Far Afield

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.

George Lewis (2010 Resident) surveys how Black composers “have explored what it means—and could mean—to be American, helping to foster a creolized, cosmopolitan new music for the 21st century.” His New York Times article features Tania León (1998 Resident) and Courtney Bryan (2020 Fellow).

In a wide-ranging interview with ASLA’s journal The Dirt, Walter Hood (1997 Fellow) discusses the intersection of African American history with his work in landscape architecture.

Hatje Cantz is publishing Mr. Bawa I Presume by Giovanna Silva (2020 Italian Fellow), which explores minimalistic ecofriendly houses, schools, and hotels by the Sri Lankan “tropical modernist” Geoffrey Bawa. The book received a 2019 Graham Foundation grant.

A belated congratulations to 1996 Fellow Thomas Phifer for winning a 2020 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects for the Pavilions, his expansion of the Glenstone Museum in Maryland.

In his essay “Monuments and Crimes,” Dell Upton (2019 Resident) considers historic preservation as a tool of political ideology in Italy and America in a new article published by Journal18, an online publication affiliated with the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture.

Oxford University Press is publishing Allison L. C. Emmerson’s book Life and Death in the Roman Suburb, which includes research she conducted during her 2019 Rome Prize Fellowship year.

The political theorist Danielle Allen (2020 Resident) has won this year’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a $500,000 award administered by the Library of Congress that recognizes work in disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize.

John Yau’s monographic article on the painter Elliot Green (2012 Fellow) reflects on the “profound influence [of Rome] on the direction his work subsequently took.”

Simon Mordant, a member of the AAR Board of Trustees, has become an Officer of the Order of Australia for his distinguished services to visual arts at the national and international level, to emerging artists, and to philanthropy.

The artist Garrett Bradley, a 2020 Rome Prize Fellow, discusses her short film America and her recent exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.

Thompson Mayes, a 2014 Rome Prize Fellow and the author of Why Old Places Matter, will speak virtually at the Heritage Foundation of Williamson County’s annual Preservation Symposium, to be held on June 26.