How a Storied Arts and Humanities Institution Is Finding Support on Both Sides of the Atlantic
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The American Academy’s fellows can immerse themselves in the ancient, medieval and evolving world of Rome. Photo by Wendy Paris.
The American Academy in Rome may be the most significant cultural institution you’ve never heard of. Established in 1894 and chartered by an Act of Congress in 1905, AAR grants the prestigious Rome Prize to about 30 of the nation’s leading artists and scholars each year. Winners receive a five- to 11-month, fully funded residency at the academy’s compound in Rome, plus a stipend and time to immerse themselves in the ancient, medieval and evolving world of Rome, away from the demands of their day-to-day lives.
Fellows live and dine together on the elegant grounds high up on Rome’s Janiculum Hill, west of the Tiber. Just walking past the arched entryway and down the high colonnades of AAR’s main building — with indoor and al fresco dining halls, residential suites, parlors and a grand courtyard — feels like entering a more refined, civilized era. Across a quiet street, the grand 17th-century Villa Aurelia, built for Cardinal Girolamo Farnese, rises from a manicured Mediterranean garden. As AAR President Peter Miller told me while sitting on a white armchair in the academy’s billiard room near a massive fireplace, grand piano and a large, romantic painting of a hunter with many dogs, “This is utopia. We’re fundraising for this dream that has been realized.”
It may be utopia for fellows, but it's a lot of work for the development team. The academy’s very exclusivity and its overseas location make raising money for it a particular kind of art. As costs for everything from food and housekeeping to Zoom rise, and AAR expands on its offerings, staff are finding new ways to ramp up their bilateral fundraising approach — and testing some tactics that may be instructive to other international education- and arts-focused organizations.
The Rome Prize and who pays for it
AAR is the oldest American overseas center for independent study and research in the arts and humanities, and its Rome Prize is among the most prestigious awards an artist or scholar can get. Past Rome Prize winners include artist Philip Guston, architect Michael Graves, composer John Adams, writers Ralph Ellison and William Styron, and hundreds of other leading artists and academics. Recent and past residents (another category of Rome-based fellows) include playwright/actor Anna Deveare Smith, visual artists Kara Walker and Cy Twombly, artist and architect Maya Lin and writer Francine Prose.
AAR supports the somewhat old-world notion that artists and scholars need time to think and create, and that doing so among the statues, fountains and columns of the ancient world is uniquely edifying and inspiring. The nation of France launched the Prix de Rome in 1666 to create just such an opportunity for its creators, and today, continues the tradition through the Academy of France in Rome, housed near AAR in the Villa Medici. Some three-dozen other nations also operate Rome-based academies for their own top artists and scholars. These include the Spanish Academy in Rome, housed in the cloister of the former monastery of San Pietro in Montorio, the British School at Rome, founded in 1901, and the Swiss Institute in Rome.
AAR sits firmly among these other institutions, but it is the only one that relies almost entirely on private philanthropy. All the others run on robust state support. At AAR, endowments, combined with revenue from activities like renting out the Villa Aurelia for weddings, cover less than 60% of the annual budget. Each Rome Prize is individually endowed, with funds earmarked for a particular discipline or sub-category. But these endowments don't always cover the entire fellowship they are designed for — nor do they pay for salaries for staff, food for fellows and everything else. Funds must be raised each year.
AAR’s early funders included a who’s who of Gilded Age magnates. J.P. Morgan, William K. Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Charles F. McKim, along with the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation, each gave $100,000 toward the creation of a $1 million endowment back in 1909.
Today, most gifts still come from private donors – often former Rome Prize winners, or even their heirs. Philip Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and her husband, Thomas Mayer, for example, gave a $3 million gift in 2019 to establish the Philip Guston Rome Prize in Visual Art. The Tsao Family Foundation is another recent donor.
Meet the people “West of the Hudson”
Miller, who became AAR’s president in the summer of 2023, has begun addressing the organization’s funding challenges. To help raise money and visibility in the U.S., he has set himself off on a cross-country tour of sorts, highlighting AAR’s role as a national institution. He has visited former fellows, hosted informational panels for prospective fellows “west of the Hudson River,” and conducted panels by Zoom. These efforts seem to be paying off. “This year, we had the highest number of applications for the Rome Prize ever,” Miller said.
The academy is also being proactive about opening its New York City-based headquarters to more people. This past fall, it hosted a celebration at its New York office to showcase recent work of alumni, inviting all living fellows to come. The goal is to do this every year to honor fellows who published books or had exhibitions or performances in the past year. “Originally, the idea was to do it every five years, but it turned out that over 40 people had published books in 2022 alone. We had to scale it back,” Miller said.
“Our fellows are enormously productive and successful,” he went on. Fellows as a whole have won 452 Guggenheim fellowships, 52 MacArthur Awards, 74 Pulitzer Prizes and a whole bunch of other accolades. “The academy has made a huge contribution to American intellectual and cultural life.”
In another unusual move for the academy, it is using this year’s annual Rome Prize Ceremony, where the new crop of winners is traditionally announced, as a fundraiser. The ceremony is slated for April 25, the 100th anniversary to the day of a 1924 fundraiser when George Gershwin’s recently composed “Rhapsody in Blue” was performed at Carnegie Hall. This year’s event, to be held at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, will feature a reprise of that concert as a benefit for music program fellowships.
Cosa?! You want me to give money to what?
The academy also offers a few shorter fellowships to Italian citizens each year. The cost of these fellowships, formerly covered by the Fulbright program, now falls on AAR. Partly to meet this need, the academy is also ramping up its Italian fundraising efforts. Here, it faces a different challenge: European countries, with so much more involvement from the state, have a far less developed tradition of private philanthropy than the U.S. As Sally Benner, AAR’s chief development officer, put it, “It’s still nascent in Italy, this model of American philanthropy that we are steeped in.”
Philanthropy is growing across Europe in a somewhat clunky process. A 2003 French tax law, for example, greatly spurred philanthropic giving in France, including for the arts. But, as I recently wrote, not everyone is enthusiastic about tax breaks for private donors.
Italy’s philanthropic sector, meanwhile, has the unusual distinction of being home to 86 foundations of banking origin. These nonprofit, autonomous organizations, which “represent a peculiarity in the international field of foundations,” were created in the 1990s as part of the privatization of savings banks in Italy. Together, they have given away more than 26 billion euros in specific, mandated areas, including the arts. But even with this banking-business bonanza, Italy has fewer philanthropic assets and plays host to less overall philanthropic giving than many other European countries, including Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands, according to Lucia Patuzzi, senior knowledge development manager of Philea, Philanthropy Europe Association.
Also, banking association arts grants tend to go to small, regional Italian organizations. “Therefore, international academies would not fall under their criteria for grantmaking unless there is a strong link to one of their calls for proposals or a reason for a partnership, and certainly their geographical focus,” Patuzzi said.
Learning to party for a purpose
One way AAR is reaching out to current and would-be Italian philanthropists is through the introduction of a longtime staple of the U.S. arts and culture philanthropy scene: the glitzy gala. In 2005, AAR created the McKim Medal Gala, held at the Villa Aurelia, to fill the gap left after the Fulbright program stopped funding Italian AAR fellows. “They don’t have galas in the same way that New York has galas. It’s kind of an American style concept we’ve brought to Rome, the fundraising gala,” said Andrew Mitchell, AAR’s director of communications, noting that the McKim Medal Gala has now become an important way to connect with the Roman community and a significant fundraising and social event. In 2023, the McKim Medal Gala raised $750,000 in unrestricted operating funds.
AAR is working to become more connected to Italy, both to enrich the experience for fellows and to be a good local citizen. Miller said, “For a long time, AAR, like these other institutions, was a bit extra-territorial, a bit like an embassy. It was by America, of America, and for America. This is changing for the better with greater and more consistent interest in Italy over the past 10 or 20 years. Paying more attention to where we live has increasingly taken hold.”
The brand-new Galileo Night Lecture, held in the academy gardens in April, is one example of the effort to connect the Academy to more Italians. On April 14, 1611, Galileo made his first demonstration of the telescope in the garden of what is now the AAR. The Galileo Night Lecture celebrates this fact and joins an ongoing series of public events at the academy in Rome. “This is another way to say, “We are here. We are of the fabric of Rome and in Italy,” Benner said.
From the ancient past to the future
But really, you may be thinking, is the idea of spending time in the cradle of Western civilization still relevant in today’s future-focused, tech-saturated era, particularly given the fact that even those who do appreciate history are generally looking at a much more expansive past, one that includes non-Western cultures? My own 16-year-old son, for example, can expound upon China’s Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors with far more acumen than he can discuss the rise and fall of the French aristocracy.
Miller believes a Rome residency may be more valuable than ever. AAR is a place that “makes the bombardment of the phone seem distant,” he said. “It is a place for scholars and artists to be physically and metaphysically distant from the U.S. and that is very valuable. Narrowly, the idea was to improve the arts in the U.S., but there is also a more general value of seeing the world and seeing your existence with some perspective.”
Also, the study of history and of Rome is evolving. I met one fellow looking at the role of Africans and African Americans in Italian cinema.The Tsao Family Foundation’s new fellowship is supporting study of connections between Rome and China. In general, there is a shift toward seeing Rome as part of the broader Mediterranean economic and cultural system. “In some ways, Rome is a metaphor for empire, the arc of civilization,” Mitchell said.
One thing remains constant, though: the need to raise funds for all this. As Miller put it, “I feel like I’m a conservator, to preserve this for the next 100 years.”
