Features

Flaming music boxes. Ping pong balls. Kurt Vonnegut. Shakespeare. While not typical staples of classical music, all have been featured in the work of AAR composers and performed by the renowned Scharoun Ensemble.

Last week, a capacity audience filled the ODC Dance Theater in San Francisco for the latest installment of Conversations | Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome. The event, a panel discussion on the design of museums and cultural spaces, featured speakers offering unique perspectives on approaching their work.

It’s not easy to picture Cy Twombly with a camera in his hand. Famous for his abstract canvases and found-object sculptures, Twombly’s best-known work seems to eschew the world in favor of its symbolic and conceptual fundamentals.

The composer Annie Gosfield, a current AAR Resident, sat serenely at her computer while the percussionist Chris Cutler roamed barefoot around an ensemble of suspended garden tools.

Over the last three years, a collaboration between the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, or the Centro, and AAR has given the Centro students an opportunity to use Academy resources to curate their own exhibition. This year, they worked with Academy curator Valentina Follo to tell the story of a pioneering woman—Esther Boise Van Deman.

A festive group of Fellows, Affiliated Fellows, Residents, Trustees, and Academy friends reunited recently for an annual tradition—the 2015 AAR Cabaret.

A large crowd braved driving rain turn to see Edward Hirsch (1989 Fellow) and Robert Polito read and discuss poetry at this fall’s first US installment of the series, Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Archaeology is destruction—every turn of the spade destroys layers of earth that preserve moments of the human past. The archaeology archive—the documentation that records excavation—transforms that destructive moment into history. More important than any buried building or fragment of sculpture, this archive preserves the tenuous link between the modern archaeologist and the people of the past.

New Rome Prize Winners and Italian Fellows met and mingled with friends of the American Academy in Rome as the sun set on a warm September evening last week. Members of the community and their families/fellow travelers gathered with staff and supporters of the Academy for the annual Opening Reception amongst the pines and olive trees of the Bass Garden and were welcomed by the Academy’s President Mark Robbins and Director Kimberly Bowes.

The American Academy in Rome constitutes a kind of bridge between the US and Italy. Most often it leads eastwards across the Atlantic, with American Fellows, Residents, and visitors coming to stay on the Janiculum, but sometimes traffic runs the opposite direction.

Ancient Rome was fast-forwarded to the twentieth century at this year’s Jerome lecture series, delivered by the eminent Latin professor Maria Wyke from University College London.

What defines the experience of a city? What codes and idioms—verbal and other—do you need to know to feel truly at home?

In 1949, the French critic André Malraux made an observation that suggested art history has been bound with photography since the mid-nineteenth century.

Over 475 guests recently gathered to honor Carlo Petrini and Paolo Sorrentino at the American Academy in Rome’s 2015 McKim Medal Gala. A wide variety of Italian and American luminaries from the worlds of art, fashion, business, and academia enjoyed cocktails, music and conversation in the candlelit gardens of the Villa Aurelia. The evening was styled in the manner of a modern garden party, as envisioned by filmmaker and philanthropist Ginevra Elkann, who served as Gala Chair.

Despite the fact that the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto is renowned for reintroducing realistic expression into Western art, his life is largely shrouded in mystery.

In this issue of AAR Magazine, we invite you to meet the community of artists, writers, scholars, and composers who are living and working at the American Academy in Rome.

Telling stories across the “table” animates Charles Mayton’s first solo show in Italy at the American Academy in Rome, which runs through May 10.

On April 20, the American Academy in Rome hosted its annual Spring Gala—drawing a sold-out crowd from the art, architecture, and food worlds to a magical evening at the Four Seasons Restaurant.

The American Academy in Rome recently announced the winners of the Rome Prize Fellowship

The American Academy in Rome’s 2015 Spring Gala was held last Wednesday at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The festive event honored three individuals whose work in the arts and humanities represents the very best of the energetic scholarly and artistic activity that takes place at the American Academy in Rome every day.