Features

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012, the American Academy in Rome awarded its highest honor—the Centennial Medal—to the artist William Kentridge (2011 Resident) and the theater director Peter Sellars for their contributions to art and culture.

The American Academy in Rome doesn’t just nurture preeminent artists and established scholars – it also offers a select group of college students a unique pre-grad school experience.

Heidi Wendt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at Brown University, and the Emeline Hill Richardson Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies.

On Friday afternoon in the courtyard of the Casa delle Letterature, in Rome’s historic center, an audience sat under the orange trees listening to poetry being read aloud in Italian and in English. A fountain contributed its own quiet music, as falling water caused the maidenhair fern to tremble; from time to time, gulls from the nearby Tiber laughed overhead; and church bells loudly called people to evening prayer. But for those who were listening, nothing really broke the spell of a beautiful May afternoon, and of poetry itself.

The American Academy in Rome’s Janet and Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony to announce the winners of the 2012–13 Fellowships took place on April 26, 2012, at the Harmonie Club in New York.

The American Academy in Rome congratulates the winners of the 116th annual Rome Prize Competition.

On Thursday 18 April 2012, a capacity crowd braved a rainy vernal evening to attend the latest installment of the American Academy in Rome’s Conversations That Matter on the topic of “Italy Today.”

Lonn Combs is principal architect at EASTON + COMBS in New York, assistant professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture, and the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture.

In New York City, the Academy hosted an event to launch Mona Talbott’s new book, Zuppe, and to celebrate the fifth year of the Rome Sustainable Food Project, a program that has stirred a delicious revolution in institutional cooking by providing organic, local, sustainable meals at the American Academy in Rome.

For ten days in March, Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge Corey Brennan (1988 Fellow) led a record-sized group of twenty-eight members of the AAR community on an itinerary to Istanbul and the Aegean coast of Turkey.

Every year, the American Academy community comprises a vivid cross-section of the best in contemporary art and scholarship, its exact texture determined by the particular interests and abilities of the Fellows, Residents, and Affiliated and Visiting Artists and Scholars who assemble on the Janiculum.

Lei Liang is an associate professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, and the Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow in Musical Composition

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.