Features

As we begin this January, it feels appropriate to look back on the accomplishments of the past year and ahead to the promise of the coming one.

AAR announces a fellowship opportunity, in partnership with the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of Italy’s Ministry of Culture, aimed at advancing curatorial research and promoting Italian contemporary art on an international stage.

Volume 69 of our annual journal, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, features scholarship that spans antiquity to the modern era.

The American Academy in Rome has partnered with the Emily Harvey Foundation to create a new residency opportunity for Rome Prize Fellows in Venice, starting in summer 2025.

Visual artist Sally Smart has been awarded the Mordant Family and Creative Australia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. 

AAR presented a screening of Questions as Tools in Art, Science and the Humanities, a documentary that delves into how leading thinkers and creators wield intellectual inquiry to shape their fields, followed by a panel discussion with several of the interviewees.

On Thursday, November 21, AAR concluded its two-event series at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York with a panel discussion on “Material Afterlives.” 

To mark the return of the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures to Rome this December, to be given by Rubina Raja starting today and continuing into next week, we are looking back at the history of the series at the American Academy in Rome.

In celebration of Arbor Day this year, the Verdi planted a beautiful cypress tree in the Triangle Garden for the children in our community to enjoy.

Anthony Acciavatti (2025 Fellow) and AAR President Peter N. Miller were two of sixteen speakers at a two-day conference hosted by the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Warwick Venice Centre.

At last week’s New York Gala, the American Academy in Rome honored the Grammy Award–winning jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, and the visual artist Jenny Holzer with the Centennial Medal.

Last month Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Medal on Michael C. J. Putnam (1964 Fellow, 1970 Resident, Life Trustee) and gave the Vergilius Prize to Joseph Farrell (2014 Resident).

Charting a vision for the future of institutional food, Mark Bittman and Kathleen Finlay will lead the next chapter of the ecogastronomic endeavor founded by Alice Waters and Mona Talbott in 2006.

Historically, Rome Prize Fellows have gathered around the table to play a specific variation of pool known as “cowboy”: a combination of carom and pocket billiards using four balls.

AAR mourns the loss of the artist and philanthropist Cynthia Hazen Polsky, who passed away on October 22.

The artists Carrie Mae Weems (2006 Fellow) and Alex Katz (1984 Resident) are among the recipients of the 2022 and 2023 National Medals of Arts, to be presented today at the White House by President Joseph R. Biden. 

AAR invites applications for a pilot Rome Prize dedicated to the Environmental Arts & Humanities, designed specifically for collaborative efforts.

Peter N. Miller’s “‘The History of Rain and Fine Weather’ Revisited: The View from the Top of the Gianicolo” kicked off the new fellowship year at the American Academy in Rome.

The MacArthur Foundation has just awarded Tony Cokes, a celebrated video artist and AAR’s 2023 Carla Fendi Rome Prize Fellow in Art and Technology, with a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.