Conversations/Conversazioni

Please join us for a discussion on designing for museums and cultural environments. Our panelists will include:

• Craig Dykers (2015 Resident), Partner, Snøhetta
• Walter Hood (1997 Fellow, 2014 Resident), Principal, Hood Design Studio and David K. Woo Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley
• Sandra Phillips (2000 Resident), Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Catherine Wagner (2014 Fellow) Visual Artist and Professor, Mills College

Moderated by Mary Margaret Jones (1998 Fellow), President and Senior Principal, Hargreaves Associates and Chair of the AAR Board of Trustees, with an introduction by AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow).

A conversation in English with Craig Dykers, cofounder of Snøhetta, an influential architecture and design firm based in Oslo and New York that is responsible for, among other important projects, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center in New York. In a wide-ranging discussion, Dykers will speak with Pippo Ciorra, senior curator at MAXXI Architettura, about the role of context, nature, and human nature in these projects, as well as those currently in development.

Craig Dykers is the William A. Bernoudy Designer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and cofounder of Snøhetta.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute in Rome, the Ordine degli Architetti P.P.C. di Roma, and MAXXI Architettura, under the patronage of the Royal Norwegian Embassy.

We have announced the winners!

Please join us on Monday, April 24 as we celebrate the 2023–24 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows at the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony, taking place in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York.

The event will also feature a Conversations/Conversazioni between the artist Carrie Mae Weems (2006 Fellow) and AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow).

The ceremony and conversation are free and open to the public. To attend in person, please complete the registration process.

The conversation will also be streamed online. To watch on Zoom, please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

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

This conversation, the first collaboration between the New York Public Library and the American Academy in Rome, will consider the ethical, aesthetic, and social implications of public art and design. Laurie Anderson, Firelei Báez, Walter Hood, and Justin Garrett Moore will discuss the impact—positive or negative—that public art can have on the built environment, drawing from their personal experiences and work. They will explore thorny issues surrounding the decision-making process of civic projects and the motivations that lie behind public art or monuments. What happens when artistic and creative concerns clash with commercial and political ones? How can social justice and equity be addressed through aesthetics? How can public art best be used to strengthen and uplift communities?

Laurie Anderson (2006 Resident) is an artist based in New York. She is known for her interdisciplinary work in visual art, music, poetry, photography, film, electronics, and digital media.

The Bronx-based artist Firelei Báez (2022 Fellow) transforms visual references drawn from diasporic histories in her exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive environments. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is organizing a midcareer survey of her work, to open in 2024.

Walter Hood (1997 Fellow) is the founder and creative director of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an established lecturer on professional and theoretical projects.

Justin Garrett Moore is a designer, urbanist, and program officer for the Humanities in Place program at the Mellon Foundation. His work focuses on advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice through place-based initiatives and programs, built environments, cultural-heritage projects, and commemorative spaces and landscapes.

This event, to be presented in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in midtown Manhattan as part of the LIVE at NYPL series, is free and open to the public. AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow) will introduce the speakers and join them onstage during the conversation.

In-person registration is sold out, but a limited number of standby tickets will be available on the night of the event. The conversation will also be streamed online. Please register in advance to watch the event live.

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

Please join us in New York City as André Aciman, Craig Dykers, Elaine Molinar, and Joseph Viscomi discuss their shared connections to the city of Alexandria, Egypt. In his memoir Out of Egypt (1995), André Aciman described the now lost Alexandria of his youth. (Aciman is also the author of Call Me by Your Name, recently adapted into a hit film now in theaters.) Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar’s architecture firm, Snøhetta, designed the Bibliotheca Alexandria in 2002, and the building was movingly defended by citizens of Alexandria during the upheavals of early 2011. And Joseph Viscomi’s first manuscript, tentatively entitled “Out of Time: History, Presence, and the Departure of the Italians of Egypt, 1933–Present,” details how the Italians of Egypt—a population that numbered around 55,000 on the eve of WWII—anticipated, experienced and remembered their departures from Egypt.

The speakers are:

• André Aciman, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York (2015 Resident)
• Craig Dykers, Partner, Snøhetta (2015 Resident)
• Elaine Molinar, Partner, Snøhetta (2015 Visiting Artist)
• Joseph Viscomi, Faculty Fellow, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University (2015 Fellow)

This year marks the centenary of Milton Gendel, the American art critic, photographer, journalist, translator, cultural diplomat, and long-time resident of Rome. After studying art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, Gendel frequented the circle of exiled European Surrealists in New York before the Second World War. He spent the final years of the conflict in the China theater, where he took up photography with a borrowed camera, a pursuit that yielded over 70,000 negatives now conserved by the Fondazione Primoli in Rome. His photographic archive represents an unparalleled and often witty record of international artistic ferment in Italy and the dramatic transformation of the country from 1950 to the present day.

The Rome correspondent for both ARTnews and Art in America, Gendel reported on artistic developments and befriended key figures, including Leo Castelli, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Piero Dorazio, Toti Scialoja, and Tancredi Parmiggiani, among others. His article about Alberto Burri, “Burri Makes a Picture,” remains a fundamental text on the artist’s work. Gendel was also involved in the activities of the Rome New York Art Foundation on the Tiber Island, which hosted a series of groundbreaking exhibitions from 1957 to 1962. His activities often extended beyond the visual arts. He translated Bruno Zevi’s Saper vedere l’architettura into English and worked as a speechwriter for the visionary entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti. In the 1980s, he attempted to create a Tiber Island History Museum in the Palazzo Pierleoni Caetani.

An honorary member of the Society of Fellows, Gendel and his photographs have been the focus of two exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, in 1981 and 2011. On this occasion, an international panel will pay tribute to Gendel’s work in a variety of fields. Speakers will include: Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York; Marella Caracciolo Chia, writer; Barbara Drudi, art historian; Lindsay Harris, photography historian, 2014 Fellow, and the Academy’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the Humanities from 2014 to 2018; and Adachiara Zevi, architectural historian.

The Body: Out Front/Hidden/Abstracted
Thursday, October 25, 6:30 PM
Museum of Art and Design
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY

Please join us in New York City as we kick off the 2018–19 season of Conversations | Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome, featuring a panel discussion between the choreographer and dancer Molissa Fenley, the theater and puppet artist Dan Hurlin, and the performance and installation artist Pat Oleszko as they discuss various ways the body is used for expression in performance-based art. Moderating the discussion will be Martin Wechsler, programming consultant for the Joyce Theater.

Dan Hurlin
Theater and Puppet Artist, Sarah Lawrence College (2014 Fellow)

Molissa Fenley
Artistic Director, Molissa Fenley and Company (2008 Fellow)

Pat Oleszko
Artist (1999 Fellow, 2003 Resident)

Martin Wechsler
Moderator, The Joyce Theater, New York

This event is free and open to the public.

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.

Susan Sellers (2023 Resident) and Hérica Valladares (2009 Fellow, 2023 Resident) will explore hidden stories that are embedded in objects through their forms, materials, and uses.

Susan Sellers is the current Henry Wolf Graphic Designer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and a designer based in New York who works across disciplines, focusing on identity, exhibitions, and public spaces. She is a founding partner of the design firm 2x4 and the former director of design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her current project investigates materials and forms of display across time and political ideologies.

Hérica Valladares is the current Esther Van Deman Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and associate professor of classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on Roman wall painting, the history of archaeological exploration on the Bay of Naples, and the reception of classical antiquity in the early modern period. Her book Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. While in Rome, she is working on a new monograph, whose current title is Fashioning Empire: Roman Women and Their Objects.

The conversation, to be moderated by Marla Stone, the Academy’s Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor, will be held in English.

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

This event, to be presented in person at the Academy as well as on Zoom, is free and open to the public. Please register for Zoom in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Notice

Space in the Lecture Room is limited, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. For access to the Academy, guests will be asked to show a valid photo ID and comply with COVID-19 safety protocols. Please contact events [at] aarome.org (events[at]aarome[dot]org) with any questions.

Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.

CONVERSATIONS – NEW TERRAIN

JULIA CZERNIAK
Professor and Associate Dean, Syracuse Architecture
MARY MARGARET JONES
President and Senior Principal, Hargreaves Associates (1998 Fellow)
MICHAEL MANFREDI
Cofounder, Weiss/Manfredi
GREGG PASQUARELLI
Cofounder, SHoP Architects

In collaboration with the Enel Foundation.

Please join us for a panel discussion featuring some of the world’s leading practitioners of landscape architecture, architecture and urban design sharing thoughts related to the complex weave of manmade and natural systems. The panel will review innovative design strategies for the reclamation of brownfields and other disturbed landscapes, and discuss a variety of approaches for their reuse. Speakers will also address the challenges of large-scale development projects that require cooperation between communities and public and private organizations. Examples range from the adaptive re-use project of Brooklyn Bridge Park to the grounds of the Sydney Olympics, among other projects.

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The 2016–17 season of Conversations/Conversazioni is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.