Features

Siobhan Liddell is a visiting critic from the Sculpture Department at Yale University, and the Vera G. List/Edith Bloom Rome Prize Fellow in the Visual Arts.

Thanks to a grant from the Brown Foundation that was matched in varying amounts by every trustee, the American Academy in Rome has recently renovated the Lecture Room and Programs offices on the ground floor of the Academy’s McKim, Mead & White building.

Elizabeth C. Robinson is a predoctoral candidate in the Classics Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Irene Rosenzweig/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies (and in year two of a two-year fellowship).

Trustee Emeritus John T. Sargent Sr. (1924–2012) died peacefully at home in Manhattan on February 5, 2012. A powerful figure in New York publishing, he was long associated with and ultimately CEO and chairman of Doubleday & Company.

Helen North died on January 21, 2012, at age 90, ten days before her 91st birthday. At the time of her death she was Centennial Professor Emerita of Classics at Swarthmore College, an institution with which she was closely associated for more than sixty years.

How did so many of the monuments and cultural treasures of Europe escape destruction in World War II? One crucial factor was the “Monuments Men”—the popular term for a group of a few hundred men and women from thirteen different countries who made up the military Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives (MFA&A) section during and immediately following the Second World War.

When Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellow Dmitry Kaminker arrived at AAR in September 2011 from St. Petersburg, he often introduced himself at dinner as a Russian sculptor who hadn’t brought any tools or materials along with him and who planned to spend his three-month long fellowship enjoying his first vacation in forty years. So much for initial intentions.

Margaret Marshall Andrews is the Paul Mellon/Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Helen M. Woodruff Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America and a member of the Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania.

During one four-day period in December, the full range and depth of artistic activity at the American Academy in Rome was on display, as an installation artist, a visual artist, an illustrator, two composers, and an oboist all presented their work.

In early December 2011 the American Academy's Villa Aurelia was the venue for an international conference entitled "Paradigm and Progeny: Roman Imperial Architecture and Its Legacy."

Beatriz del Cueto, FAIA, is a principal at Pantel del Cueto & Associates, a historic preservation consulting firm in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation.

David A. Rubin is a partner at OLIN, a design firm in Philadelphia, PA, and the Garden Club of America Fellow in Landscape Architecture.

After four years of service as Drue Heinz Librarian, Rebecka Lindau is expanding the parameters of scholarly research online and positioning the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library for the future in her new role as consultant on digital initiatives.

On Friday evening, 18 November until almost midnight on Sunday, the Villa Aurelia and Sala Aurelia were once again the locus for the Roman new music festival called Nuova Consonanza, in this case curated by Fausto Sebastiani in its 48th edition, and entitled Rimodulazione (Remodulation).

Every November in New York, the Academy embarks on a week-long sequence of meetings and events that brings together Trustees, Fellows, Trustees Emeriti, and longtime friends of the Academy.

On Friday 4 and Saturday 5 November 2011, a comprehensive conference at the American Academy’s splendid seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia highlighted the work of a dozen internationally renowned scholars of cultural heritage and cultural property.

Matt Donovan teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and is the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature.

The “Glimpse Series” offers a closer view of the AAR community’s current Rome Prize winners by delving further into their studios or studies, their daily routines or work in progress. The scholarly and artistic work being pursued continues to be as varied as the fellowship recipients themselves. The following “Glimpse” focuses on Craig Martin, Associate Professor in History at Oakland University.

Approximately two hundred Romans and AAR community members filled the Cortile and the Art Gallery on the evening of Wednesday, October 19 to celebrate the opening of the photography exhibition Milton Gendel: Portraits, the second part of a two-part retrospective dedicated to the work of the long-time American expatriate in Rome that began on October 4 with the opening of the show Milton Gendel: una vita surreale (Milton Gendel: A Surreal Life) at the Museo Carlo Bilotti.

Norma W. Goldman, an archeological scholar, Latinist, and a longtime friend and Academy supporter, died on Friday, September 30, 2011. She was 89 years old. Goldman is survived by her son Mark, her daughter-in-law Carolyn, and her grandchildren Liam and Grace.