Est e ovest

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

In this talk, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Ayad Akhtar will discuss generational transformations in the social body at the hands of finance. He will explore the implications (and causes) as the results of shifts in contemporary mythopoesis. Akhtar’s latest play, Junk, which recently concluded its acclaimed run at Lincoln Center in New York, explored the emergence of the United States as a republic of consumers fanned by the greed-driven and unregulated hostile takeovers in the heyday of the junk bond on Wall Street in the 1980s.

Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a novelist and author of American Dervish, published in over twenty languages worldwide. His play Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, and was nominated for the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. His plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand received Off-Broadway runs and are currently being produced around the world, garnering nominations for the Evening Standard and Olivier Awards in London this past year. His most recent play Junk received its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2016, winning the Craig Noel Award for Best New Play. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He is also the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obie Awards, a Jeff Award, and the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award. Akhtar has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, the Sundance Institute, Ucross, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. He is also a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop.

Ayad Akhtar is Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

In the eyes of many art critics who attended the United States’ 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—an international event of colossal proportions—two of most noteworthy and controversial art works on display were The Death of Cleopatra (1876) by the Rome-based African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) and The Abolition of Slavery (1873) by the Trieste-based Italian sculptor Francesco Pezzicar (1831–1890). While past and present commentaries have viewed the marble and bronze statues independently, and thematically and aesthetically distinct from one another, this talk offers more radical and interconnected interpretations of the two sculptures. Both were created on the Italian peninsula in an atmosphere of lingering doubts about the greater nationalist project that was then underway, and both rendered their respective subjects with an idiosyncratic corporeality that, in tandem with their inferred narratives about the end of slavery and nobility in death, broached more psychological and spiritual concerns. These historical and thematic correspondences argue for an inquiry unbound by stylistic categories or East/West binaries but, rather, considerations of the aesthetic sensibilities and synergies that developed within the post-Risorgimento artistic milieu.

Richard Powell is the James S. Ackerman Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017. He is Dean of the Humanities and the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Rome Art History Network.

The lecture will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

In this conversation, noted scholar of architecture, Nasser Rabbat, and cutting-edge designer, Nader Tehrani, will discuss “fluidity” as a paradigm for understanding the built environment of the Mediterranean world. Moderated by John Ochsendorf (2008 Fellow), the conversation will highlight concepts of fluidity in Rabbat’s groundbreaking scholarship on Syrian architectural heritage and in the innovations of Tehrani’s designs.

Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and the 2018 Louis Khan Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Nader Tehrani is Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, a principal of NADAAA, and the 2018 Resident in Design at the American Academy in Rome. Ochsendorf is Director of the American Academy in Rome and Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture at MIT.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West. The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.​

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

Ever since Edward Saïd, scholars have alerted listeners to the ways in which composers of Western classical music have dipped into other traditions in order to dress up a musical Other with which to converse and compete. This can range from the use of formulaic exotic signifiers to direct quotation, but also includes the more diffuse assimilation of styles, ideas, and genres.

With every successive generation of composers untangling the counterpoint of musical signifiers, our readings of them become more complex: how do we hear, for instance, a twenty-first-century work alluding to Benjamin Britten’s infatuation with Balinese music? And how do composers today negotiate concerns regarding cultural appropriation?

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is the Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and music critic for the New York Times. Nico Muhly is the Paul Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

Introducing the main themes of the symposium, Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation, taking place at the American Academy in Rome on 18 May, Avinoam Shalem sets the methodological and historiographic stage for the proceedings.

Mainly discussed as part of European popular culture and being categorized and, to some extent, underestimated as exotica, the oriental carnival of 1886 organized within the neighborhood of the ancient Jewish Ghetto in Florence, located to the south of the present Piazza della Repubblica, serves as the starting point for this lecture. Reconstructed as the “City of Baghdad,” this carnival created a tableau vivant (living picture) of the Orient in the quotidian life of Florence. Its timing, namely shortly after the modern planning of this area as the main open public space at the time that Florence was the capital of the Italian State (between 1865 and 1871) and just before the Ghetto’s demolition, underscores the rapidly falling dusk of “Orientalism” in favor of historicism and national modernism. But it also hints at the long tradition of blurring the borders between Islam and Judaism in the Italian-speaking zone, either deliberately or innocuously. In this lecture the specific choices and cases of linking Judaism and Islam will be discussed in order to suggest a long durèe of alternative “Backdoor History” for understanding the reception of Islamic art and architecture in Italy and for the making of its Image.

Avinoam Shalem is the Riggio Professor of the arts of Islam at the Columbia University. His main field of interest is in medieval artistic interactions in the Mediterranean basin, medieval aesthetic and the historiography of the field of art history. Among his recent publications: Reconstructing the Image of the Prophet in Europe (2013); The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation (with Christiane J. Gruber, 2014); Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam (with Olga Bush, 2015); and The Chasuble of Thomas Beck: A Biography (2017). He cocurated the exhibition The Future of Tradition: The Tradition of Future at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010) and is currently directing the research projects When Nature Becomes Ideology: Palestine after 1947. Shalem was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2016.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This lecture is made possible in part by the Embassy of the United States of America to Italy.

Collateral Events

Conference
Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation
18 May 2018
10:00am–6:00pm, Lecture Room

Exhibition
Yto Barrada, The Dye Garden
Thursday–Saturday, 4:00–7:00pm
10 May–8 July 2018