Far Afield

Jessica Helfand (2010 Resident) will debut a series of new paintings, titled The Service Society, at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York. The works portray a diasporic community of Irish women.

Elena Past (2022 Fellow) helped organize an exhibition and a panel discussion, taking place tomorrow at Wayne State University in Detroit, for Analog Anthropocene, an environmental humanities project related to her Rome Prize research on Ferrania film.

Today the artist Teresita Fernández (1999 Affiliated Fellow, 2018 Resident) speaks to the curator Allison Glenn about her exhibition Soil Horizon at Lehmann Maupin in New York during this Brooklyn Rail–sponsored virtual event.

Stephen Greenblatt (2010 Resident) and Adam Phillips investigate an essential feature of the literary imagination in a new book, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, published by Yale University Press.

Jessica Nowlin (2015 Fellow), an assistant professor in classics for the University of Texas at San Antonio, was recognized by her school with a 2024 Community Engagement Award.

Two Rome Prize Fellows—the landscape architect Lisa Switkin (2008) and the architect Germane Barnes (2022)—are presenting at “The World Around Summit 2024,” a day-long conference dedicated to the contemporary built environment, taking place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on May 11.

Glenn Most (1983 Fellow) of the University of Chicago is speaking at an international conference on “Plato and Lyric Poetry,” hosted by the Classics Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and taking place May 10–11. His talk is titled “Pindar’s nomos basileus (Fr. 169 Sn.-M.) in Plato.”

Tomorrow Emily Wilson (2006 Fellow) gives the third and final talk, “The Wisdom of Stories,” in the 2023–24 Thalia Potamianos Annual Lecture series, sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and held at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York.

Sites of Impermanence, an exhibirion organized by the National Academy of Design and featuring Sarah Oppenheimer (2011 Fellow), Richard Gluckman (2017 Resident), and Sanford Biggers (2018 Fellow), closes on May 11 in New York.

Denva Gallant (2023 Fellow) publishes Illuminating the Vitae partum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy with Pennsylvania State University Press. The book explores a richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae patrum, now in the Morgan Library and Museum, “whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late medieval Italy.”

On May 6, the architect Dilip Da Cunha (2021 Resident) will lead a seminar, “Decolonizing wetness: it is where design begins,” at the Habitat Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland.

This week Indiana University Press released Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema by Luca Caminati (2010 Fellow). This book considers how filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni “engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period.”

Bryony Roberts (2016 Fellow) has cocurated Spatializing Reproductive Justice—an exhibition spreading awareness of inequities of US reproductive care and the agency of design to expand access to it—for New York’s Center for Architecture. The show opens today.

Today the Gilmore Piano Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan features the world premiere of a commissioned composition by Christopher Cerrone (2016 Fellow). Written for two pianos, the piece will be performed by Kasey Shao and Harmony Zhu.

An exhibition of nine paintings by Eric Fischl (1996 Fellow) at the gallery Skarstedt in New York, drawn from a new series called Hotel Stories, closes on May 4.

Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine, written by the historian Caroline Cheung (2017 Fellow) for Princeton University Press, explores ancient Rome’s prodigious wine industry.

The RISD Alumni Association has recognized Elizabeth Whelan (2024 Fellow) with the Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf Visionary Award for her outstanding achievements, commitment to continued exploration, and inspired approach to her work.

Two Academy Residents, the writer Jhumpa Lahiri (2013) and the composer and performer Du Yun (2023), have just been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pietro Pucci (1996 Resident), a classical philologist and a professor in the Department of Classics at Cornell University for over fifty years, has died. He was 96 years old.

Tomorrow the historian David Nirenberg (2021 Resident) leads a conversation with Tamara Rojo, a dancer and artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, and the historian and New Yorker dance critic Jennifer Homans on “Dance: Past, Present and Future” at the Institute for Advanced Study.