East and West

Ayad Akhtar – The Mythos of Money: An Artist’s Observations of Finance’s Rise to Predominancy in the Twenty-First Century

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Ayad Akhtar – The Mythos of Money: An Artist’s Observations of Finance’s Rise to Predominancy in the Twenty-First Century

A scene from the Lincoln Center Theater production of Junk by Ayad Akhtar (photograph © T. Charles Erickson Photography)

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

In this talk, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Ayad Akhtar will discuss generational transformations in the social body at the hands of finance. He will explore the implications (and causes) as the results of shifts in contemporary mythopoesis. Akhtar’s latest play, Junk, which recently concluded its acclaimed run at Lincoln Center in New York, explored the emergence of the United States as a republic of consumers fanned by the greed-driven and unregulated hostile takeovers in the heyday of the junk bond on Wall Street in the 1980s.

Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a novelist and author of American Dervish, published in over twenty languages worldwide. His play Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, and was nominated for the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. His plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand received Off-Broadway runs and are currently being produced around the world, garnering nominations for the Evening Standard and Olivier Awards in London this past year. His most recent play Junk received its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2016, winning the Craig Noel Award for Best New Play. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He is also the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obie Awards, a Jeff Award, and the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award. Akhtar has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, the Sundance Institute, Ucross, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. He is also a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop.

Ayad Akhtar is Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

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

Richard Powell – Resurrection and Respiration: Two Sculptures by Edmonia Lewis and Francesco Pezzicar

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Richard Powell - Resurrection and Respiration: Two Sculptures by Edmonia Lewis and Francesco Pezzicar

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

In the eyes of many art critics who attended the United States’ 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—an international event of colossal proportions—two of most noteworthy and controversial art works on display were The Death of Cleopatra (1876) by the Rome-based African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) and The Abolition of Slavery (1873) by the Trieste-based Italian sculptor Francesco Pezzicar (1831–1890). While past and present commentaries have viewed the marble and bronze statues independently, and thematically and aesthetically distinct from one another, this talk offers more radical and interconnected interpretations of the two sculptures. Both were created on the Italian peninsula in an atmosphere of lingering doubts about the greater nationalist project that was then underway, and both rendered their respective subjects with an idiosyncratic corporeality that, in tandem with their inferred narratives about the end of slavery and nobility in death, broached more psychological and spiritual concerns. These historical and thematic correspondences argue for an inquiry unbound by stylistic categories or East/West binaries but, rather, considerations of the aesthetic sensibilities and synergies that developed within the post-Risorgimento artistic milieu.

Richard Powell is the James S. Ackerman Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017. He is Dean of the Humanities and the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Rome Art History Network.

The lecture will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

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Nasser Rabbat & Nader Tehrani – Fluidity

Conversations/Conversazioni
East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Fluidity: Nasser Rabbat and Nader Tehrani (moderated by John Ochsendorf)

In this conversation, noted scholar of architecture, Nasser Rabbat, and cutting-edge designer, Nader Tehrani, will discuss “fluidity” as a paradigm for understanding the built environment of the Mediterranean world. Moderated by John Ochsendorf (2008 Fellow), the conversation will highlight concepts of fluidity in Rabbat’s groundbreaking scholarship on Syrian architectural heritage and in the innovations of Tehrani’s designs.

Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and the 2018 Louis Khan Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Nader Tehrani is Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, a principal of NADAAA, and the 2018 Resident in Design at the American Academy in Rome. Ochsendorf is Director of the American Academy in Rome and Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture at MIT.

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

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West. The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.​

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim & Nico Muhly – Contrapuntalism

Conversations/Conversazioni
East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim and Nico Muhly - Contrapuntalism

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

Ever since Edward Saïd, scholars have alerted listeners to the ways in which composers of Western classical music have dipped into other traditions in order to dress up a musical Other with which to converse and compete. This can range from the use of formulaic exotic signifiers to direct quotation, but also includes the more diffuse assimilation of styles, ideas, and genres.

With every successive generation of composers untangling the counterpoint of musical signifiers, our readings of them become more complex: how do we hear, for instance, a twenty-first-century work alluding to Benjamin Britten’s infatuation with Balinese music? And how do composers today negotiate concerns regarding cultural appropriation?

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is the Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and music critic for the New York Times. Nico Muhly is the Paul Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

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

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Avinoam Shalem – Through the Backdoor: The Histories of “Islamic” Art and Architecture in Italy

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Avinoam Shalem – Through the Backdoor: The Histories of 'Islamic' Art and Architecture in Italy

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

Introducing the main themes of the symposium, Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation, taking place at the American Academy in Rome on 18 May, Avinoam Shalem sets the methodological and historiographic stage for the proceedings.

Mainly discussed as part of European popular culture and being categorized and, to some extent, underestimated as exotica, the oriental carnival of 1886 organized within the neighborhood of the ancient Jewish Ghetto in Florence, located to the south of the present Piazza della Repubblica, serves as the starting point for this lecture. Reconstructed as the “City of Baghdad,” this carnival created a tableau vivant (living picture) of the Orient in the quotidian life of Florence. Its timing, namely shortly after the modern planning of this area as the main open public space at the time that Florence was the capital of the Italian State (between 1865 and 1871) and just before the Ghetto’s demolition, underscores the rapidly falling dusk of “Orientalism” in favor of historicism and national modernism. But it also hints at the long tradition of blurring the borders between Islam and Judaism in the Italian-speaking zone, either deliberately or innocuously. In this lecture the specific choices and cases of linking Judaism and Islam will be discussed in order to suggest a long durèe of alternative “Backdoor History” for understanding the reception of Islamic art and architecture in Italy and for the making of its Image.

Avinoam Shalem is the Riggio Professor of the arts of Islam at the Columbia University. His main field of interest is in medieval artistic interactions in the Mediterranean basin, medieval aesthetic and the historiography of the field of art history. Among his recent publications: Reconstructing the Image of the Prophet in Europe (2013); The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation (with Christiane J. Gruber, 2014); Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam (with Olga Bush, 2015); and The Chasuble of Thomas Beck: A Biography (2017). He cocurated the exhibition The Future of Tradition: The Tradition of Future at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010) and is currently directing the research projects When Nature Becomes Ideology: Palestine after 1947. Shalem was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2016.

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

This lecture is made possible in part by the Embassy of the United States of America to Italy.

Collateral Events

Conference
Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation
18 May 2018
10:00am–6:00pm, Lecture Room

Exhibition
Yto Barrada, The Dye Garden
Thursday–Saturday, 4:00–7:00pm
10 May–8 July 2018

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Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Conference/Symposium
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Islamic Art and Architecture in Italy: Between Tradition and Innovation

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

Gli Arabi in Italia, edited by Francesco Gabrieli and Umberto Scerrato and published in 1979, remains an inescapable, richly illustrated compendium for those interested in the wide variety of objects and monuments linked to Islamic culture in Italy. This conference critically investigates the origins of this influential volume, and the scholarly approaches and assumptions that shaped it, in order to contextualize more recent avenues of inquiry in the field.

Much has changed in the past forty years as scholarship about the Islamic presence in Italy and its legacy has been conditioned by a renewed attention to material culture, on the one hand, and a widespread interest in the Islamic world, on the other. Focusing on the latest methodologies used to analyze the categories of objects documented by Gabrieli, Scerrato and their collaborators—including ceramics, rock crystal, metalwork, and architecture—we can track the ongoing transformation and most up to date findings of this dynamic and multifaceted field. Featuring leading scholars from Italy, the United States and Europe, the conference aims to create a meaningful dialogue between the historiographical tradition culminating in the volume Gli Arabi in Italia and the innovative methods that have emerged since its publication.

The keynote address on May 17 at 6:30pm will be delivered by Avinoam Shalem, the Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam at Columbia University.

The conference is organized by Peter Benson Miller, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, and Silvia Armando, Italian Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2017. It is made possible in part by the Embassy of the United States of America to Italy.

The event will be held in English and Italian. Most of the presentations will be streamed live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Keynote Lecture
Avinoam Shalem
Through the Backdoor: The Histories of 'Islamic' Art and Architecture in Italy
17 May 2018
6:30pm, Lecture Room

Exhibition
Yto Barrada, The Dye Garden
Thursday–Saturday, 4:00–7:00pm
10 May–8 July 2018

Dacia Maraini

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Dacia Maraini

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

Dacia Maraini's talk will open the exhibition Matera Imagined/Matera Immaginata: Photography and a Southern Italian.

The celebrated writer, critic, and theater producer Dacia Maraini will discuss her thoughts on writing, travel, Italy, and the South in the context of the Academy’s fall exhibition, Matera Imagined/Matera Immaginata: Photography and a Southern Italian Town. Daughter of Topazia Alliata, a Sicilian princess, and Fosco Maraini, a Tuscan ethnographer and photographer whose images of Matera are featured in the exhibition, Maraini for decades has used literature as a way to explore Italy and its culture with both profound intimacy and intellectual rigor. Her numerous, critically-acclaimed novels and plays have given voice and agency to women of all walks of life. Like her close friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), was shot in Matera, Maraini often empowers characters in her stories who struggle to find places for themselves in reality. An avid traveler and keen observer, Maraini will share her unique perspectives on southern Italy and its portrayal through the arts.

Seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 5pm.

EXHIBITION EVENTS

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

Conversation
Mario Cresco with Roberta Valtorta
Photography and Matera
21 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.

Emmet Gowin – A Life in Photography

East and West
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Emmet Gowin - A Life in Photography

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

In this lecture, the renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin will discuss his art in the context of the Academy’s fall exhibition, Matera Imagined/Matera Immaginata: Photography of a Southern Italian Town. Since the 1960s, when he first studied photography with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gowin has been celebrated for his intimate, deeply moving portraits of his wife and muse, Edith, and for his later landscapes and aerial photographs that highlight the impact of modernity on the natural world. Matera Imagined features the arresting landscape he took of Matera’s unique urban layout during a family trip to the town in 1980.

Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia in 1941 and earned his BFA in Graphic Design from the Richmond Professional Institute and his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has received many distinguished awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His work is included in many museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Maison Européene de la Photographie, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Tokyo Museum of Art.

The event will be held in English. On this occasion, the exhibition will be open from 5pm to 8pm.

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

Conversation
Mario Cresco with Roberta Valtorta
Photography and Matera
21 November 2017
6:15pm, 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.

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