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Lynne C. Lancaster will speak about the ways in which her time in Rome over a thirty-year period has affected the trajectory of her research on Roman architecture.

Lynne C. Lancaster (Fellow 2002)  is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the Humanities. She is the author of Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome, Innovations in Context (2005) and Innovative Vaulted Construction in the Architecture of the Roman Empire, 1st to 4th centuries CE (2015) as well as articles on the Colosseum, Trajan’s Column, and Trajan’s Markets. She studied architecture at Virginia Tech (BArch) and classical archaeology at Oxford University (MPhil, DPhil).

The event will be held in English. Watch the livestream at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Please note: a valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. 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.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

The Italian artist Paolo Gioli (1942– ), who studied painting and the nude at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice, has long been preoccupied with the human body. Like his experimental films, which establish “an essential analogy between celluloid and skin as the sensitive interface between the self and the outside world,” Gioli’s Polaroid transfers use the body and its fragments as a means to interrogate photography’s history and theoretical foundations, as well as its dialogue with cinema, printmaking, sculpture, and painting.

After spending a year in New York in the late 1960s, Gioli was among the first artists to master Polaroid transfers following the introduction of SX-70 instant film in 1972. Since then, he has produced a wide range of formally complex works with the gelatin and dye layers of Polaroid emulsion. Using handmade pinhole cameras and alternative paper and silk supports, Gioli marries the most elemental procedures of early photography to a sophisticated use of the one-step film created by Edwin Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation. Among the many fruitful paradoxes of Gioli’s work is the way he creates timeless images by condensing a vast iconography into a spontaneous set of dexterous operations with instant film.

This exhibition, part of a series of public events at the American Academy in Rome during 2018–19 exploring the body as a site of subjectivity and meaning from antiquity to the present, features a selection of Gioli’s Polaroid transfers. Titled Anthropolaroid, it demonstrates not only the artist’s technical virtuosity with the medium, but also his profound meditations upon the human form and the fractured body politic. The accompanying, fully illustrated catalogue includes a text informed by a new interview with Gioli about his work and aspects of his process, as well as the artist’s essay “Anthropolaroid,” published in Italian in 1979 and translated into English here for the first time.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Benson Miller, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. Miller is also editor of the catalogue. Paolo Gioli is the Richard Grubman and Caroline Mortimer Photographer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome for 2018–19.

The exhibition is on view from October 11 to December 9, 2018, Friday through Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm.

Please note: a valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. 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.

Organized by the American Academy in Rome and Longwood Gardens, Designing Water is a two-day symposium that explores the relationship of design and water across time, space, and scale. Created for professionals involved in the designing, planning, and managing of water systems, Designing Water brings together academic leaders and world-renowned design practitioners from Asia, Europe, and North America. Each presenter will bring their local perspectives to truly global interests and concerns—such as ecology, aesthetics, meaning, and public space—as they assemble at Longwood Gardens in the picturesque Brandywine Valley, immediately preceding the 2018 annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in Philadelphia. Information and details on sessions, speakers, and registration can be found at designingwater.org.

Among the confirmed speakers at Designing Water are Julia Czerniak, Professor and Associate Dean, Syracuse Architecture (and chief curator of Designing Water), and several Rome Prize Fellows, including Anita Berrizbeitia (2006), Mary Margaret Jones (1998), Catherine Seavitt Nordenson (1998), and Charles Waldheim (2007).

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

Paolo Gioli’s Polaroid transfers, featured in the current exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, are inextricably linked to his output as one of Italy’s most innovative experimental filmmakers. One of the last remaining artists still making film on celluloid, Gioli employs a deconstructive attitude toward motion picture technology and its consumerist culture. Probing the productive dialogue between cinema and photography, Gioli explores the possibilities of these intertwined media with pinhole and camera obscura devices. The results, whether in the form of still or moving images, foreground the human body, desire, and the physical and psychological processes involved in sense perception.

Patrick Rumble, who has called Gioli “the last of the first filmmakers,” is a professor in the Departments of French and Italian, European Studies, and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A regular contributor to Artforum magazine, he is the editor of the three DVD box-set Paolo Gioli: The Complete Filmworks (Raro Video USA, 2016).

On this occasion, Rumble will present a selection of the artist’s films ranging in date from 1979 to 2013, discussing the relationship between photography and cinema in Gioli’s work.

The event will be held in English. Watch it livestream at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This screening is held in conjunction with Videocittà, a series of events focusing on cinema and the audiovisual taking place at various venues throughout the city of Rome during the Festival del Cinema from 19 to 28 October 2018.

Paolo Gioli is the Richard Grubman and Caroline Mortimer Photographer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome for 2018–19.

The exhibition Paolo Gioli: Anthropolaroid remains on view through 9 December 2018, Friday through Sunday, 4pm - 7pm.

Please note: a valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. 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.