Far Afield

Beverly McIver (2018 Fellow) talked to Art and Object about how her year in Rome affected the current direction of her painting. McIver’s work is currently on view at Craven Allen Gallery in Durham, North Carolina.

Sinclair Bell, associate professor of art history at Northern Illinois University, a 2003 Rome Prize Fellow, and editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome series, has won a $60,000 NEH Fellowship for his project “Race and Representation in the Roman Empire: Images of Aethiopians in Imperial Visual and Material Culture.”

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is presenting a Zoom talk, “Your Turn,” with three 2006 Fellows—Pamela Hovland (design), Alex Schweder (architecture), and Ward Shelley (visual arts)—on Friday, January 8 at noon.

A solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jennifer Packer, winner of the 2020 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, is on view at the Serpentine Galleries in London through March 2021 (temporarily closed now). The show, titled The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, features portraits of friends and family and still lifes of flowers.

The composer Katherine Balch, winner of the 2020 Elliott Carter Rome Prize, offers an artist-curated playlist for I Care If You Listen that includes pieces by Zosha Di Castri, Tyshawn Sorey, Tomeka Reid, and more.

The artist and ceramicist Jim Melchert talks to the Brooklyn Rail about his life, his work, and his time as AAR’s Director from 1984 to 1988.

A composition by 2018 Fellow Ash Fure, titled “Shiver Lung,” makes the New York Times “25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020.” Fure’s new CD Something to Hunt is out on Sound American.

Basil Twist (2019 Fellow) has released a full-length film adaptation of his underwater puppet production Symphonie Fantastique, for rental or purchase through Vimeo On Demand. The film was shot during several live performances at HERE Arts Center in 2018 to mark the show’s twentieth anniversary.

Helen O’Leary (2019 Fellow) has been awarded a 2021–23 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Gia Kourlas of the New York Times selected a reimagining of 2008 Fellow Molissa Fenley’s “State of Darkness” (1988) for seven dancers at the Joyce Theater as one of the year’s best in dance.

This month Oxford University Press is publishing Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After by Jonah Siegel (2004 Fellow).

Last month former AAR Director John Ochsendorf and current Mellon Humanities Professor Lynne Lancaster talked to CNN about the Pantheon in Rome.

The archaeologist Lynn Meskell (2015 Resident), a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, has been appointed Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The artist and performer John Kelly (2007 Fellow) has won a 2020 fellowship from the New York–based Art Matters Foundation.

Archipelago Books will publish a new novel by 2017 Italian Fellow Andrea Bajani, titled If You Kept a Record of Sins, in March 2021.

Anonymous Was a Woman has awarded 2020 grants to the artists Barbara Chase-Riboud (1958 Affiliated Fellow) and Karyn Olivier (2019 Fellow). These artists receive unrestricted awards of $25,000 each in recognition of their work.

Santa Nastro of Artribune spoke to curator and former Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Peter Benson Miller about Encounters II: The Activist Gesture, his online exhibition with Julie Mehretu and J. Meejin Yoon.

Last month Lindsay Harris (2014 Fellow and former Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of Humanities) organized a virtual exhibition and tour, The Lives of Everyone: Photographs from the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Collection.

Rutgers University is presenting a live Zoom concert of works for solo voice and electronics by 2020 Fellow Pamela Z, followed by a moderated discussion, on Wednesday, November 18.

Skira has published Doug Argue: Letters to the Future, a monograph edited by Claude Peck and Paola Gribaudo that offers 170 reproductions of work by this 1998 Rome Prize Fellow.

This month the University of Chicago Press will publish The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps by Jessica Maier, a 2005 Fellow in Renaissance and early modern studies.

An installation by John Schlesinger (2003 Fellow) opens today at Philadelphia’s Cherry Street Pier. The work, titled After the Fall, continues the artist’s exploration of installation in challenging spaces through photography, sculpture, found or recycled materials, and neon.

“When I realized that rural areas were largely ignored in academic urban design and planning programs,” writes Dewey Thorbeck (1964 Fellow) in Architect, “I founded the Center for Rural Design [at the University of Minnesota] to establish a design discipline to focus on future rural land uses.”

An installation by Abigail DeVille (2018 Fellow) titled Light of Freedom at Madison Square Park in New York evokes, in her own words, “a long line of freedom fighters who have been protesting to exist in this nation from the very beginning.”

Theaster Gates, 2020 Resident and an honoree at AAR’s 2020 Virtual Benefit, talks to the Guardian about the work behind his first ever New York show, Black Vessel, and why white supremacy still threatens vital cultural institutions

Christopher Celenza, 1994 Fellow and AAR director from 2010 to 2014, has been named James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

A new book by Susan Meiselas (2017 Resident), titled Tar Beach, charts a photographic history and tradition unique to New York’s Little Italy.

The opening reception for Transatlantico at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey, is October 18. The exhibition features 120 artworks from Palazzo Monti’s extensive alumni network, which includes our 2018 Italian Fellow Alessandro Di Pietro.

Ismail Muhammad profiles Garrett Bradley, a 2020 Rome Prize Fellow whose new documentary, Time, stubbornly resists all the easy ways of thinking about incarceration in America.

Allunati, a solo exhibition of work by Rä di Martino (2018 Italian Fellow), opens at the gallery Monica de Cardenas in Milan on October 15, on view through November 28.