The speakers for the event are: J. Meejin Yoon, dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University (2006 Fellow, 2020 Resident); the artist Julie Mehretu (2020 Resident); and Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020 Resident).

This Conversations/Conversazioni is part of a year-long series of programs and events conceived around the theme of “Encounters,” which celebrates the 125th anniversary of the founding of the American Academy in Rome.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2019–20 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Watch the Livestream
 

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

Immediately preceding the opening of the exhibition The Academic Body, which tracks the transformation of the body in art and society from 1894 to the present, Mark Robbins, curator of the exhibition and AAR president and CEO, will speak with two of the artists in the exhibition, Patrica Cronin (2007 Fellow) and Stefan Sagmeister, current Henry Wolf Graphic Designer in Residence.

The conversation will be held in English.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2018–19 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Are monuments memory? While they are often discussed in those terms, it is better to think of them as pastiches of familiar myths and metaphors created for the needs of a particular moment. In addition, they need to be considered as elements of complex landscapes that also contained buildings and open spaces. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were periods of intense monument building in the service of nationalist projects. Confederate American, Risorgimento Italian, and Fascist monuments all used similar visual and mythic elements, but two were failures. This conversation, moderated by John Ochsendorf, considers all three types of monuments from the point of view of their visual imagery and their roles in civic landscapes. It concludes with a consideration of the reason the Confederate monuments need to be removed.

Dell Upton is Distinguished Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the 2019 James Marston Fitch Resident in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. Adachiara Zevi is an architect, art historian, and president of Fondazione Bruno Zevi. John Ochsendorf, Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the American Academy in Rome.

The conversation concludes a two-day conference held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and American Academy in Rome on “A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments, and Works of Art in Italy.” Please download a PDF of the conference program.

The event will be held in English. Watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2018–19 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

For the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture, a group of academics, journalists, and politicians will discuss the status of women as public intellectuals and how the advent of new media has changed the nature and tenor of feminist discourse. The historical role of women’s voices—as authors and advocates—will be laid against the new terrain presented by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the democratized internet.

Participants include: Mary Beard, a professor of classics and a blogger for the Times; Linda Douglass, the former White House communications director for health care; Sabina Ciuffini, an entrepreneur and a blogger for Il Fatto Quotidiano; and Kashetu Kyenge, an Italian politician and ophthalmologist.

Simultaneous translation will be available. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Friends of the Library Annual Book Sale will be held in the Academy’s Salone from 2:00 to 5:00pm on the same day.

This event is made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Embassy of the United States of America.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

A conversation between Mario Cresci, one of the most compelling artists in Italy to explore the contemporary world through photography, and Roberta Valtorta, Founder and former Director of the Museo di Fotografia Contemporane. Taking as its cue the two works by Cresci on view in the Academy’s fall exhibition, Matera Imagined/Matera Immaginata: Photography and a Southern Italian Town, the artist and curator will discuss Cresci’s art, photography as a language, and the key role photography has played in redefining Italian landscape from the 1970s to today.

The event will be held in Italian. You can watch it livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome. On this occasion, the exhibition will be open from 5pm to 8pm.

The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

EXHIBITION EVENTS

Inaugural Lecture
Dacia Maraini
12 October 2017
5:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

Exhibition Opening
12 October 2017
6:30pm-9pm, AAR Gallery

Curator Lecture
Lindsay Harris
Matera Imagined
16 October 2017
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

Lecture
Emmet Gowin
A Life in Photography
14 November 2017
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

GALLERY HOURS

Thursday-Sunday, 4pm-7pm
12 October- 26 November 2017

The exhibition will also be open on 16 October, 14 November and 21 November from 5pm to 8pm.

Join AAR as we convene an interdisciplinary discussion on the role of structures and spaces for cultural and performance use.

Christopher Hawthorne
Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times (2016 Resident)

Mark Lee & Sharon Johnston
Founding Partners, Johnston Marklee (2017 Residents)

Andrew Norman
Assistant Professor of Composition, Thornton School of Music,
University of Southern California (2007 Fellow)

The 2016–17 season of Conversations/Conversazioni is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Imagining Matera
Tuesday, December 11, 2018, 6:30 PM
Italian Cultural Institute
686 Park Avenue, New York, NY

Lindsay Harris
Art Historian (2014 Fellow)

Emmet Gowin
Photographer

M. Antonella Pelizzari
Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Emma Blake
Associate Professor, University of Arizona (2013 Fellow)

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

In this conversation, which kicks off the American Academy in Rome’s 2017–18 theme, East and West, a series of events in several disciplines exploring exchanges and conflicts between the West and the Islamic World, Yto Barrada discusses her work with the MAXXI curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. Barrada studied history and political science at the Sorbonne and photography in New York. Her work—including photography, film, sculpture, prints and installations—began by exploring the peculiar situation of her hometown Tangier. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the 2007 and 2011 Venice Biennale.

She was the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year for 2011, after which her exhibit RIFFS traveled to several cities, including the MACRO in Rome under Pietromarchi’s directorship. Barrada is also the founding director of Cinémathèque de Tanger. A comprehensive monograph of her work was published by JRP Ringier in 2013. She is a recipient of the 2013–14 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography (Peabody Museum at Harvard University) and was awarded the 2015 Abraaj Prize.

Barrada is the Mary Miss Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2017. The event will be held in English.

The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

This panel discussion will bring together three speakers—the interdisciplinary artists Yto Barrada (2018 Resident) and Sanford Biggers (2018 Fellow) and Peter Benson Miller, formerly Andrew Heiskell Arts Director for the American Academy in Rome—for an engaging dialogue about the role of contemporary art in sparking conversations about compelling social issues.

Occasioned by Barrada’s exhibition The Dye Garden at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, until December 22, this conversation pairs Barrada with Biggers. Both artists work with thread, textiles, quilted fabric, and embroidery, as well as photography, installation, and film, to unearth forgotten histories and critically engage sociopolitical issues, including the legacy of slavery, diaspora, postcolonial identity, and resistance to dominant narratives. Together, they will discuss collaboration, the impact of their time in Rome on their recent work, and the overlap between their respective artistic projects, among other topics.

This Conversations/Conversazioni is part of a year-long series of programs and events conceived around the theme of “Encounters,” which celebrates the 125th anniversary of the founding of the American Academy in Rome.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2019–20 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Please join us at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York for a Conversations | Conversazioni event featuring the novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar (2018 Resident) and Mark Robbins, president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome (1997 Fellow).

Akhtar’s debut novel American Dervish (2012) was widely praised, and his play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013. His most recent dramatic effort, JUNK, ran for three months at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater and was honored with the 2018 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2018–19 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.