Overview of the Academy

The American Academy in Rome is one of the leading American overseas centers for independent study and advanced research in the fine arts and the humanities. Inspired by their comradeship in organizing America's contribution to the fine arts at the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893, a group, including architects Charles Follen McKim and Daniel Burnham, painters John La Farge and Francis Millet, and sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, resolved to create a center to study art amid the classical tradition of ancient Rome. Rome was chosen as the site of the Academy because "with the architectural and sculptural monuments and mural paintings, its galleries filled with the chef d'oeuvres of every epoch, no other city offers such a field for study or an atmosphere so replete with precedents." In 1894 McKim founded the American School of Architecture in Rome. McKim involved not only artists and architects but also the great financial geniuses of his time. J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Henry Clay Frick, all contributed to his enterprise. A year later the American School of Classical Studies in Rome was formed by the Archaeological Institute of America, and in 1913, a union between the two Schools became what is now the American Academy in Rome.

Through its annual Rome Prize fellowship program, the Academy supports up to thirty individuals working in archaeology, architecture, classical studies, design arts, historic preservation and conservation, history of art, landscape architecture, literature, modern Italian studies, musical composition, post-classical humanistic studies and visual arts. Rome Prize Fellows are chosen by juries of experts who review past work and the proposed project of each applicant. While the Academy is composed of two historic disciplines, the Arts and the Humanities, it does not have a faculty, a curriculum or a student body. The artists and scholars in residence at the Academy are there to pursue their own independent projects.

The Academy provides a unique opportunity for interaction between artists and scholars working in up to eighteen different disciplines. The Academy community, which regularly numbers 75, also includes Residents, who are eminent artists and scholars invited by the Director to stay at the Academy for periods ranging from two to four months. Residents in the Arts are selected by invitation only; Residents in the Humanities may apply by writing to the Director in Rome. The Academy community is strengthened by the recipients of other fellowships and by large numbers of Visiting Artists and Scholars who rent rooms, apartments and studios during the course of the year. The community increases to include graduate students and high school teachers during the summer months, when the Academy's Classical Summer School and National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar take place.

The scholarly resources of the Academy include an excellent Library that is especially strong in the history, archaeology and art of Rome and Italy. The catalogue of the Library is part of the Union of Scholarly Libraries in Rome network of research libraries in Rome. The photographic archive contains valuable documentation of Roman monuments, as well as a record of the work of past Rome Prize Fellows. In addition, the Academy owns a small but varied teaching collection of antiquities, ranging from statues and inscriptions to pottery and millstones. Alone, or in collaboration with other institutions, the Academy also conducts archaeological fieldwork. The results of these excavations, as well as the scholarship produced by Fellows at the Academy, are made public in a series of publications, including Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome and Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Each year a number of Academy events, including concerts, symposia, readings and exhibitions, take place both in New York and Rome. These are open to the public, as is the annual exhibition in Rome of the work of the Fellows, whose catalogue is published annually.

The American Academy in Rome is housed in a splendid series of buildings on the crest of the Janiculum hill, in a setting of lovingly-tended gardens.

The Academy is a member of an association of research institutes in Rome known as the "Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, Storia e Storia dell'Arte in Roma." This international association serves as a network for scholars in a wide range of disciplines, and helps to promote multinational projects. The Academy is also a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Association of Research Institutes in Art History, and the Research Libraries Group (RLG).