Far Afield

Marlon Blackwell (2019 Resident), professor and E. Fay Jones chair in architecture at the University of Arkansas, was selected as 2020 SEC Professor of the Year, the Southeastern Conference’s highest faculty honor.

In the Washington Post, the artist Karyn Olivier (2019 Fellow) argues against the removal of a mural at the University of Kentucky on which her companion artwork in the same building, Witness, is based.

AAR sadly remembers 2009 McKim Medal Gala honoree Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer widely considered one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema. He will be missed.

George Lewis (2010 Resident) surveys how Black composers “have explored what it means—and could mean—to be American, helping to foster a creolized, cosmopolitan new music for the 21st century.” His New York Times article features Tania León (1998 Resident) and Courtney Bryan (2020 Fellow).

In a wide-ranging interview with ASLA’s journal The Dirt, Walter Hood (1997 Fellow) discusses the intersection of African American history with his work in landscape architecture.

Hatje Cantz is publishing Mr. Bawa I Presume by Giovanna Silva (2020 Italian Fellow), which explores minimalistic ecofriendly houses, schools, and hotels by the Sri Lankan “tropical modernist” Geoffrey Bawa. The book received a 2019 Graham Foundation grant.

A belated congratulations to 1996 Fellow Thomas Phifer for winning a 2020 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects for the Pavilions, his expansion of the Glenstone Museum in Maryland.

In his essay “Monuments and Crimes,” Dell Upton (2019 Resident) considers historic preservation as a tool of political ideology in Italy and America in a new article published by Journal18, an online publication affiliated with the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture.

Oxford University Press is publishing Allison L. C. Emmerson’s book Life and Death in the Roman Suburb, which includes research she conducted during her 2019 Rome Prize Fellowship year.

The political theorist Danielle Allen (2020 Resident) has won this year’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a $500,000 award administered by the Library of Congress that recognizes work in disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize.

John Yau’s monographic article on the painter Elliot Green (2012 Fellow) reflects on the “profound influence [of Rome] on the direction his work subsequently took.”

Simon Mordant, a member of the AAR Board of Trustees, has become an Officer of the Order of Australia for his distinguished services to visual arts at the national and international level, to emerging artists, and to philanthropy.

The artist Garrett Bradley, a 2020 Rome Prize Fellow, discusses her short film America and her recent exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.

Thompson Mayes, a 2014 Rome Prize Fellow and the author of Why Old Places Matter, will speak virtually at the Heritage Foundation of Williamson County’s annual Preservation Symposium, to be held on June 26.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project has just released a compact disc of the space of a door, a musical composition by 2014 Rome Prize Fellow Eric Nathan.

This year the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded the Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music to James Primosch (1993 Affiliated Fellow) and the Walter Hinrichsen Award in Music to Pamela Z (2020 Fellow).

In the architecture category, Nader Tehrani (2018 Resident) earned the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize and AAR Director John Ochsendorf (2008 Fellow) received the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced its 2020 award and prize winners. In the category for art are four Rome Prize Fellows: Elliott Green (2012), Yun-fei Ji (2006), Siobhan Liddell (2012), and Karyn Olivier (2019).

Artist Relief, an important new initiative helping artists who face urgent financial circumstances due to the coronavirus pandemic, has awarded a grant to Roberto Lugo, a 2020 Rome Prize Fellow in design.

The Easton Journal revisits Farmers and Geese (1939), a WPA-era bas-relief in a Connecticut post office by the Boston sculptor Joseph Coletti, an Affiliated Fellow from 1924 to 1926.