Conversations/Conversazioni

IUNO and the American Academy in Rome are proud to present CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION, a collaborative exhibition by Zachary Fabri and Emily B. Frank (2024 Fellows), which considers the generative interplay of art making and art conservation.

Fabri and Frank present an exhibition that displays the collaborative relay in their iterative process and challenges the boundaries of their respective disciplines. They are concerned with how ideas move (and have continuity) and change (and are mutable) through (a generative process of) art making and conservation. A vital element of their collaboration is exploring the way that these two practices bleed into each other as modes of telling stories and conveying ideas.

Organized chronologically by iteration, the exhibition reveals the processual continuity and mutability of their ideas in materials. From the initial seed artwork to the final installation, visitors will experience how conservation and art making are intertwined and blur traditionally conceived boundaries, shaping and reshaping the narrative along the way.

About the Artists

Emily B. Frank is the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. She is an objects and sculpture conservator interested in the ways that conservation can contribute to our understanding of the ancient and contemporary world. Based in New York, Frank founded Emily B. Frank Conservation in 2017 and also works for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION builds on themes and questions at the core of her work, which include:

• Creative approaches to the documentation of works of art

• Working with artists and fabricators prior to the completion of artworks

• The role of conservation in defining/articulating the narratives that objects represent and help construct (which are neither uniform nor stable)

• Parallels between conservation and translation practices

Zachary Fabri is the 2024 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. He is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, drawing, and installation, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and performance. He has received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri has shown his work at Art in General, the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Performa, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Collaborative projects include the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions were held at CUE Art Foundation in New York, the Nicholson Project in Washington, DC, and the Recovery Plan in Florence.

IUNO is a research center for contemporary art that wishes to leave space and time for encounters between people, spaces, and languages. Interested in processes rather than in projects, IUNO disorganizes knowledge and fosters a nonsystematic and convivial approach to artistic production and its theoretical debate through exhibitions, seminars, performances, educational programs, and editorial formats.

As part of its Black History Month programming, and in partnership with Short Theatre and NERO, the American Academy in Rome is hosting a conversation between Erica Hunt (2024 Fellow) and Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’ to celebrate Fred Moten’s poetic oeuvre and the ways it resonates with their practices and personal experiences, on the occasion of the launch of La Sonora Reticenza, the latest book by Moten published by the Italian editorial house. Click HERE for more info about the book.

Over more than two decades of research and poetical experimentation, Moten has explored the relationship between social movements and Black aesthetics in a wide range of areas, from critical theory and literature to art, performance, and music. His work has profoundly influenced many poets, artists, and readers. Moten’s poetry is characterized by a cherished opacity and a musicality that boldly stretches to the very limits of noise. In his verses, meaning is “subordinate to the sound,” and that is “the sound of the resistance to slavery; the critique of (private) property and of the proper.”

Bringing together the poet Erica Hunt (2024 Fellow) and the activist and scholar Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’, the conversation explores the artistic and political significance of Moten’s poetry, including the potentiality of language as memory and resistance, and discusses Blackness as refusal, autonomy, and “self-possession.”

Erica Hunt is the 2024 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust. Hunt is the author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts, and, most recently, Jump the Clock. Hunt's poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, In the American Tree, and Conjunctions, among other publications. Essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, A-LINE, and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With the poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is coeditor of the anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing in 2018 (Kore Press). Hunt has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, the Djerassi Foundation and Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy.

Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’ is a social-science researcher and activist. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Padua with a thesis entitled “Why don’t you take them to your house? Antiracism and everyday life in the experiences of coexistence solidarity.” (“Perché non li porti a casa tua? Storie di accoglienza tra rifugiati e locali”), in which she analyzes racism and antiracism to explain the connection between everyday practices and systems of domination. Tesfau’ is adjunct professor at the IUAV University of Venice, Stanford Florence, and NYU Florence and research collaborator at the University of Padua. She is resident curator at Centrale Fies as part of the “Agitu Ideo Gudeta” artistic residency fellowship. She is actively involved in the antiracist debate in Italy, particularly in the fields of education and outreach.

This event will be held in English.

The study of the ancient world has long underpinned cultural and institutional assumptions in Europe and the United States. But changes in those assumptions feed back into changes in the study. Very recently, the speed of change, and the pressure to change, has dramatically accelerated, both in the wider society and within the walls of the university. This conversation brings together two renowned scholars of ancient Rome to discuss the current state of things and how it might change in the decade to come.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation generously supports Conversations/Conversazioni at the American Academy in Rome.

Joy Connolly is a scholar of Roman political thought and literature and their Anglo-American reception. She writes and speaks frequently about the future of humanistic inquiry in the United States. She began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2019. Previously she served as provost and interim president of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, home of over 4,000 graduate students, and as Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York University, where she served as dean for the humanities from 2012 to 2016, as well as at Stanford University and the University of Washington. Committed to broadening scholars’ impact on the world, Connolly has advocated for doctoral education reform, publicly engaged scholarship, and changes to faculty reward structures. She has published two books with Princeton University Press, The State of Speech and The Life of Roman Republicanism, and over eighty articles, reviews, and essays. Connolly earned a BA from Princeton University in 1991 and a PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Her current book project argues for a global approach to the study of the world’s ancient cultures. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Alessandro Schiesaro is professor of Latin literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he earned his BA and PhD and recently returned to teach after several decades spent mostly abroad. He previously held chairs at Princeton, King’s College London, Sapienza University of Rome, and at Manchester, where he was William Hulme Professor of Classics. His main fields of interest include Latin literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and cultural history; he is especially fascinated by the interaction between poetry and philosophy, the role of poetry as a form of knowledge, and the intersection between memory and emotions. Alessandro edits the Classical journal MAIA – Rivista di Literature Classiche and is a member of the editorial board of several international journals. A member of Academia Europaea, he has been a visiting professor at Stanford and has lectured extensively in Europe and the US. He is currently serving as the Scuola Normale’s deputy director, after leading the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at Manchester and the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies.

In celebration of Black History Month, the American Academy in Rome is hosting an evening of live events, exploring the historical presence of Black Europeans dating back to the Renaissance. The program kicks off with a spoken-word poetry performance and a song by the rapper and poet Stretch, whose work examines the experiences of young people growing up in multicultural communities in the United Kingdom and France.

A screening of Il Moro/The Moor (2021), a short film by the director, producer, and actor Daphne Di Cinto, will then follow. Lastly, Di Cinto and the historian and professor Olivette Otele will be in conversation with AAR’s Curator-at-Large, Johanne Affricot.

Hidden or neglected, the presence of Africans and their descendants living in Europe from the late 1400s to the early 1600s was an important phenomenon and one that Di Cinto’s film and Otele’s book African Europeans: An Untold History bring to the fore. 

Il Moro/The Moor tells the untold story of Alessandro de Medici, the first Duke of Florence in 1530 and the first man of African descent to become a head of state in Renaissance Europe. While unveiling a true story from the past, the film aims to speak about the situations that Black Europeans still experience today and to celebrate the talent of today’s Afro-European community. 

African Europeans traces a long African European heritage through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary, uncovering a forgotten past, from Emperor Septimius Severus to enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance, all the way to present-day migrants moving to Europe’s cities.

Daphne di Cinto

Black Italian screenwriter, director, actor and producer, Daphne Di Cinto is an alumna of The Actors Studio Drama School and she played the Duchess of Hastings in Netflix’s Bridgerton. Il Moro-The Moor her directorial debut was longlisted for Oscars 2024. Daphne has received the Cultured Focus Visionary in Film Award during the 79th Venice Film Festival and the Leader of Change in Creativity Award at the 2023 Black Carpet Awards. She writes stories about migrations, identity and the female gaze.

Olivette Otele

Olivette Otele is a Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. Her area of research is colonial, post-colonial history and memory studies. Otele holds a Ph.D. in History from Université Paris La Sorbonne, France and received an honorary doctorate in Law from Concordia University in Canada in 2022. She is a Fellow, a former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She was the recipient of several prestigious national and international research grants. Otele was a judge of the International Man Booker Prize, has written numerous scholarly papers and books, and she is also a regular contributor to the press, television and radio programs in Britain, the US and France. She is broadcaster and a consultant for films and documentaries such as Chevalier (2023), on Disney+ and African Queens airing on Netflix (2023). Her latest books include an edited volume, Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies (2021) and African Europeans: An Untold History (2020). She works with policy makers and other institutions to engage with the histories of colonial slavery and restorative justice strategies (Welsh Government Audit on Slavery and Colonialism and the Guardian Newspapers project Cotton Capital).

Stretch

Stretch is a Black Welsh rapper and poet whose creative journey started with using poetry as a coping mechanism for mental health. His work examines the experiences of young people growing up in multicultural communities in the UK and in France. His work as a poet features in George the Poet’s anthology, Part of a Story That Started Before Me: Poems about Black British History (Penguin, 2023). Stretch is a passionate, self-taught mix engineer. He has performed in different venues, including for the 10th Anniversary of Festival du Monde en Vues', one of the Caribbean islands biggest film festival in Guadeloupe and more recently at the National Gallery, London. His singles and mixed tapes are available on Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud and most music platforms.

Cultural Patrimony and Collective Responsibility with C. Brian Rose, Deborah Lehr, James Cuno, and Navina Haidar.

Please join us in New York for the latest installment of Conversations|Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome. Leading figures from the academic, preservation, and museum communities will engage in a thought-provoking discussion surrounding shared global responsibility in protecting cultural and intellectual heritage.

The panel of speakers will include: James Cuno, chief executive officer and president, J. Paul Getty Trust; Deborah Lehr, chairman, the Antiquities Coalition; Navina Haidar, curator, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art; and event moderator C. Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania.

At a critical time when the climate crisis is making indelible changes to our agricultural systems, immigration patterns, food security, safety, and access, the American Academy in Rome presents a two-part event dedicated to reflecting on the roles of producers, consumers, creatives, and thinkers, and their practices, processes, and hopes for the future. The first part of the event will host two Conversations/Conversazioni between culinary projects and local wine producers actively engaged in the principles of zero waste and a zero-kilometer philosophy, committing to spreading the message of emergency. The second part will offer a pairing experience curated and executed by the Rome Sustainable Food Project kitchen in collaboration with the guest panelists, demonstrating how we can consciously, sustainably, and deliciously find a new path forward.

6:00–7:00pm

Conversations/Conversazioni
Christina Bowerman from Hostaria Glass (Rome) and the RSFP kitchen representatives: Fausto Ferraresi, Sara Levi, and Giorgia Lauri
Moderated by Aliza Wong

7:00–8:00pm

Conversations/Conversazioni
Marco Cirese and Alice Gargiullo from the winery Noelia Ricci (Romagna), Giuseppe Mottura from the winery Sergio Mottura (Lazio), and Guillaume Gelly from the winery Paolo e Noemia d’Amico (Lazio)
Moderated by Tina Cancemi

8:00–10:00pm

Pairing Dinner
Three dishes created by the RSFP kitchen combined with three different types of wine selected by our panelists directly from their wineries

Sign up to the public closed on February 6, 2024.

The event will be held in English.

Please join us for the first US installment of 2015 season of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome, featuring a discussion between two leading figures in poetry, Edward Hirsch (1989 Fellow) and Robert Polito, at the New School in New York. They will discuss ways of reading and listening to poetry, the importance of reading translations of poems written in foreign languages, and the interactions between poetry and other arts.

Celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry, Edward Hirsch is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Rome Prize (1989), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published seven additional books of poems, including most recently, Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that the New Yorker calls “a masterpiece of sorrow.” Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.

The poet and scholar Robert Polito earned his PhD from Harvard and has served as director of Creative Writing at the New School for two decades. Polito’s collections of poetry include Hollywood & God (2009) and Doubles (1995). His poetry blends narrative and lyric impulses, drawing on both American pop culture and literary tradition. Polito’s scholarly works include A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1995), and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1996), for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Polito’s interest in midcentury American culture, especially the crime novel and film noir, has also led him to such editing projects as Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (2009); The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (2004); Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s (1997); Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (1997); and editions of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain for the Everyman Library. He has contributed a catalogue essay to About Face (1985); a retrospective of Manny Farber’s paintings; an essay on the Kinks for This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project (2004); an essay on Bob Dylan to Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (2005); and an essay on Allen Ginsberg to Howl: Fifty Years Later (2006). He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A contributing editor to both BOMB and the Boston Review, Polito has written poetry and criticism that have been published widely. He is at work on a new book titled Detours: Seven Noir Lives.

The American Academy in Rome’s spring exhibition, June Jordan, The Poetry of Design, will open with a Conversations/Conversazioni on equity and justice in design, which Jordan helped catalyze by foregrounding the rights and voices of disenfranchised communities. Sean Anderson (2005 Fellow), associate professor of architecture at Cornell University and former Museum of Modern Art curator, and the architect J. Yolande Daniels (2004 Fellow, 2023 Resident), associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss the African diaspora’s impact on cities, the role of literature in architecture, and how Jordan paved the way for greater inclusivity in design today, among other topics.

Interim Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Lindsay Harris (2014 Fellow) will moderate the discussion, following an introduction by AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow) and remarks from Whitfield Lovell (2019 Resident), whose portrait of Jordan, a gift to the Academy, inspired the exhibition and is a centerpiece of its installation.

This event, to be presented in person at the Academy as well as on Zoom, is open to the public. To watch on Zoom, please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation generously supports Conversations/Conversazioni at the American Academy in Rome.

June Jordan, The Poetry of Design is curated by Lindsay Harris with Lexi Eberspacher, Programs Associate for the Arts. The opening reception for the exhibition will take place after the conversation, from 7:00 to 9:00pm.

Notice

For access to the Academy, guests will be asked to show a valid photo ID. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.

Please join us for a discussion on designing for museums and cultural environments. Our panelists will include:

• Craig Dykers (2015 Resident), Partner, Snøhetta
• Walter Hood (1997 Fellow, 2014 Resident), Principal, Hood Design Studio and David K. Woo Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley
• Sandra Phillips (2000 Resident), Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Catherine Wagner (2014 Fellow) Visual Artist and Professor, Mills College

Moderated by Mary Margaret Jones (1998 Fellow), President and Senior Principal, Hargreaves Associates and Chair of the AAR Board of Trustees, with an introduction by AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow).

A conversation in English with Craig Dykers, cofounder of Snøhetta, an influential architecture and design firm based in Oslo and New York that is responsible for, among other important projects, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center in New York. In a wide-ranging discussion, Dykers will speak with Pippo Ciorra, senior curator at MAXXI Architettura, about the role of context, nature, and human nature in these projects, as well as those currently in development.

Craig Dykers is the William A. Bernoudy Designer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and cofounder of Snøhetta.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute in Rome, the Ordine degli Architetti P.P.C. di Roma, and MAXXI Architettura, under the patronage of the Royal Norwegian Embassy.