The following was submitted by Elizabeth Smith:

A painter and photographer of mainly botanical subjects, Leslie Laskey's lengthy resume can at times read like an artistic history of the 20th century.  Born in Michigan in 1921, Laskey enlisted in the U.S. Army the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Serving in a combat engineering unit, Laskey was among the troops that landed on Omaha Beach early on D-Day.

As a student after the war, Laskey studied at the Chicago Institute of Design (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) with famed American Bauhaus pioneer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. He settled in St. Louis in 1956, when he accepted a faculty position at Washington University, where he developed a basic design program.

His demanding classes inspired both fear and awe in his students. On the one hand, students would leave his classes shaken by Laskey's incisive critiques (for years a campus STOP sign read: "STOP Laskey"). On the other hand, Laskey received a distinguished faculty award in 1982.  In 1986 he received the Distinguished Professor Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and to this day he is visited by an unending train of grateful students he taught during an academic tenure that spanned five decades.

Laskey's career has been productive, and he has exhibited his work widely throughout the United States.

Source:
News publication Record published by Washington University Press, St. Louis, Missouri