Features

The human body has gone through a lot since the American Academy in Rome was founded more than a century ago. When the Academy first opened its doors in 1894, the Greek and Roman notion of perfect balance and chiseled beauty was still the standard for study.

To catch a glimpse of the long-lost beliefs of the ancients and their visions of the afterlife, one needs to look at the images of the gods that they painted on their pottery. This was the argument the archaeologist Thomas Carpenter made during the 2019 Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture.

AAR presents The Academic Body, an exhibition that spans over a century to tell the changes in the representation of the body in art and society.

Claudia Trezza recaps a recent Academy symposium titled “Water and Culture: A View from Rome.” The event kicked off with a lecture by the architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi (both 2019 Residents).

AAR is pleased to announce a new Rome Prize Fellowship this year. The Philip Guston Rome Prize in Visual Arts, established by Musa and Thomas Mayer with a $3 million gift in memory of the artist Philip Guston.

Two 2019 Residents, Giuliana Bruno and Alice Friedman, focused on the subject of surfaces for their Conversations/Conversazioni event earlier this month. Claudia Trezza offers a few thoughts about the discussion.

The American Academy in Rome has announced the winners of the 2019–20 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities.

Many urban projects realized during the Ventennio remain part of the Italian land­scape. Together with architectural mon­uments and works of art, they constitute surviving traces of Fascist visual culture in contemporary Italy. These delicate issues were the sub­ject of an international, interdisciplinary conference recently held in Rome.

Claudia Trezza looks at Cinque Mostre 2019: Δx Displacement, the Academy’s annual winter exhibition that was curated for the fourth time in a row by Ilaria Gianni.

The American Academy in Rome announced that scholar and curator Elizabeth Rodini has been selected as the next Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, a position based in Rome.

In a December 5 talk at MAXXI, Rome’s preeminent contemporary art museum, the renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu (2018 Resident) recalled the statues of the Virgin Mary that filled the Catholic primary school in her hometown of Nairobi, Kenya.
 

The American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce that Dr. Sinclair W. Bell, a 2003 Rome Prize Fellow in ancient studies, has been appointed to a three-year term as editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome.

Friends and colleagues of Milton Gendel paid tribute to this celebrated artist and critic at the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia for a bittersweet gathering that honored his work and full life during his nearly seventh years in his adopted home.

In the first of his three lectures for the American Academy in Rome, the renowned historian of the ancient world Robin Lane Fox explained how the two traditions imagined divine intervention differently.

At the American Academy in Rome’s Fall Gala, nearly three hundred guests gathered at the Metropolitan Club to honor the cultural achievements of iconic actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro, and to celebrate returning 2018 Rome Prize Fellows.

An international audience packed the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia on September 25 to hear Mary Beard, one of the world’s most celebrated scholars of the ancient world, kick off the year’s series of programs with a lecture titled “The Classical Body: The Naked and the Nude.”

The American Academy in Rome presents Paolo Gioli: Anthropolaroid, a solo exhibition by the artist Paolo Gioli, curated by Peter Benson Miller.
 

The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund has awarded 2018–19 fellowships to Alexander Skidan in poetry, and to Vladimir Logutov in the visual arts.

The American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce its selection for a new vice president for development, Kathleen Heins, who will start on August 13, 2018.

This year’s Open Studios took place on Thursday, June 7, 2018. Claudia Trezza offers a summary of what she saw, including the literary and musical performances.