American Classics

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

In this conversation, part of the Academy’s ongoing series of events dedicated to American Classics, David Lang and Nicola Piovani will discuss their respective work for cinema, considering the importance of contemporary music to cinematic narrative.

Pulitzer-Prize winning composer David Lang contributed the songs “I Lie” and “World to Come” to the soundtrack of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza), an ode to the Eternal City, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 before going on to win the Oscar for best foreign language film at the 86th Academy Awards. In the opening scene, a women’s chorus sings a Minimalist sacred composition by Lang within the vaulted spaces of the Fontana dell' Acqua Paola, on the Janiculum Hill. Lang was nominated for an Oscar for the haunting “Simple Song #3,” which he composed for Sorrentino’s La giovinezza (2015). The song sums up the complex emotional life of a retired conductor, played by Michael Caine, on vacation at a Fellini-esque spa in Switzerland. David Lang is the Paul Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the spring of 2017.

Maestro Nicola Piovani, is one of Italy’s best-known composers of film scores, with over 130 film scores to his credit, including The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), Kaos (1984), both directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, and Federico Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (1986), Intervista (1987), and La voce della luna (1990). In 1998, Piovani won the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score for his work on Roberto Benigni’s celebrated film La vita è bella.

The event will be conducted in English and Italian with simultaneous translation in both languages.

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

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

The American Academy in Rome is pleased to host a roundtable panel session at the 2017 College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in New York, “The American Dream of the Mediterranean: Lessons from History,” on Thursday, February 16.

Described as “the Middle Sea” or even “the Great Sea,” the Mediterranean has long been celebrated for its centrality and significance as a crossroads of everything from foodstuffs and people to religion, culture, and economic power. In the twentieth century, the Mediterranean took on a new role as a classroom of unrivaled riches for a generation of young scholars who later defined the discipline of art history in the United States. Whether working on the arts of Islam and Byzantium, Medieval France, or Early Modern Italy, the pioneers of art and architecture who took up positions at leading American universities and museums—including Shelomo Dov Goitein, Richard Krautheimer, Meyer Schapiro, Robert Venturi and Kurt Weitzmann—developed their methods and theories during formative travels along the shores of the Mediterranean.

Taking a fresh approach to the conference session format, this roundtable brings together scholars in varied fields to discuss the lessons from the Mediterranean that have informed how we see, analyze, and think about art from the origins of art history to today. As many of the art historical trailblazers considered came as refugees to the United States, where they made their careers, this panel also questions what claims can be made, if any, about an “American” style of art history. This session is organized by the American Academy in Rome as part of its 2016-17 programming series, American Classics, which investigates both the classical underpinnings of American culture and the “classic” texts, works of art and ideals that have helped define American identity.

Session Chairs

Lindsay Harris (FAAR'14), Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Charge of the School of Classical Studies, American Academy in Rome
Avinoam Shalem (RAAR'15), Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam, Columbia University

Session Participants

Dale Kinney (FAAR,'72, RAAR'97), Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Research Professor, Bryn Mawr College
Peter N. Miller, Dean, Professor of History of the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, Bard Graduate Center
Martino Stierli, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art

Panel Session Information

Date and Time:
Thursday, February 16, 5:30-7:00 pm

Location:
New York Hilton Midtown
Beekman Parlor

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

Nathaniel Mackey is Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. Winner of a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry among numerous honors, Mackey’s poetry combines African mythology, African-American musical traditions like jazz, and an open, serial form. As he says of his work, “I approach my writing as 'of a piece' in more senses than one, admittedly fractional but wanting to imply—all the more wanting to imply—the proverbial whole the parts fail to add up to."

Nathaniel Mackey is the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2016.

The reading will be in English. You can watch this event livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This exhibition, drawn in part from the holdings of the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome, features a selection of photographs by foreign women in Rome from three successive generations. Their work confronts aspects of the Eternal City and its urban transformation over more than a century, from the Belle Époque to the present day. At the same time, it tracks the emergence of photography as an independent medium wielded by women with distinctive viewpoints, as it evolved from a documentary aid to a vehicle for subjective, even gendered expression.

The protagonists are the American archaeologist Esther Boise Van Deman, who photographed Rome and its surroundings in the 1910s; Georgina Masson, the author of a classic guidebook, The Companion Guide to Rome, that has shaped foreigners’ experiences of Rome since the 1950s; and the contemporary photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron, whose images capture glimpses of Rome as seen by an American living abroad in the Eternal City, folding them into a wandering, meditative reverie. Seen in succession against a photographic landscape of Rome defined for the most part by men, these photographs posit another way of seeing the city’s history. Taken by female flâneurs, empirical observations of bricks and mortar progressively dissolve into pure, evanescent experience.

A View of One’s Own is curated by Lindsay Harris, Peter Benson Miller, and Angela Piga. It is part of La Quadriennale in città (16° Quadriennale d’Arte) and FOTOGRAFIA, Festival Internazionale di Roma.

The exhibition is made possible in part by Richard Baron and Adi Shamir Baron.

Exhibition Events

Inaugural Lecture
Zoe Strauss
The Photography and the City - Philadelphia
13 October 2016
6pm, AAR Lecture Room

Lecture EVENT CANCELLED
Letizia Battaglia
The Photographer and the City - Palermo
3 November 2016
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

Exhibition Hours

Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, 4pm-7pm
until 27 November 2016

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts and Humanities: American Classics.

This event is the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture and is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Henry James, the literary titan and cosmopolitan figure whose classic novels explore the culture clash between brash Americans and jaded European society. In this event, Colm Tóibín, the author of the award-winning novel The Master (2004), which unpacks James’s complex character towards the end of the writer’s life, will discuss James’s legacy with Sara Antonelli, who teaches Anglo American literature at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre.

From early novels such as The Europeans or The Portrait of a Lady, which pitted the innocence of the new world against the corruption of the old, to later works, including The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, James crafted increasingly nuanced portraits of American identities thrown into relief by their experiences abroad. Many of his stories are set against the backdrop of Rome, drawing upon James’s thorough knowledge of the inner workings of its patrician palaces and artists’ studios. James himself, however, despite his prolific output, copious letters, notebooks, novels, and plays, as well as the many portraits of him by friends, remains an enigmatic figure. This has made him and his work an alluring subject for contemporary scholars and writers, including Tóibín, who have speculated about many aspects of his personal life, including his sexual proclivities, his friendships with men and women, his relationships with his siblings, and his ill-fated interest in the theater.

The event will be held in English.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Ireland in Italy.