Far Afield

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.

What do AAR leaders do after they leave Rome? John Ochsendorf, director of the Academy from 2017 to 2020, has been tapped to become founding director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, a new multidisciplinary design center opening in the fall.

New paintings from 2012 Rome Prize Fellow Elliott Green bring abstraction in conversation with landscape. His solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York opened this week.

Fanny Singer, daughter of Alice Waters, reflects on her mother’s accomplishments, including the founding of the transformative Rome Sustainable Food Project fifteen years ago, in the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

The architect Germane Barnes discovers that AAR is a truly international community. In his first two weeks as a Rome Prize Fellow, he met South African photographer and 2022 Affiliated Fellow Cole Ndelu (who took the above portrait) as well as two Rome Sustainable Food Project interns, Georgia Lahiff from Australia and Josefina Gimenez Bellucci from Argentina. Read more in his “What’s Good G?” column for Design Miami.

The Gilded Age on HBO has renewed interest in late-nineteenth-century American architecture, which includes the triumvirate of Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White. Read more about the architects of the Academy’s main building in House Beautiful.

The Academy is deeply saddened by the news that Anuradha Mathur (2021 Resident) has passed away. A renowned landscape architect, architect, and professor, she was always at the cutting edge of practice and pedagogy. Our thoughts are with her loved ones.

Among the winners of the American Institute of Architects’ 2022 Architecture Award include Tod Williams (1983 Fellow) and Billie Tsien (2000 Resident), Elizabeth Diller (1981 Affiliated Fellow), Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (2017 Residents), and Stephan Kieran (1981 Fellow) and James Timberlake (1983 Fellow).

The Passion of Perpetua, a book that Thomas Hendrickson (2013 Fellow) cowrote and copublished with a group of his students at Stanford Online High School, won the 2022 Ladislaus J. Bolchazy Pedagogy Book Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. The spirit of collaboration he experienced at AAR had a big influence on the work.

Nari Ward (2013 Fellow) first presented his monumental sculpture Peace Keeper at the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Re-created in 2020 for Grief and Grievance at the New Museum, the work was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art last month.

Francesca Grilli (2015 Italian Fellow) is turning a museum into song! For Family, to be first performed at the reopening of the Nasjonal Museet in Oslo in June, a chosen family (defined broadly) will sing the titles of artworks over a two-year period.

Franc Palaia (1986 Fellow) has published Wall Works: Frescoes, Photo-Sculpture, and Mixed Media 1973–2021. The book is a catalogue raisonné of forty-eight years of work that includes pieces he made during his time in Rome.

Two AAR authors are finalists for PEN America’s 2022 Literary Awards: André Aciman (2015 Resident) for his book of essays Homo Irrealis, and Kirstin Valdez Quade (2019 Fellow) for her novel The Five Wounds. Winners to be announced on February 28.

To fully appreciate the importance of the humanities today, we must understand their history. A new book by former AAR Director Christopher Celenza (1994 Fellow), The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400–1800, charts the humanities’ evolution from the Italian Renaissance to the Enlightenment

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.