Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts is positioned to become a national model for the creation, study and exhibition of cross-disciplinary and collaborative work in art and architecture.

The three central units are:

College of Art/Graduate School of Art. Dating back to 1879 and the founding of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, the College of Art was the first professional, university-affiliated art school in the United States. In the 1940s, its broad-based core program helped set standards for the bachelor of fine arts degree. Faculty over the years have included Max Beckmann, Philip Guston and other internationally known artists.

The 22 full-time faculty members include prominent painters, sculptors, printmakers and mixed-media artists as well as leading illustrators, graphic designers, fashion designers and photographers. In the last decade, design faculty have won numerous professional honors while fine art faculty have been featured in more than 100 solo exhibitions and 300 group shows on five continents.

College of Architecture/Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design. Established in 1910, the College of Architecture was one of eight founding members of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). In 1962, Architecture launched one of the nation's first Master of Urban Design programs. Four winners of the Pritzker Prize, generally considered architecture's highest honor, have taught at the school.

The 20 full-time faculty members include practicing architects, urban designers and landscape architects as well as eminent architectural theorists and historians and a select number of international visitors. They have won national and regional awards for design excellence and planning, including more than two-dozen from the American Institute of Architects alone.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The Kemper Art Museum dates back to 1881, making it the first art museum west of the Mississippi River. From its founding, curators and directors have built the permanent collection by focusing on the art of its time. Early acquisitions included significant images of the American West by George Caleb Bingham and Carl Wimar.

In the 1940s, curator H. W. Janson — a German exile who introduced modern European art to St. Louis and later authored the internationally influential textbook History of Art (1962) — acquired dozens of major paintings and sculptures by Max Beckmann, Georges Braques, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and other European and American modernists. Subsequent curators added significant pieces by Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, among many others.

Most recently, the museum has acquired important works by contemporary artists such as Daniel Buren, Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans and Louise Lawler.