Far Afield

Barbara Chase-Riboud talks to the New York Times Style Magazine in advance of two retrospective exhibitions, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis and the Serpentine Galleries in London.

Adele Chatfield-Taylor, the Academy’s former president and a 1984 Rome Prize Fellow, will receive the Albert Simons Medal of Excellence from the College of Charleston at a ceremony on October 27. The award recognizes individuals who have excelled in civic design, architectural design, historic preservation, and urban planning.

The first museum survey of work by 2018 Fellow Abigail DeVille opens tonight at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The exhibition “examines the myths and realities of local, familial and ancestral histories and the convoluted notion of freedom in a country fraught with oppression and racism.”

Our 2022 Italian Fellow Valerio Morabito is speaking twice at Thomas Jefferson University in conjunction with his exhibition there this month: an October 14 roundtable on “Gardens in the City” and an October 24 lecture on “Re-Imagining American Cities: Moving Forward.”

Van Doren Waxter in New York is presenting a solo exhibition of work by the late Jackie Saccoccio (2005 Fellow). The exhibition, called Tempestuous and comprising art made during the last two years of her life, is on view until October 29.

Tung-Hui Hu, our current Rome Prize Fellow in literature, offers an alternative to doomscrolling in his new book from MIT Press. Digital Lethargy explores the exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness of our online lives through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt recognized Nader Tehrani, founding principal of NADAAA and a 2018 Resident, as a “Design Visionary” with a 2022 National Design Award.

Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas, has just opened Foreign Body, an exhibition of sculptures by 2021 Fellow Steve Parker—several of them made during his time in Rome.

Oxford University Press has just published Building the Classical World: Bauforschung as a Contemporary Approach, a book of essays that was edited by Elisha Ann Dumser and Dorian Borbonus (2017 Fellow).

Phu Hoang, 2017 Rome Prize Fellow and current Society of Fellows president, has been appointed section head of architecture in the Knowlton School at Ohio State University.

The publishing house Fuorilinea has just released 2022 Resident Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Domestic Work (2000) as Lavori domestici, translated by Katie Scroccaro. The book is part of Caravelle, a series dedicated to contemporary American poets.

Territory is the title for Houghton University’s exhibition of work by 1985 Fellow Nick Blosser, on view September 2–October 9. The Tennessee-based artist is a landscape painter in the tradition of Charles Burchfield and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

The project Liz Ševčenko started during her 2018 Rome Prize Fellowship was just published by Routledge as Public History for a Post-Truth Era: Fighting Denial through Memory Movements.

Tania León, a 1998 Resident, has been announced as one of the recipients of the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors. She will be honored alongside U2, George Clooney, and others in a ceremony taking place in Washington, DC, on December 4.

In Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, Giuliana Bruno (2019 Resident) explores how historical and contemporary artists developed the projected image. The University of Chicago Press will publish the book, which draws from psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, and more, in October.

CBS Sunday Morning distilled the Academy’s essence, history, and present-day life in a five-minute segment that aired on July 10. Rome correspondent Seth Doane spoke with three 2022 Fellows—Elena Past, Igor Santos, and William Villalongo—and two Academy leaders, Marla Stone and Elizabeth Rodini.

Germane Barnes (2022 Fellow) talks to Architectural Digest about his Rome Prize project, designing a new column order to supplant the classical Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian in favor of forms and proportions rooted in Black culture.

2018 Resident Yto Barrada has won the Queen Sonja Print Award, the world’s largest prize for graphic art. The jury praised her for “pushing the boundaries of her own practice and our understanding of printmaking and graphic art.”

J. S. Marcus from the Wall Street Journal was exhausted after his visit to the Villa d‘Este, outside Rome. Dense in mythological imagery, with the need to hike up and down, the villa’s gardens were meant to “re-enact the labors of Hercules,” current Rome Prize winner Michael Lee told him.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Kertzer (2000 Resident, current Trustee) is profiled in the New York Times, where he talks about researching his new book, The Pope At War, as well as new revelations from the unsealed archives of Pope Pius XII at the Vatican.

New works by 2017 Affiliated Fellow Magali Reus tease out the tensions between natural and human environments. Her solo show A Sentence in Soil opened this past weekend at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome, a new book that Maggie Popkin completed last year during her Rome Prize fellowship, shows how objects commemorating places, people, and spectacles generated memory and shaped knowledge across a heterogeneous empire.

Our current Rome Prize winner in literature, Valzhyna Mort, translated a poem that is published in the May 16 issue of the New Yorker. Listen to her read Ludmila Khersonsky’s “First Day of War” online.

Eric N. Mack (2022 Fellow) considers himself a painter, but Scampolo!—his current exhibition at Trinity College Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery—substitutes pint glasses of water, piles of fabric, and laundry bags for paint. Claudia Dalby interviews the artist for the Dublin InQuirer.

George E. Lewis, a composer, professor of music at Columbia University, and 2010 Resident, will become the next artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble—and its first Black leader.

Marcello Barbanera, professor of classical archaeology and director of the museums at La Sapienza, has died. As an AAR Advisor in ancient studies, Barbanera was generous with his time and knowledge. In winter 2021, during full-on Covid, he generously opened the university’s cast museum for an Academy Walk and Talk, a memorable morning in difficult times. He will be missed.

Eight members of the AAR community have won 2022 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation: Mario Carpo (2005 Resident) in architecture, planning, and design; Kim Bowes (2006 Fellow and AAR Director from 2014 to 2017, pictured above) in classics; Alexandra Kleeman (2021 Fellow) and Lysley Tenorio (2016 Fellow) in fiction; Autumn Knight (2022 Fellow) in film and video; Linda Besemer (2003 Fellow) in fine arts; and Jay Hopler (2011 Fellow) and Valzhyna Mort (2022 Fellow) for poetry.

When asked to describe her life and career, Laurie Anderson (2006 Resident) answered by saying “I tell stories.” The multimedia artist and performer was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for the venerated CBS news program, 60 Minutes.

Valzhyna Mort, a current Rome Prize winner in literature, has won the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize for her collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book from a midcareer poet published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision.

Gloria Bell (2022 Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellow) told CBC that her research conflicts with the Vatican’s narrative regarding its enormous collection of Indigenous artifacts—from both her home country of Canada and around the world.