Features

We recently sat down with Fritz Haeg, Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow for 2010–11, who discussed his experiences during his Fellowship year at the Academy and some of his upcoming projects.

A capacity crowd, comprised in equal parts of Roman new music aficionados and members of the AAR community, filled the Sala Aurelia on Monday night as composer Ada Gentile's contemporary music festival Nuovi Spazi Musicali began its thirty-second season.

On Monday, 26 September the Academy President Adele Chatfield-Taylor, FAAR’84, Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94 and members of the Friends of the Academy in Italy gathered for a reception at the Villa Aurelia to welcome the new class of Academy Fellows.

The American Academy in Rome inaugurates its fall exhibition calendar with a show by the prolific, young American artist Nate Lowman. Presented by Galleria Massimo de Carlo, the show is part of Three Amigos, a multivenue exhibition, which also includes the artists Dan Colen and Dash Snow.

Boris Biancheri, who was elected a trustee of the Academy in 1999, died of cancer on 19 July 2011, in Rome.

It was on 12 July 1921—precisely 90 years ago today—that noted architectural historian William L. MacDonald, FAAR’56 was born in Putnam, Connecticut. His death on 6 March 2010 deeply touched his numerous friends, colleagues, and former students, many of them linked by their connections with the American Academy in Rome.

Rome resident and beloved American Academy Trustee artist Cy Twombly died on July 5, 2011. He was 83.

The American Academy in Rome held its annual McKim Medal Gala at the Villa Aurelia in Rome on May 26, 2011, in honor of Italian artist Luigi Ontani, whom the Academy named the seventh McKim Medal laureate.

Shane Bjornlie is the Andrew Heiskell Post-doctoral fellow in Classical Studies. Under a different sun, in southern California, Shane is Assistant Professor of Roman and Late Antique History at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches for the Department of History at CMC and for the Intercollegiate Classics program of the Claremont Colleges consortium.

Four years ago (19-21 June 2007), the American Academy in Rome hosted a conference co-organized by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max Planck Institute for Art History that explored the collecting of religious art in and of Italy.

Whether it is climate, or the use and overuse of timber resources, or the extent and effects of urbanization, or a host of other issues, the history of the Mediterranean environment in antiquity is full of unresolved debates.

Internationally-renowned artist Antoni Muntadas will bring two Janiculum neighbors together on Tuesday 7 June 2011, when the American Academy in Rome and the Real Academia de España en Roma will unite to present two Muntadas events as well as a new project by Italian artist Giulio Squillacciotti.

It was five full days, but still it seemed like a whirlwind when the AAR’s Board of Trustees made their annual visit to Rome from 25 May to 29 May.

Stephanie Malia Hom is the recipient of the 2010-2011 Lily Auchincloss Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies. She arrived in Rome from the University of Oklahoma, where she is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.

Three days in late May—Wednesday the 25th, Friday the 27th, and Saturday the 28th—see one of the Academy’s oldest and most consistently rewarding traditions, the annual presentation of work by current Rome Prize Fellows in the AAR’s School of Fine Arts.

Carly Jane Steinborn is the Phyllis G. Gordan/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Medieval Studies, and one of two Fellows lucky enough to live and work at the Academy for two years.

It may well become an annual ritual. On April 30, the archaeologist Gianni Ponti—veteran advisor to the American Academy in Rome and a dean at Rome’s IES—once again brought a somewhat incredulous group of AAR Fellows to the Roman aqueducts near Vicovaro (45 kilometers northeast of the city).

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, a public gathering of over one hundred people saw the cortile of the McKim, Mead & White Building at the American Academy in Rome transformed by a collaborative installation entitled X LOCUS.

The American Academy in Rome held the Janet and Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony on April 14 at New York City’s Harmonie Club to announce the winners of the 2011–12 Fellowships. The ceremony was well attended by over three hundred guests, including many Academy Trustees, Fellows, and Residents.

The American Academy in Rome’s Centenary Celebration Dinner took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York on April 13, 2011.