A happy 90th birthday to architectural historian and AAR Trustee Emeritus James S. Ackerman (FAAR’52, RAAR’65, ‘70, ‘75, ‘80)

James Ackerman at the Villa Lante (Rome), October 2009

It can be confidently stated that the leading historian of Renaissance architecture and Italian Renaissance architectural theory is James Sloss Ackerman (FAAR’52, RAAR’65, ‘70, ‘75, ‘80), Trustee of the American Academy in Rome 1967-1984, and now Trustee Emeritus. As it happens, James Ackerman and his wife, artist and professor Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, are spending five weeks at the AAR this fall. During that time, he has delivered a lecture on “Michelangelo, Palladio and Public Magnificence” to a capacity audience in the Academy lecture room, and has participated in a wide range of less formal walks and talks in Rome. Plus, on 8 November, he celebrated his 90th birthday at the Academy.

James Ackerman was educated at Yale; his graduate work was at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, completing his degrees (MA 1947, PhD 1952) following World War II service in the US Army in Italy. From 1949 through 1952, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Ackerman taught at Berkeley and from 1960 at Harvard as Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts until his retirement in 1990. In an in-depth interview, AAR Arts and Humanities Intern Diana Mellon asks James Ackerman about his formative experiences in Italy, his fellowship years at the AAR, his perceptions of changes at the American Academy over the decades, and of larger developments in the field of architectural history. And following the interview is appended Ackerman’s own current “must see” list for Rome and Venice.

Three Exhibitions and a Monograph for Richard Barnes FAAR’06

From the cover of Richard Barnes’ new book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009)

The work of New York-based photographer Richard Barnes, FAAR’06, is the subject of three exhibitions and a new monograph.

The University of Michigan Art Museum in Ann Arbor has just opened a Barnes solo show titled (Un)natural History: The Museum Unveiled. And an exhibition titled Past Perfect/Future Tense features all new work and is located at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan where Richard Barnes is the 2009 Sidman Fellow for the Arts. Included in this show is a full scale cast of a primitive whale species hung from the ceiling of the gallery.

At the AAR: Celebrating Nancy A. Winter, Honoring Antonio Martina

On Tuesday 20 October 2009 the American Academy in Rome celebrated the publication of Symbols of Wealth and Power: Architectural Terracotta Decoration in Etruria and Central Italy, 640-510 B.C. by Nancy A. Winter. It is the latest installment, the 9th, in the Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, published by the University of Michigan Press, and the most significant contribution to Etruscan architectural history in the last 70 years.

Nancy Winter presented on her new monumental book—some 728 pages—with Ingrid E.M. Edlund-Berry (FAAR’84) of the University of Texas at Austin as commentator. The audience included many of the leading ancient terracotta experts in the world, gathered in Rome for the conference Deliciae Fictiles IV at the Dutch Academy, as well as members of the AAR community. 

At the AAR Gallery, Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions, by Terry Adkins After John Brown

Terry Adkins, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, is the current Jesse Howard, Jr./Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. On Friday 16 October 2009 his show Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions opened in the Gallery of the American Academy, to a large and responsive audience from the AAR and the Roman public. Read a synopsis and interview with Adkins (in Italian, by Giovanna Sarno) here.

Meteor Stream is the latest incarnation of Terry Adkins’ ongoing cycle of site-inspired recitals on the abolitionist John Brown that began in 1999 at the John Brown House and sheep farm in Akron, Ohio. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of his Harper’s Ferry, Virginia campaign, the opening of Meteor Stream coincided with the inception of Brown’s 16 October 1859 raid on a U.S. armory to his execution by hanging on that December 2nd at Charlestown.

Book launch at the AAR: Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta

Credit: Annie Schlechter

An audience of more than one hundred packed the American Academy in Rome on Saturday morning 10 October 2009 for the launch of the English translation of Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009). The book is a carefully researched compendium of historical and geographical information on this staple of the Italian diet, and is the latest installment in the California Studies in Food and Culture series of the University of California Press.

Rachel Donadio in the 14 October 2009 New York Times profiled Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia, terming it “a social history disguised as a food book”.  The New York Times article also highlighted the warm reception Oretta Zanini De Vita has received at the Academy. “’I think of her as a kind of Julia Child,’ said Mona Talbott, the executive chef at the American Academy in Rome and coordinator of its Rome Sustainable Food Project, founded by Alice Waters. ‘Julia Child demystified French food. Oretta demystifies pasta.’” You can read eyewitness accounts of the 10 October AAR event by current Fellow Matthew Bronski here (“Week Five”) and by Fellow Traveler (and food expert) Amy Campion here.

From the town of Ciciliano in Lazio, a notable tribute to Lily Ross Taylor FAAR’18

Portrait bust of Lily Ross Taylor in the AAR Library

This 18 November marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Lily Ross Taylor (1886-1969) FAAR’18, who is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the foremost Romanists that North America has produced. During her career at Vassar and (especially) Bryn Mawr, Taylor produced six books—each of unusual importance—some seventy articles and almost sixty reviews.  Taylor also was the first woman to hold a Rome Prize in the united American Academy in Rome, and served as Professor-in-Charge at the AAR during two pivotal eras (1934-1935, and 1951-1955).

In one of her essays that appeared in Memoirs of the American Academy of Rome, Taylor surveyed the vexed problem of the location of the ancient municipality of ancient Trebula Suffenas, before definitively placing its location in the territory of modern Ciciliano, 13 km east of Tivoli in Lazio. Here Taylor also traced the whole story of the town’s Plautii Silvani, a powerful family that formed part of the circle of the emperor Augustus and his wife Livia. This past weekend a cultural association from the town of Ciciliano “Committee Article 9” paid tribute to Lily Ross Taylor and her 1954 article “Trebula Suffenas and the Plautii Silvani” by naming a piazza and adjoining garden in her honor, complete with a memorial stele.

Celebrating art historian Stephanie Leone FAAR’00 at the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona

The magnificent Galleria Cortona of the Brazilian Embassy in Rome’s Piazza Navona was the setting Thursday 8 October for a presentation and panel discussion of the recent book of Stephanie Leone FAAR’00, The Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona:  Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (Harvey Miller/ Brepols, 2008).

Stephanie Leone, a 2001 Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University, is associate professor in the Fine Arts department of Boston College. Aurimar Jacobino de Barros Nunes, Primo Segretario at the Embassy of Brazil in Rome, organized the event in collaboration with Anne Coulson from the Programs Department of the American Academy in Rome.

A Cabaret for the Academy, Wednesday 2 December 09 in NYC

Get ready for a great party: the American Academy in Rome Cabaret, the evening of Wednesday 2 December 2009, in New York City.

Performers include Laurie Anderson, RAAR’06, Derek Bermel, FAAR’02, Molissa Fenley, FAAR’08…and more. The venue is hard to beat: the Angel Orensanz Foundation at 172 Norfolk Street, in New York’s Lower East Side.  It’s an ex-synagogue turned downtown event space.

An interview with photographer Tod Papageorge RAAR’09

Tod Papageorge. Credit: Deborah Flomenhaft

Tod Papageorge is the Walker Evans Professor of Photography and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art. The Features section of the Academy website has posted eight compelling photographs from his work this summer in Rome (“In the Street, June 15-July 27″). Recently AAR Mellon Professor Corey Brennan caught up with Papageorge to ask him about his six weeks at the Academy this summer as the Photographer in Residence, and about some aspects of his approach to photography in general.

You are well-known as a black-and-white photographer of people in public spaces. For your Rome photographs, you are using a digital camera (a Leica M8.2) for the first time, and shooting in color. How much of a departure are your Rome images from your work to date?

It was all a big change, of course, and coincided with my arrival in Rome: I’d bought the Leica just a couple of weeks before, and spent some harried days up until my flight learning a few things about digital photography, and pinning down and applying a series of technical modifications to the camera. So the experience of making these pictures was as bright-penny new as the city itself seemed to me.

For painter Doug Argue FAAR’98, the 2009 London International Creative Competition first prize

“My work is meant to be physically experienced”, says San Francisco based artist Doug Argue FAAR’98. Still, a selection of images of Argue’s meticulous, large-scale paintings impressed the jurors of the London International Creative Competition (LICC) so much that they awarded the artist first prize in its 2009 contest. The announcement was made in a ceremony at the Soho Theatre on London’s Dean Street the evening of 6 September.

Now in its fourth year, the LICC “was formed to provide an open platform and an even playing field for artists from all walks of life.” The LICC’s mission statement underlines its breadth and scale: “the competition is open to artists from around the world and is judged solely on the artwork.” It’s a massive enterprise: this year saw entries from over 5000 artists from more than five dozen countries, yielding fifteen finalists. Argue’s work, as well as that of the other finalists, will also be showcased during the 2009 Lucie Awards for photography at New York’s Alice Tully Hall on 19 October.