Features

This year the AAR established an Affiliated Fellowship in association with the Community Colleges Humanities Association. 

The American Academy in Rome celebrated its tenth annual McKim Gala last month on a picture-perfect spring evening.

Having served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of Classical Studies for the past two years, Kimberly Bowes (2006 Fellow) now becomes the twenty-second Director of the American Academy in Rome.

On Friday evening the AAR community gathered for a splendid barbecue in Bass Garden in honor of Christopher Celenza (1994 Fellow).

View photographs from the 2016 McKim Medal Gala in New York.

On June 3rd the Academy welcomed Alumni and their families back for a Reunion to celebrate the centenary of the Academy’s consolidation on the Janiculum Hill, organizing a week of special tours, a symposium on the future of the arts and humanities, an exhibition dedicated to the architectural history of the Academy Main Building, the annual Fellows’ Reading and Open Studios, the McKim Medal Gala and several informal opportunities to reconnect.

Last week the Academy marked the close of an academic cycle and the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of the McKim, Mead & White Building in the company of Trustees, Fellows, Residents, friends, and returning Alumni.

An encounter with Rome represents now, as it has done since the American Academy’s inception, something unique: a chance for American artists and scholars to spend significant time interacting and working with each other in one of the oldest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world.

An image of the skyline of Old Cairo flashes on the screen. “Islamic? Fatimid? Mamluk? Egyptian? How would you categorize these buildings?” the conservation specialist Dina Bakhoum queries the assembled group.

Beautiful weather enticed an especially large crowd to turn out for the opening of the AAR Gallery’s latest exhibition.

Addressing a crowded AAR Lecture Room, James Hankins (1982 Fellow) of Harvard University gave two parallel accounts about the recovery of ancient Greek and Latin sources in the Italian Renaissance and the evolution of Renaissance ideas on the Roman republic from the late fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century.

Gabrielle Piedad Ponce is the winner of the Millicent Mercer Johnsen Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize and is a doctoral candidate at The Johns Hopkins University.

On an evening in February, photography students and faculty from Cornell in Rome headed up the Janiculum Hill from the center of the city to attend a private lecture at the studio of visual artist Catherine Wagner at the American Academy in Rome.

In his concert-lecture entitled, “Da Dove Viene La Black Art?” Derrell Acon combines song, poetry, literary quotation, and instrumentals in asking audiences to reflect with him on the origin and character of black art in America.

What follows is a virtual tour of sites that have hosted the would-be American Academy before it settled in its current home.

Elizabeth Fain LaBombard is the winner of the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and an Associate at James Corner Field Operations in New York.

Eric Nathan is the winner of the Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize in Musical Composition and a Composer from New York City.

Milton Gendel: A Surreal Life, curated by Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Peter Benson Miller and Barbara Drudi, opened last Friday in New York at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.

Ruth W. Lo is the Donald and Maria Cox Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Modern Italian Studies and a Ph.D candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.

Bradley E. Cantrell is the winner of the Garden Club of America Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and the Director and Associate Professor at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University.