Cinque Mostre 2017 is an annual exhibition of work by current Rome Prize Fellows and invited artists curated by Ilaria Gianni with assistance from Saverio Verini.

Every Friday at 5:00pm, one or two artists participating in the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2017 - Vision(s) : will give brief presentations on their work.

February 24

Yasmin Vobis / Robert Hutchison (English)

March 3

Phu Hoang / Rachely Rotem (English)
Saverio Verini (full tour, Italian)

March 10

Emiliano Maggi (Italian)
Stanislao Di Giugno (Italian)
Tomaso De Luca (Italian)
E. V. Day (6:00pm Wanda Video / 6:30pm In-Vitro, English)

March 17

Michael Queenland (English)
Kyle deCamp (English)

March 24

Jonathan Berger / Annalisa Metta (English)
Nicola Pecoraro (Italian)

March 31

Enrico Riley (English)
David Reinfurt (English)

Opening Hours

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm
February 14–April 4, 2017

Taking its cue from the multifaceted term “vision” and emphasizing its physical-perceptive, political, supernatural, and mystical aspects, VISION(S) : explores the strategies that artists and scholars employ to re-configure our view of the world. This exhibition brings together different approaches and “ways of seeing,” drawing inspiration from the present, facts from the past, and projections of the future. Employing various strategies, including translation, history, performance, poetry, fiction, and mysticism, the works challenge notions of culture, origin, and belonging.

VISION(S) : offers an encounter between personal investigations of the creative process and the often compromised external gaze of the viewer. The show unfolds along a non-linear thread constantly challenging viewers’ desire to understand through seeing, in which works of art confound styles and genres. Each contribution acts as a unique apparition, in which the spectator is not just a bystander, but an operative participant in a new dimension, acting as observer and producer of visions. The resulting experiences are reminders of what John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing (1972) as “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” unleashing a new process of searching for meaning, one that is imbued with imagination and awareness. Realism and its ordinary, pragmatic view of the world are overtaken by fantasy and prophecy, intuition and illusion. Authors and spectators are complicit in the fabrication of worlds through a different interpretation and construction of what appears to be real.

Participants are: Gundam Air, Gregory Bailey, Cornelia Baltes, Elisabetta Benassi, Jonathan Berger, Kristi Cheramie, Caroline Cheung, Roberto Coda Zabetta, E. V. Day, Tomaso De Luca (in collaboration with Vincenzo Giannetti), Gabriele De Santis, Kyle deCamp, Stanislao Di Giugno, Sean Edwards, Hussein Fancy (collaboration with Accettella-Teatro Mongiovino), Aaron Forrest, Anna Franceschini, Piero Golia, Leon Grek, Grossi Maglioni, Isabell Heimerdinger, Robert Hutchison, Lauren Keeley, Jack Livings, Emiliano Maggi, Christoph Meinrenken, Annalisa Metta, Nicole Miller, MODU - Phu Hoang e Rachely Rotem, Jonathan Monk, Matthew Null, Luigi Ontani, Pino Pasquali, Nicola Pecoraro, Gianni Politi, Michael Queenland, David Reinfurt, Enrico Riley, Danielle Simon (in collaboration with Zazie Gnecchi Ruscone e G.A.N Made in Italy), Francis Upritchard, Alessandro Vizzini, Yasmin Vobis, Bedwyr Williams, and Joseph Williams.

Performances on February 14:

7:00pm, Cryptoporticus: Il Cuore di Wanda (1931–2017), a first-ever live performance of the Futurist radiophonic opera, presented for the first time since its premiere in 1931.

8:00pm, Courtyard: Indoor City (2017), a project conceived by two architects, two writers, a historian, a music composer, and a climate scientist.

Finissage

April 4, 2017, 6:00–8:00pm
A reading of Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, a project by Nicole Miller and Michael Queenland.

A performance of The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins, a project by Hussein Fancy, in collaboration with Jonathan Berger, Caroline Cheung, Leon Grek, Enrico Riley, Joseph Williams, and the Accettella-Teatro Mongiovino.

Opening Hours

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm
February 14–April 4, 2017
Guided visits every Friday. Please check website for times.
FIRST GUIDED VISIT ON FEBRUARY 24 AT 5:00 PM - ROB HUTCHISON AND YASMIN VOBIS

The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts.

The performances of Il Cuore di Wanda and The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins are made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Beer at the opening event offered by: untitled and Menabrea.

As part of the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract, the American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce a day of encounters between artists, critics, and scholars dedicated to the history, mythology, and contemporary significance of transsexuality in Western painting, sculpture, film and performance. Inspired by the work of current fellows and important figures in Italian art from the cinquecento until the present, this series of presentations and screenings will explore how evolving representations of transfigured, transgender, or nonbinary bodies have created discursive links between bodily hybridity, creativity, and power.

Speakers: Leslie Cozzi, Jessica Gabriel Peritz, and Alessandro Bava. The presentations will be conducted in English.

Screening: A. L Steiner and A. K. Burns, Community Action Center, 2010.

Exhibition: Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract will be open on 8 March 8 from 4:00 to 8:00pm.

Please see full program in attachment.

The project is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts and the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

This series of seminars presents the work of established and young scholars of medieval art in Italy, fostering conversations about the new research directions in the field and exploring the ways in which this art of the past lives and has resonance in the present. The seminars also aim to cultivate relationships between the AAR fellows and scholars from across the national academies and universities in Rome. Each session will feature a talk, Q&A, and a discussion of a short precirculated paper.

The seminars are organized by AAR Fellows Bissera V. Pentcheva, Anna Majeski, and Joseph Williams.

All seminars take place at 5:00pm in the AAR lecture room. The seminars will be held in English.

April 6

Professor Valentino Pace, emeritus, Università degli Studi di Udine
Issues in the Art Historical Research of Medieval Southern Italy

May 25

Professor Tanja Michalsky, Executive Director of the Biblioteca Hertziana
Mapping Italy – from Paolino Minorita to Flavio Biondo

June 22

Professor Beat Brenk, emeritus, Universität Basel and La Sapienza
The Cappella Palatina in Palermo

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

This series of seminars presents the work of established and young scholars of medieval art in Italy, fostering conversations about the new research directions in the field and exploring the ways in which this art of the past lives and has resonance in the present. The seminars also aim to cultivate relationships between the AAR fellows and scholars from across the national academies and universities in Rome. Each session will feature a talk, Q&A, and a discussion of a short precirculated paper.

The seminars are organized by AAR Fellows Bissera V. Pentcheva, Anna Majeski, and Joseph Williams.

All seminars take place at 5:00pm in the AAR lecture room. The seminars will be held in English.

April 6

Professor Valentino Pace, emeritus, Università degli Studi di Udine
Issues in the Art Historical Research of Medieval Southern Italy

May 25

Professor Tanja Michalsky, Executive Director of the Biblioteca Hertziana
Mapping Italy – from Paolino Minorita to Flavio Biondo

June 22

Professor Beat Brenk, emeritus, Universität Basel and La Sapienza
The Cappella Palatina in Palermo

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

This series of seminars presents the work of established and young scholars of medieval art in Italy, fostering conversations about the new research directions in the field and exploring the ways in which this art of the past lives and has resonance in the present. The seminars also aim to cultivate relationships between the AAR fellows and scholars from across the national academies and universities in Rome. Each session will feature a talk, Q&A, and a discussion of a short precirculated paper.

The seminars are organized by AAR Fellows Bissera V. Pentcheva, Anna Majeski, and Joseph Williams.

All seminars take place at 5:00pm in the AAR lecture room. The seminars will be held in English.

April 6

Professor Valentino Pace, emeritus, Università degli Studi di Udine
Issues in the Art Historical Research of Medieval Southern Italy

May 25

Professor Tanja Michalsky, Executive Director of the Biblioteca Hertziana
Mapping Italy – from Paolino Minorita to Flavio Biondo

June 22

Professor Beat Brenk, emeritus, Universität Basel and La Sapienza
The Cappella Palatina in Palermo

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Minturnae lies at the modern border between Lazio and Campania. Given its liminal position, scholars have often sought to classify material from the site as either “Etrusco-Italic” or “Campanian,” depending on the period and perspective of their study. This conference seeks to dispense with such labels, and instead to consider Minturnae within its immediate geographic and cultural context. The conference will begin with several papers focused specifically on Minturnae, and will then expand outwards to consider other sites in the region. By scrutinizing the links and relationships between these sites, we will ask how, if at all, we can define a “local region” for Minturnae and its neighbors in the mid-to-late Republic, and what this means for our understanding of Minturnae’s history and material remains more broadly.

The conference is organized by Sophie Crawford-Brown (Irene Rosenzweig/Lily Auchincloss/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome), in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle arti e Paesaggio per le Province di Frosinone, Latina e Rieti.

Papers will be given in English and Italian. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Discussing the writing of fables, the rhetorician Nicolaus, who taught in Constantinople in the reign of emperor Leo (A.D. 457–474), recommends an approach that aptly describes what we encounter in the collections of Aesop’s fables that survive from antiquity. Nicolaus writes: “The language (phrasis) should be very simple, straightforward, unassuming, and free of all subtlety and periodic expression, so that the meaning is absolutely clear and the words do not appear to be loftier in stature than the actors, especially when these are animals” (Nicolaus, Progymnasmata, 2.11). Writers of fables and fairy tales throughout history, from Phaedrus to Calvino, have cultivated a similar aesthetic – a simple style matched to the putative simplicity of the tales themselves. But what is actually involved in this kind of stylization? How is a simple style of writing determined, how is it achieved? Moreover, do the standards change over time, or is there some stable idea of simplicity that obtains in different times and places?

This one-day conference, in English and Italian, brings together leading scholars of fable, fairy tale, and storytelling to consider the place of style in the history of fable-writing. The central questions to be explored include: What is gained and what is lost when popular forms of storytelling are transformed into literature? How is orality represented in our written sources? Does the collecting and archiving of fables necessitate a kind of stylization and a subsequent loss of authenticity? To what extent does fable/fiaba/favola remain a meaningful idiom for contemporary
writers?

Speakers include: Caterina Mordeglia (Università degli Studi di Trento), Stefano Jedrkiewicz (independent scholar), Giuseppe Crimi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre), Giovanni Zago (Università degli Studi di Firenze), Laura Di Nicola (Sapienza Università di Roma), and Mario Casari (Sapienza Università di Roma).

Presentations will be in English and Italian.

Organizer: Jeremy Lefkowitz, Swarthmore College and American Academy in Rome

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.