Each spring, the American Academy in Rome opens its doors to the public through Open Studios and Open Stacks, two programs that invite audiences into the studios, archives, and research practices of artists and scholars developing work across the fellowship year. This spring, Open Stacks takes place on May 27 and Open Studios on May 28. On the 27th, Fellows in the humanities present original research spanning race in ancient Roman art, the body as a site of labor and belief, and the movement of ideas across medieval and early modern geographies. On the 28th, the Academy's artists, architects, designers, writers, and composers open their studios and take to the stage in the Bass Garden for an evening of installations, performances, readings, and screenings. Together, the two events promise an exceptional cohort of Fellows.
These events extend a tradition almost as old as the Academy itself. In 1896, just two years after its founding, the first Annual Exhibition of painting, sculpture, and architecture was organized in New York, offering American audiences an early view of work produced through encounters with Rome. Since 1920, annual exhibitions and public presentations in Rome have continued across an expanding range of disciplines, interrupted only briefly by the Second World War.
Adapting to the XXI century, the American Academy presents Open Week 2026, showcasing the work of both visual artists and scholars, articulating what makes the American Academy unique, having artists and scholars together.
As Lindsay Harris (2014 Fellow, 2014–18 Mellon Professor, 2021–23 Interim Andrew Heiskell Arts Director) traces in her essay, "Openness," written for the 2022 Winter Open Studios, these presentations have also charted the institution's gradual movement toward broader artistic and intellectual inclusivity. Early exhibitions reflected the dominance of classical models and Beaux-Arts traditions, carefully rendered figure studies and architectural plans affirming the authority of inherited forms. The arrival of Director Laurance Roberts in 1947 marked a turning point: programmatic restrictions were loosened, and Fellows were encouraged to engage Rome not as a fixed canon to be reproduced, but as a living environment for experimentation. This shift unfolded alongside a widening of the Fellowship itself. Sculptor Concetta Scaravaglione became the first woman awarded a Rome Prize in the Arts; composer Ulysses Kay became the first Black Rome Prize winner; sculptor John Rhoden followed shortly thereafter, each expanding the visual and conceptual languages represented within Academy exhibitions.
Open Academy 2026 extends this history while reframing it for the present, introducing brief presentations by scholars as an equally public and accessible component of the program. Rather than functioning solely as exhibitions or lectures, Open Studios and Open Stacks foreground process as a form of public engagement, where visitors encounter work in formation, artistic research unfolding across studios and gardens, scholarly inquiry emerging through archives, texts, and material histories. Openness here is not simply a matter of access — it is a methodology grounded in exchange, interdisciplinarity, and the shared production of knowledge.
Open Stacks 2026: Scholars' Presentations
On May 27, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, Open Stacks offers a series of concise public presentations by Rome Prize and Italian Fellows in the Humanities. Now in its third edition, the program is organized this year around three themes that reflect the breadth and ambition of the current cohort's research. "Race Across Time" moves between ancient Rome and the twentieth century, asking how race has been constructed, represented, and contested across vastly different historical moments. "Bodies and the Work They Do" considers the human body as a site of labor, healing, punishment, and belief, from Roman water infrastructure to the pastoral poetry of Vergil to the afterlife. "Knowledge Across Geographies" traces how ideas, languages, and cultural forms have traveled across the Mediterranean and beyond, from medieval translation movements to the early modern spice routes to the connections between Latin and Chinese classical traditions. Together, the talks emphasize research as an evolving process, inviting audiences into the questions and methods shaping each Fellow's work.
Open Studios 2026: Artists' Showcase
On May 28, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm, Open Studios brings audiences into the studios and shared spaces of the McKim, Mead & White Building, with a new format that extends the evening into live performances in the Bass Garden, installations, readings, screenings, and works in progress by Rome Prize and Italian Fellows. This year's presentations range across environmental, historical, and social questions: climate and urban transformation, volcanic and aquatic landscapes, diasporic identity, sound, material experimentation, and the politics of public space. Visitors encounter projects at different stages of development while engaging directly with the artists, architects, designers, writers, and composers behind them. More than an exhibition, Open Studios transforms the Academy into a temporary site of encounter, where disciplines overlap, conversations bloom, and the boundaries between making and thinking briefly disappear.