The New York Times critic at large A.O. Scott (2020 Resident) and the filmmaker and artist Garrett Bradley (2020 Fellow) will discuss Garrett’s work across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, Southern culture, and the history of film in the United States.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Eastern Time (12:00 midnight Central European Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Catherine Opie (2021 Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography) will discuss her work around community and home, as well as her recent road trip across the United States, with AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow). Focusing on the idea of a place as a portrait, she will also touch on her interests to explore the Vatican with her camera during her residency at the American Academy in Rome.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Eastern Time (12:00 midnight Central European Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Andreas Scholl, director of Antikensammlung Berlin, and Lynne Lancaster (2002 Fellow), Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome, will discuss “The Pergamon Panorama in Berlin: Where Tradition and Innovation Converge.”

Scholl will speak on the Pergamon Panorama in Berlin, a project that takes the nineteenth-century concept of the cyclorama and uses a combination of traditional methods and digital technology to bring it into the twenty-first century to re-create the ancient city of Pergamon. A conversation between Scholl and Lancaster about the project will follow the presentation.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

This event is the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture and is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Henry James, the literary titan and cosmopolitan figure whose classic novels explore the culture clash between brash Americans and jaded European society. In this event, Colm Tóibín, the author of the award-winning novel The Master (2004), which unpacks James’s complex character towards the end of the writer’s life, will discuss James’s legacy with Sara Antonelli, who teaches Anglo American literature at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre.

From early novels such as The Europeans or The Portrait of a Lady, which pitted the innocence of the new world against the corruption of the old, to later works, including The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, James crafted increasingly nuanced portraits of American identities thrown into relief by their experiences abroad. Many of his stories are set against the backdrop of Rome, drawing upon James’s thorough knowledge of the inner workings of its patrician palaces and artists’ studios. James himself, however, despite his prolific output, copious letters, notebooks, novels, and plays, as well as the many portraits of him by friends, remains an enigmatic figure. This has made him and his work an alluring subject for contemporary scholars and writers, including Tóibín, who have speculated about many aspects of his personal life, including his sexual proclivities, his friendships with men and women, his relationships with his siblings, and his ill-fated interest in the theater.

The event will be held in English.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Ireland in Italy.

Each year the Rome Prize is awarded to emerging artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities.

Please join us as we announce the 2016–17 Rome Prize Winners and Italian Fellows at the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony. The ceremony will include Conversations | Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome, featuring a discussion between Anthony Grafton (2004 Resident) and Christopher Celenza (1994 Fellow). Grafton and Celenza will talk about the development of language to communicate across disciplines in the arts and humanities.

A prosecco toast will follow.

Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 6:30 PM
Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall (Auditorium)
The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY

This event is free to the public, however, RSVPs are required:

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. He earned his AB, AM, and PhD at the University of Chicago. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has won the International Balzan Prize and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award. Grafton is author or coauthor of many books, including Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship and most recently Henricus Glareanus’s (1488–1563) Chronologia of the Ancient World. He has served as curator for two exhibitions: New Worlds, Ancient Texts at the New York Public Library (1992–93); and Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture at the Library of Congress (1993).

Christopher S. Celenza holds a PhD from Duke University and a DrPhil from the University of Hamburg, as well as a BA and MA from the State University of New York, Albany. Currently the Charles Homer Haskins Professor at Johns Hopkins University, he has a dual appointment in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Classical Studies. Celenza is the founding director of the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe and the vice dean for humanities and social sciences. He is the author of many books, including Machiavelli: A Portrait and The Lost Italian Renaissance (winner of the Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America and named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title). In addition to his Rome Prize Fellowship, he has held fellowships from the ACLS, Villa I Tatti, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Celenza served as the twenty-first director of the American Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2014.

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Teresita Fernández, Visual Artist (2018 Resident, 1999 Affiliated Fellow)

Mark Robbins, AAR President (1997 Fellow)

This event is free to the public. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The 2016–17 season of Conversations/Conversazioni is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony
Thursday, 12 April 2018 – 6:30pm
Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square, New York

Each year the Rome Prize is awarded to emerging artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Please join us as we announce the 2018–19 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows at the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony.

The event also features a Conversations | Conversazioni with the artist Ann Hamilton, a 2017 Resident, and Mark Robbins, AAR president and CEO and a 1997 Fellow. The dialogue will be followed by a prosecco toast.

This event is at capacity. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis ONLY for those who have RSVP’d in advance.

This discussion will feature two speakers—the author Musa Mayer and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth—for an engaging dialogue about the impact of Rome and Italy on the prolific later work of the American artist Philip Guston (1949 Fellow, 1971 Resident).

The conversation will take place at Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011.

This event is free and open to the public; an RSVP is required.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2019–20 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Augustus and other emperors established some 150 colonies in the provinces and Italy itself. Population displacement is but one aspect of the turmoil such settlements incurred. Did such colonies, said “to embody the Roman people’s unparalleled greatness,” contribute to an imperial “Romanitas”? How did their urban forms contribute to making “Roman” the empire’s sixty-million-plus population of differing cultures, languages, and religions, especially given the lag time to actually build such cities?

Mussolini’s regime self-consciously invoked ancient models, not only by staging him as a new Augustus through urban works, but by founding entirely new towns—147 of them in the 1930s. Focusing on the best-known case (the Pontine Marshes reclamation), this conversation will explore parallels and differences across eras. How did the state-driven settlements of Italians from one region to another inspire or discourage senses of citizenship? Were rituals of foundation as important under Fascism as they were in antiquity?

Mary T. Boatwright (2021 Resident) is professor emerita of classical studies at Duke University, and Mia Fuller (1998 Fellow) is the Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished [Associate] Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Lynne Lancaster, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome.

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

In August 1967, a group of artists in Chicago created a mural of Black heroes, The Wall of Respect, which quickly became a rallying point for activists, neighborhood residents, and cultural workers and spawned a broader community mural movement not only in Chicago but nationwide. It is uncontroversial to say that such murals represented the aspirations and political struggles of communities. But art critics and historians have tended to downplay their political agency as well as their artistic importance, thinking of them as affirming but ultimately anodyne expressions of identity.

What if instead we consider murals as interventions in and contestations of urban space? What would it mean to think of murals as shaping space and people’s experience of it, mediating relationships among groups, staking claims to visibility, belonging, and the right to the city? Rebecca Zorach and Nicole Marroquin will address these questions with examples drawn from the long history of public art and political movements in Chicago.

Rebecca Zorach (2021 Resident) is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University, and Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor of art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.