Features

Photographer Carole Raddato has gifted the core of her vast collection—some 30,000 digital images—to the AAR Library to ensure its long-term preservation and continued access to scholars.

The Library of the American Academy in Rome has reopened its doors to scholars.

Marilyn Hernández, deputy chief development officer for individual giving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the Academy’s new Vice President for Development.

Sanjaya Thakur, associate professor and chair of the Classics Department at Colorado College, has been appointed director of AAR’s Classical Summer School.

Matthew Brennan is the 2020 Booth Family Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation and a PhD candidate in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Parrish Elizabeth Wright is a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Greek and Roman History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Encounters I and II are part of a year-long series of events commemorating the institution’s 125th anniversary. The exhibitions trace only a few representative examples of the many interdisciplinary encounters fostered by the Academy from 1948 to the present.

This year, fellowships were awarded to twenty-two North American and two Italian artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for a period of five to seven months at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome.

In the midst of a global pandemic that has disproportionately affected communities of color, racially motivated violence is a reminder that systemic racism still persists.

A video installation by the preservationist Matthew Brennan and the designer Eugenia Morpurgo, on view during Cinque Mostre 2020 earlier this year, featured a condensed version of their vision of a landscape after 2,100 years of climate change.

In celebration of the Academy’s 125th anniversary, the exhibitions Encounters I: Abstracting Rome and Encounters II: The Activist Gesture investigate the enduring impact of the city of Rome as a dynamic creative laboratory through a series of interdisciplinary exchanges.

Encounters I identifies the abstracting techniques resulting from three historic encounters; the second part traces how those techniques are employed in recent contemporary works responding to pressing social and political issues in the United States.

Pairing the artist Julie Mehretu and the architect J. Meejin Yoon, Encounters II explores the role of abstract forms and gestural mark making as indices and agents of social and political change in contemporary American society.

Nancy Millar O’Boyle, a member of the American Academy in Rome’s Board of Trustees from 1985 to 2011, died on March 25, 2020. She was one week shy of her 89th birthday.

In consideration of the safety of those residing in Rome and the institution as a whole, we have made the difficult decision to close the Academy’s campus on April 3.

The modernist architect Henry N. Cobb, an AAR Trustee Emeritus and a 1992 Resident, has died. He was 93 years old.

Hundreds of people filled AAR’s courtyard, cryptoporticus, library, and galleries to view artists and performers showcase their work and explore this year’s theme, “Convergence.”

The historian and educator Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident) has been appointed the 24th Director of the American Academy in Rome.

Convergence is the theme of the 2020 edition of Cinque Mostre, AAR’s annual collective exhibition featuring work by current Rome Prize Fellows, Italian and Affiliated Fellows, and invited artists.