Exhibition Catalogues

In celebration of the Academy’s 125th anniversary, Encounters investigates the enduring impact of the city of Rome as a dynamic creative laboratory via a series of interdisciplinary exchanges. Spanning the immediate post–World War II period to the present day, the results of these collaborations were not always immediately apparent, but their impact continues to resonate throughout the arts and the humanities in the United States and around the world. This exhibition, articulated in two parts, highlights specific examples of this central aspect of the Academy’s mission, demonstrating the interplay between visual art, musical composition, literature, and architecture set against, interpreting, and engaging monuments and urban space in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

The exhibition traces, in particular, how these encounters have contributed to the development of several distinct strains of abstraction. Emerging from conceptions of city, space, society, and history, and employing differing perspectives and techniques such as collage and the imaginary interpretation of architecture, these strains, expressed in a range of separate but interconnected media, owe a great deal to the unique intellectual and creative atmosphere at the American Academy in Rome.

Featured artist are: John Cage and Philip Guston; Eleanor Clark and Eugene Berman; and Al Held, Stephen Kieran, and James Timberlake.

This exhibition catalogue accompanies Yto Barrada: The Dye Garden, originally presented at the American Academy in Rome in 2018 and expanded for the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2019. The Dye Garden features recent work by Yto Barrada (2018 Resident), whose artistic practice weaves together family history and broader sociopolitical narratives, employing a variety of media, including photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, books, and hand-dyed textiles. The artist has long investigated gestures of resistance to structures of power and control. She has an abiding interest in mechanisms of displacement and dislocation, as well as questions of appropriation and authenticity.

This fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by Helaine Posner, the Neuberger’s chief curator, and Peter Benson Miller, curator and former Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. An artist’s contribution titled “Color Walks” is a special feature of this book. Barrada is the 2019 recipient of the Neuberger Museum of Art’s 2019 Roy R. Neuberger Prize.

Since the origins of representation, the human body has been a vehicle for a variety of approaches to artistic expression. The Academic Body explores the renewed currency of the classical body—not as a standard, canonical form—but as a fulcrum for contemporary meditations on identity, gender, sexuality, and race. The diverse group exhibition and this complementary, fully illustrated catalogue (with essays by scholars Mary Beard, Deborah Willis, and Leslie Cozzi) reflect the influences and impact of the American Academy in Rome as a microcosm of American artistic and cultural mores as it approaches its 125th anniversary.

The publication features work by Sanford Biggers (2018 Fellow), Patricia Cronin (2007 Fellow), Daniel Chester French, Stephen Greene (1954 Fellow), Ann Hamilton (2017 Resident), Lyle Ashton Harris (2001 Fellow), Tom Johnson/Adrienne Kennedy, John Kelly (2007 Fellow), Sally Mann, Paul Manship (1912 Fellow), Jessie Marino (2019 Fellow), Beverly McIver (2018 Fellow), Ana Mendieta (1984 Fellow), Wangechi Mutu (2019 Resident), Catherine Opie, Stefan Sagmeister (2019 Resident), Concetta Scaravaglione (1950 Fellow), David Schutter (2016 Fellow), Sissi (2007 Italian Fellow), Giuseppe Stampone (2014 Italian Fellow), Catherine Wagner (2014 Fellow), and Deborah Willis (2019 Resident).

The Italian artist Paolo Gioli (1942– ), who studied painting and the nude at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice, has long been preoccupied with the human body. Gioli’s Polaroid transfers in particular have used the body and its fragments as a means to interrogate photography’s history and theoretical foundations, as well as its dialogue with cinema, printmaking, sculpture, and painting.

After spending a year in New York in the late 1960s, Gioli was among the first artists to master Polaroid transfers following the introduction of SX-70 instant film in 1972. Since then, he has produced a wide range of formally complex works with the gelatin and dye layers of Polaroid emulsion. Using handmade pinhole cameras and alternative paper and silk supports, Gioli marries the most elemental procedures of early photography to a sophisticated use of the one-step film created by Dr. Edwin Land, cofounder and principal inventor of the Polaroid Corporation. Among the many fruitful paradoxes of Gioli’s work is the way he condenses a vast iconography into a spontaneous set of dexterous operations with instant film.

The selection of works in this volume demonstrates not only the artist’s often overlooked technical virtuosity with Polaroid film, but also his profound meditations on the human form and the fractured body politic.

Organized by the American Academy in Rome, the catalogue for the exhibition Matera Imagined/Matera Immaginata: Photography and a Southern Italian Town highlights how photography has framed modern perceptions of Matera, a southern Italian town noted for its millennia-old cave dwellings. A palimpsest of history and traditions characteristic of Mediterranean culture, Matera in the twentieth century was transformed in the collective imagination from an ancient backwater at the edge of civilization to a cultural bellwether for the future of Europe.

This selection of photographs of Rome and its environs by three women, drawn in part from the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome, confronts the Eternal City and its urban transformation over more than a century, from the Belle Époque to the present day. The exhibition traces the emergence of photography as an independent medium wielded by women with distinctive viewpoints, as it evolved from a documentary aid to a vehicle for subjective expression.

The catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition A View of One’s Own at the Academy (October 13–November 27, 2016), curated by Lindsay Harris, Peter Benson Miller, and Angela Piga.

At the American Academy in Rome, the studio as a purpose-built architectural space remains a vital locus for fertile artistic exploration and production. Studio Systems explores the status and diverse interpretations of the studio in line with current modes of production that are often less dependent on a clearly defined studio environment. What does it mean to work in the studio now, as it increasingly cedes its privileged position as the exclusive laboratory for contemporary artistic practice to more mobile, itinerant, digital, and global networks?

This exhibition catalogue is a provocative interrogation of race and identity in contemporary Italy envisioned by visual artists, scholars and writers from Africa, Europe and the United States exploring new forms of subjectivity and agency shaped by history, immigration and integration, the legacy of colonialism and persistent stereotypes.

Nero su bianco features work by an international group of artists—many of them closely affiliated with the American Academy in Rome, where is set the eponymous exhibition curated by Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Storr, and Peter Benson Miller. Its intent is to take the cultural, social, and political temperature in Italy today with a specific eye on immigration, integration, and the aftermaths of colonialism, especially regarding African-European communities. With that goal, the exhibition examines and questions key sites, paying special attention to their historical origins and legacies and the conditions and modes of production that shaped them.

The American artist Grear Patterson plumbs the pleasures and traumas of adolescence in photographs, videos, works on canvas, and sculptures that evoke personal and collective rites of passage. His work, alternating between disclosure and reticence, explores the immediacy of violent impulses and erotic yearning. Like a collection of random snapshots and personal effects, Forest Theater summons in various, often indirect ways, formative moments in Patterson’s life. Embodied by, among other things, baseball cards, summer camp, and fireworks on the Fourth of July, these moments might be construed as typical of an American childhood and the turbulent passages of adolescence—Sturm und Drang leavened by the cool sensibility of Ed Ruscha, with a nod to the dark undercurrent in William Eggleston’s photographs of backyards and suburban clutter.

Part Hardy Boy and part Holden Caulfield, Patterson presents his recollections in the form of photographs and private relics, tapping into a broader consciousness. His artist’s book, like the works in the exhibition, contains remarkably mature ruminations upon memory, nostalgia, and the hormone-fueled transition from childhood to adulthood. Like Harold with his purple crayon, Patterson creates a rich personal world that melds the real and the imaginary.

This catalogue was published in conjunction with an exhibition, curated by Peter Benson Miller and held at the American Academy in Rome from October 8 to December 4, 2014. The exhibition and book are a collaboration between Depart Foundation and AAR.

In 2014, the American Academy in Rome celebrates the centenary of its main building, the only project designed by the legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead & White in Europe. Marking the occasion, this exhibition of drawings, plans, photographs, and other archival material, curated by the noted architectural historian Marida Talamona, traces the design, construction, and early critical reception of the structure.

Replete with essays by Talamona, Barry Bergdoll, Francesca Romana Stabile, Paola Porretta, and Lindsay Harris, among others, the illustrated catalogue promises to be the most definitive resource to date on the McKim, Mead & White Building.

The catalogue for an exhibition, promoted by the DEPART Foundation, features work created by artists who live and work in the United States and who use different media, such as painting, photography, graphics, sculpture, installation, and video. The exhibition reinterprets the meaning of the word “Americana,” playing with the ideas of patriotism and positivism, concepts that have always been associated with its definition, while offering a more ambiguous and complex meaning.

The show brings together the work of artists from different generations who pursue various poetic and stylistic expressions: Uri Aran, Darren Bader, Aaron Bobrow, Joe Bradley, Tom Burr, Nick Darmstaedter, Louis Eisner, Roe Ethridge, Sam Falls, Mark Flood, Erik Frydenborg, Elias Hansen, John Henderson, Mike Kelley, Brendan Lynch, Carter Mull, Takeshi Murata, Oscar Murillo, Trevor Paglen, Mitzi Pederson, Seth Price, Rob Pruitt, Jon Rafman, Stephen G. Rhodes, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Edward Ruscha, Lucien Smith, Valerie Snobeck, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt, and Oscar Tuazon.

The exhibition was curated by Vincenzo de Bellis and on view October 3–November 14, 2013.

This catalogue, A Question of Time—Roman Campaigns: Historical and Contemporary Photography, is one part of a two-year project of the same name that includes two workshops (May 2009, June 2010) and two exhibitions (June 15–30, 2009; September 24–October 15, 2010).

Since Philip Guston’s death in 1980, his late figurative paintings and drawings have steadily reaped the acclaim they deserve—acclaim that was largely denied them during his lifetime. Hilton Kramer infamously reviewed Guston as a “mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” in a damning 1970 New York Times article. This volume reunites a selection of paintings from the Roma series, completed during Guston’s residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970–71. (He was also a Fellow in 1949.) From early in his career, Guston had taken inspiration from Italian art, and his 1973 painting Pantheon features a list of Italian painters: de Chirico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, and Tiepolo. Italian cinema (especially Fellini) and classical sculpture were also dear to his heart. The Roma works consolidate this dialogue with Italian art and culture. Diary entries published alongside the reproductions recount exchanges at the American Academy, pilgrimages to Venice, Arezzo, Sicily and Orvieto, and observations of the international cultural community in Rome.

Georgina Masson is the literary pseudonym of Marion Johnson (1912–1980), “Babs” to her friends. An English citizen, Johnson was born in the Far East and lived and traveled in her youth throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. She settled in Rome in the early 1940s and remained in Italy until her return to England in 1978.

A photographer and historian of architecture from ancient Rome to medieval Sicily, Masson was a profound and passionate connoisseur of Rome. Her celebrated Companion Guide to Rome, first published in 1965, and numerous photographic guides reveal her indefatigable curiosity and lively interests.

The author of many studies and biographies, she devoted much effort to a study of Rome and Italian architecture, with particular attention to villas and gardens. As an expert on this subject matter, she published her own photographs in major publications such as Italian Villas and Palaces and Italian Villas and Gardens, published in 1959 and 1961 respectively.

In Rome, she assiduously frequented the American Academy, to which she bequeathed her legacy of a lifetime of negatives. A veritable treasure trove, the photographs stem from the 1950s through the 1970s—a selection of them is reproduced here, revealing an anthropological interest in documenting local customs and life.

This catalogue accompanied an exhibition, Georgina Masson: Author and Eye, that was held at AAR from April 29 to June 28, 2003. The photographs reproduced in the book come from the Masson Collection in the Photographic Archive.

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition Alex Katz, Edward Ruscha that took place February 15–April 22, 2001, at the American Academy in Rome. The show was organized by Constance Lewallen, senior curator for the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum.

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition Joel Shapiro: Roma that took place March 12–May 30, 1999, at the American Academy in Rome. The show also featured public works at Piazza Sant’Ignazio, Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina, Piazza Barberini, and the garden of the Borghese Gallery.

This catalogue documents the Annual Exhibition 1996, which took place May 29–July 14, 1996, at the American Academy in Rome. Twenty artists, including Henri Cole, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Manuel Ocampo, David Rakowski, and Eve Sussman, participated.

This catalogue was prepared to document an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, (January 15–February 15, 1991) and at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor (March–April 1991).

The catalogue was produced for the exhibition Sol LeWitt, Marco Tirelli, which took place at the American Academy in Rome in January and February 1990.