This Conversations/Conversazioni explores the ways in which politics, capital, and power have influenced art and cultural production from the days of the Medici until now. Contemporary art curator Rujeko Hockley and art historian Stephanie Leone (2000 Fellow) join the American Academy of Rome to shed light on the importance of arts patronage and the fraught ethical nuances that come with it. This conversation, moderated by John Marciari (1998 Fellow), is free and open to the public.

Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, she organized 2 Lizards (2022), a film installation by the artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), and the midcareer survey Julie Mehretu (2021). Additional projects at the Whitney include the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017), and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017 (2017). Previously, Hockley was assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she cocurated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as the artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kehinde Wiley, Tom Sachs, and others. She is the cocurator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and traveled to three US venues. Hockley serves on the boards of several organizations, including Art Matters and Institute For Freedoms, as well as the advisory boards of Recess and the Vision & Justice Series.

A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture with a focus on Rome, Stephanie Leone is professor of art history at Boston College and a 2000 Rome Prize Fellow. She is the author of The Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona: Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (2008) and the editor of The Pamphilj and the Arts: Patronage and Consumption in Baroque Rome (2011). Leone also edited Walls and Memory: The Abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri (Lazio), from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond (2005) with Lisa Fentress, Caroline Goodson, and Margaret Laird (2000 Fellow, current editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome).

John Marciari is the Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where he oversees a renowned collection of approximately 25,000 works. A specialist in Italian and Spanish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he is curator of the upcoming Morgan exhibition Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Marciari is also a 1998 Rome Prize Fellow in history of art.

This event, to be presented in person at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, is free and open to the public. It will also be streamed online.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation generously supports Conversations/Conversazioni at the American Academy in Rome.