PORTRAITS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME: REINSTALLATION
Before reinstallation; the portraits behind the bar were the first to be hung and thus represented the Fellowship community as it was in its early years: only white and mostly male (the few women Fellows were scholars, and the earliest portraits only depicted arts Fellows). Formats and styles were standardized.
The AAR has a long history of displaying portraits of Rome Prize Fellows behind the bar—a collection that is added to regularly by the Fellows themselves. As the Fellowship classes have diversified so too have the portraits, reflecting the arrival of women artists (not until 1950), artists and scholars of color (1949), and a more varied array of creative practices too. (By tradition, no photographs were permitted, as photography was not fully recognized as an art form.) Change came, gradually, but because the installation of the bar was organic, expanding from the center as portraits we added, the space was still dominated by a “white dude wall.” Signs of an evolving Academy hung at the margins. In 2020 we decided to change that.
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Work in progress, in the AAR dining room, December 2020. Nearly 200 portraits had to be taken down and repositioned. Every portrait in the AAR’s collection, except one early photograph, were on view; today they all are.
Stefano Silvia and I celebrate the reinstallation with a coffee prepared by master barista Alessandro Lima, January 2021. The new installation focuses on the AAR’s present and points to its future, while acknowledging and remembering its past.
I took advantage of a quiet moment over the Covid-plagued 2020-21 winter holidays, before the arrival of the 2021 Fellows, to work on the installation, with the collaboration and support of my talented colleague Stefano Silvia.
With encouragement from then AAR Director John Ochsendorf, I began the task of reorganizing the portrait collection. I wanted the installation to be honest and clear about the Academy’s history, but to foreground an inclusive present and future rather than an exclusionary past. After speaking with many constituents—Fellows, regular visitors, and staff—I chose to keep all portraits together, to cluster them in broad chronological groups, and to place the most recent Fellows behind the bar, where they have the most visibility and presence. The historic Fellows are still there, but now face the bar from the opposite wall. There are photographic portraits, group portraits, and soon also a spectacular pair of drawings of the AAR’s first Black Fellows, donated by the artist Whitfield Lovell.