Far Afield

“When I open one of her novels,” writes Dwight Garner in his New York Times review of What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez (2001 Fellow), “I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be.”

The award-winning writer Randall Kenan (1997 Fellow), an unapologetically Black gay Southern writer who used his identities to tell stories only he could tell, has died. Among his numerous books are A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), Walking on Water (1999), and The Fire This Time (2007).

This month I. B. Tauris and Bloomsbury will publish Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image, written by Elizabeth Rodini, AAR’s Andrew Heiskell Arts Director.

The New York Review of Books will present “Poetry in Response to Crisis,” an online panel discussion with Dan Chiasson, Ange Mlinko, Francine J. Harris, Ishion Hutchinson (2018 Fellow), and Jana Prikryl, on Wednesday, September 2—one week from today.

The Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, is presenting Joan Thorne: Light, Layers, Insight, an exhibition of work by our 1987 Rome Prize Fellow, through January 3, 2021.

The composer and performer Pamela Z (2020 Fellow) discusses her recent Rome Prize experience—including her piece Simultaneous, comprising audio interviews with Fellows and presented at Cinque Mostre—with the San Francisco Classical Voice.

John Ochsendorf, 2008 Fellow and AAR director from 2017 to 2020, has been appointed to the board of trustees at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia.

Holland Cotter’s feature on the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, whose design was led by J. Meejin Yoon (2006 Fellow, 2020 Resident) and Eric Howeler, in collaboration with Mabel O. Wilson (2021 Resident) and others.

The Washington Post praises the University of Virginia’s recently opened Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in Charlottesville, designed by the architects Eric Howeler and J. Meejin Yoon (2006 Fellow, 2020 Resident).

On Milwaukee explores the story behind Depression-era murals by the Wisconsin-born artist Francis Scott Bradford (1927 Fellow) in a courthouse designed by the architect Albert Randolph Ross of McKim, Mead & White.

“I knit with wood, take things apart,” Helen O’Leary (2019 Fellow) tells Artistic Fuel in a recent interview. “I see my studio as an archeological site, a compendium of armatures, erasures, deliberate archaisms, renovations and restorations.”

Bissera Pentcheva (2018 Fellow), who is reconstructing the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music by studying the Hagia Sophia’s extravagantly reverberant acoustics, discusses her scholarship with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim (2018 Resident) of the New York Times.

Lysley Tenorio (2016 Fellow) has just published a new novel, The Son of Good Fortune, which he worked on during his time at AAR. The book has received positive reviews from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and Publishers Weekly.

Next month New Focus Recordings will release a new EP from composer Christopher Cerrone (2016 Fellow) and flutist Tim Munro. Liminal Highway is a hypnotic five-movement work for flute and electronics inspired by a poem by John K. Samson, lead singer and songwriter for the Weakerthans.

LSH CoLAB will open Camouflage, an exhibition of work by 2005 Rome Prize Fellow George Stoll, in Los Angeles on Sunday, July 19. A social-distancing reception for Stoll and Helen Chung, who has a concurrent show, takes place from 4:00 to 6:00pm.

An exhibition of work by Ila Bêka (2019 Italian Fellow) and Louise Lemoine, titled HOMO URBANUS: 10 Films/10 villes du monde, has opened at Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux.

Jack Fortner, a 1968 Rome Prize Fellow in musical composition, the artistic director of the chamber music group Orpheus, and professor emeritus of music at California State University, Fresno, died on June 25.

Marlon Blackwell (2019 Resident), professor and E. Fay Jones chair in architecture at the University of Arkansas, was selected as 2020 SEC Professor of the Year, the Southeastern Conference’s highest faculty honor.

In the Washington Post, the artist Karyn Olivier (2019 Fellow) argues against the removal of a mural at the University of Kentucky on which her companion artwork in the same building, Witness, is based.

AAR sadly remembers 2009 McKim Medal Gala honoree Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer widely considered one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema. He will be missed.