Features

On Friday 4 and Saturday 5 November 2011, a comprehensive conference at the American Academy’s splendid seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia highlighted the work of a dozen internationally renowned scholars of cultural heritage and cultural property.

Matt Donovan teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and is the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature.

The “Glimpse Series” offers a closer view of the AAR community’s current Rome Prize winners by delving further into their studios or studies, their daily routines or work in progress. The scholarly and artistic work being pursued continues to be as varied as the fellowship recipients themselves. The following “Glimpse” focuses on Craig Martin, Associate Professor in History at Oakland University.

Approximately two hundred Romans and AAR community members filled the Cortile and the Art Gallery on the evening of Wednesday, October 19 to celebrate the opening of the photography exhibition Milton Gendel: Portraits, the second part of a two-part retrospective dedicated to the work of the long-time American expatriate in Rome that began on October 4 with the opening of the show Milton Gendel: una vita surreale (Milton Gendel: A Surreal Life) at the Museo Carlo Bilotti.

Norma W. Goldman, an archeological scholar, Latinist, and a longtime friend and Academy supporter, died on Friday, September 30, 2011. She was 89 years old. Goldman is survived by her son Mark, her daughter-in-law Carolyn, and her grandchildren Liam and Grace.

We recently sat down with Fritz Haeg, Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow for 2010–11, who discussed his experiences during his Fellowship year at the Academy and some of his upcoming projects.

A capacity crowd, comprised in equal parts of Roman new music aficionados and members of the AAR community, filled the Sala Aurelia on Monday night as composer Ada Gentile's contemporary music festival Nuovi Spazi Musicali began its thirty-second season.

On Monday, 26 September the Academy President Adele Chatfield-Taylor, FAAR’84, Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94 and members of the Friends of the Academy in Italy gathered for a reception at the Villa Aurelia to welcome the new class of Academy Fellows.

The American Academy in Rome inaugurates its fall exhibition calendar with a show by the prolific, young American artist Nate Lowman. Presented by Galleria Massimo de Carlo, the show is part of Three Amigos, a multivenue exhibition, which also includes the artists Dan Colen and Dash Snow.

Boris Biancheri, who was elected a trustee of the Academy in 1999, died of cancer on 19 July 2011, in Rome.

It was on 12 July 1921—precisely 90 years ago today—that noted architectural historian William L. MacDonald, FAAR’56 was born in Putnam, Connecticut. His death on 6 March 2010 deeply touched his numerous friends, colleagues, and former students, many of them linked by their connections with the American Academy in Rome.

Rome resident and beloved American Academy Trustee artist Cy Twombly died on July 5, 2011. He was 83.

Shane Bjornlie is the Andrew Heiskell Post-doctoral fellow in Classical Studies. Under a different sun, in southern California, Shane is Assistant Professor of Roman and Late Antique History at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches for the Department of History at CMC and for the Intercollegiate Classics program of the Claremont Colleges consortium.

The American Academy in Rome held its annual McKim Medal Gala at the Villa Aurelia in Rome on May 26, 2011, in honor of Italian artist Luigi Ontani, whom the Academy named the seventh McKim Medal laureate.

Four years ago (19-21 June 2007), the American Academy in Rome hosted a conference co-organized by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max Planck Institute for Art History that explored the collecting of religious art in and of Italy.

Whether it is climate, or the use and overuse of timber resources, or the extent and effects of urbanization, or a host of other issues, the history of the Mediterranean environment in antiquity is full of unresolved debates.

Internationally-renowned artist Antoni Muntadas will bring two Janiculum neighbors together on Tuesday 7 June 2011, when the American Academy in Rome and the Real Academia de España en Roma will unite to present two Muntadas events as well as a new project by Italian artist Giulio Squillacciotti.

It was five full days, but still it seemed like a whirlwind when the AAR’s Board of Trustees made their annual visit to Rome from 25 May to 29 May.

Stephanie Malia Hom is the recipient of the 2010-2011 Lily Auchincloss Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies. She arrived in Rome from the University of Oklahoma, where she is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.

Three days in late May—Wednesday the 25th, Friday the 27th, and Saturday the 28th—see one of the Academy’s oldest and most consistently rewarding traditions, the annual presentation of work by current Rome Prize Fellows in the AAR’s School of Fine Arts.