearsal, social, and storage spaces on campus. “We want to create a process with a shared understanding of how those spaces get out to meet the needs of today’s really diverse student body,” Gonzalez said. A new committee, the Future of Student Space Planning Team, was created to work on the initiative. The group of 22 students, chaired by Executive Director for Campus Life Stan Sweeney and senior Raevyn Ferguson, was selected to represent different
student perspectives and create recommendations for the Board of Trustees in regards to student space. By the end of October, the team aims to publish an online forum for students to voice their concerns to the committee. The initiative’s three phases are discovery, clarification, and implementation, all of which will take a full academic year to complete. This year, the group will begin seeking out the biggest problems that they can then focus on solving. Next year will be dedicated to creating policies to be implemented by Fall 2025. For many students, the big question with this initiative is how access to the eleven houses on campus, primarily occupied by Interfraternity Council (IFC) fraternities, will change. According to Wild, the future of the houses is unclear. “It’s not fair to our campus community if we privilege one
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group over another [in terms of] space,” Wild said. “I also think it’s not fair for the University to make arbitrary decisions without student input into how we allocate the spaces.” According to Wild, it’s necessary to determine whether an organization even needs space, as well as for the organization to understand the responsibility that comes with taking up space. “Having space dedicated for a student group is a privilege,” Wild said. “With that privilege comes some responsibility to give back to the campus community.” At the meeting, Gonzalez said that fraternity houses privilege one gender over the rest of the school because men in Greek housing have paid cheaper residential fees than students in the South 40. Students from various organizations also voiced
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