Far Afield

Missing Words, an ambitious cycle of works from 2014 Fellow Eric Nathan, balances structural impulses with the composer’s carefully considered approach to orchestration, harmony, and pitch. The CD and digital download will be available soon from New Focus Recordings.

Handcrafted during an extended residency at Arcadia University, new ceramic works and site-specific wallpapers by 2013 Fellow Polly Apfelbaum will be in dialogue with a concurrent exhibition on the Pennsylvania folk artist and antiques dealer David Ellinger. Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale is on view February 3–April 17 at Arcadia Exhibitions.

Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie joined the cast for a Netflix adaption of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. A Resident at AAR in 2019, Doerr memorialized his 2004–5 Fellowship year in Four Seasons in Rome.

The International Contemporary Ensemble will perform The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, a collaboration between Ash Fure (2018 Fellow) and her brother Adam Fure, at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. Performances take place January 13–16.

A pair of long-forgotten, recently restored WPA murals by Philip Guston (1949 Fellow, 1971 Resident) and Musa McKim are on view at the Currier Museum of Art through January 30. Painted in 1941, the two paintings hung for many years in a federal forestry building in Laconia, New Hampshire.

Jana Dambrogio (2008 Fellow) is at the forefront of new discoveries into “letterlocking,” an elaborate technique of folding and sewing royal correspondence to make written documents more secure.

“I hate stories about writers,” Tom Bissell (2007 Fellow) told the Los Angeles Times about Creative Types, his new collection of short stories—written from the perspective of a writer. The book is “a way to address my weird anxieties about my own career, a way to lighten the psychic burden by poking fun at myself.”

Sarah Manguso (2008 Fellow) talked to Publishers Weekly about her forthcoming first novel, Very Cold People, which explores “whiteness, class differences, and intergenerational trauma that were prevalent in the 400-year-old town she grew up in outside of Boston.”

The University of Toronto Press will publish Feeding Fascism by 2018 Fellow Diana Garvin in February. The book explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor.

Earlier this fall Michael Hersch (2001 Fellow) premiered a new opera, Poppaea, in Basel and Vienna that explores the legacy of Nero’s second wife. Lauren Donovan Ginsberg (2018 Fellow) contributed an essay giving the story a greater complexity.

The New York Times has named “Pillar III” by 2015 Fellow Andy Akiho (from Seven Pillars) and “I Will Learn How to Love a Person and Then I Will Teach You and Then We Will Know” by 2016 Fellow Christopher Cerrone (from The Arching Path) as two of the best classical-music tracks for 2021.

Giovanna Silva (2020 Italian Fellow) has been photographing not only the contents of Italian archives and collections, but also their locations and methods of archiving. A solo exhibition of her investigation, titled Archivi, Synthesis, is on view at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York through January 8.

Kirstin Valdez Quade (2019 Fellow) won the 2021 First Novel Prize for The Five Wounds, a book that she wrote during her time in Rome. The award, awarded by the Center for Fiction and presented in a ceremony emceed by Fran Lebowitz, comes with a $15,000 prize.

Mary Reid Kelley (2012 Fellow) and Patrick Kelley collaborated with artists and studio assistants at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia during a two-year residency to produce an installation of video and sculpture centered on two works, Blood Moon and I’m Jackson Pollock. The exhibition is on view through February 20, 2022.

The Shape of Things is a major presentation of new and historical work by 2006 Fellow Carrie Mae Weems at the Park Avenue Armory, on view through December 31. Robin Pogrebin surveys the exhibition and the artist’s career in a comprehensive New York Times profile.

Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between is a new collection of essays by Southern writer and 1988 Fellow Padgett Powell. The book covers family and food, places and painters, and authors and other animals.

As this week’s guests on The Grant Tourist podcast with Dan Rubinstein, AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow) and artist Sanford Biggers (2018 Fellow) discuss the importance of collaboration, the decline of empires, and the origins of the Academy. Listen now on Apple Podcast or Spotify.

A solo exhibition of work by 2020 Resident Glenn Ligon at Hauser & Wirth in New York is accompanied by a new publication documenting his studio and process.

Sanford Biggers (2018 Fellow) has won a 2021 Heinz Award for the Arts from the Heinz Family Foundation. The program celebrates twenty-six years of honoring the outstanding contributions of those who are changing our world for the better.

Helen O’Leary (2019 Fellow) is having a solo exhibition, titled Writing the Unwritable Novel, at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, on view through December 23.

Princeton University Press will soon publish Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome by Cammy Brothers (1997 Fellow). The book is an illuminating reassessment of the architect whose innovative drawings of ruins shaped the enduring image of ancient Rome.

Among the recipients of the 2022 Archaeological Institute of America Awards are 2019 Fellow Allison L. C. Emmerson, who won the James R. Wiseman Book Award for Life and Death in the Roman Suburb, and AAR Advisor Elizabeth B. Fentress, who was honored with the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement.

Le Rouge et Le Noir, a solo exhibition of new work by 2019 Resident Whitfield Lovell, is on view at DC Moore Gallery in New York through December 18. The artist presents three series: The Reds, Winteriesse (which he began during his time in Rome), and Spell Suite.

The Institute for Advanced Study has appointed David Nirenberg (2021 Resident), dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and professor of medieval history, as its tenth director and Leon Levy Professor, effective July 1, 2022.

Katherine Balch (2021 Fellow in musical composition) and Catie Newell (2014 Fellow in architecture) recently completed fellowships at Civitella Ranieri in Italy.

Artist Ramona Gibbs talks to Flyover Zone about her father, the sculptor Harrison Gibbs, who was a Rome Prize Fellow from 1936 to 1938.

The magazine Town & Country reports on AAR’s 2021 New York Gala honoring John Guare, Julie Mehretu, and Mary Schmidt Campbell, held on October 26.

“People don’t normally look at me walking down the street and go, ‘Oh, that’s definitely a potter,’” Roberto Lugo (2020 Fellow) told the New York Times in advance of his participation in ​​Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among his other recent exhibitions.

The Catholic University of America Press has just published Tales of a Minstrel of Reims in the Thirteenth Century, an anonymous medieval work that comes with an introduction by William Chester Jordan (2018 Resident) and notes by Randall Todd Pippenger (2022 Fellow).

Mary Ellen Carroll, our 2021–22 Rome Prize winner in design, is presenting on “The Ethical Imagination (EI®):” at a virtual event called “Artist as Innovator: Demo Day,” taking place October 22–24 and showcasing world-changing projects incubated through an 18-month Imaginator Start-up initiative.