Germane Barnes among the winners of the 2021-22 Rome Prize
By Matt Hickman
As announced in a Zoom-based virtual award ceremony featuring Sir David Adjaye in conversation with Avinoam Shalem, director of the American Academy in Rome, a fresh batch of 35 American creatives have been bestowed with the gift of “time and space to think and work” and will be headed to the Eternal City this September.
Said gift comes in the form of the 2021–2022 Rome Prize, a fellowship award that includes a stipend, workspace, and room-and-board at the Academy’s historic 11-acre campus on the Gianicolo in Rome. The Academy, a storied overseas research and arts institution domestically headquartered in New York City, was first established in 1894 under the leadership of architect Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White. (The firm designed the Academy’s landmark main building, completed in 1914.)
The Rome Prize is presented to fellows across 11 disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, design, and historic preservation and conservation. Among the latest recipients are Germane Barnes, an architect, designer, urban planner, and educator who serves as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Miami (his work is currently on display in Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art); Phoebe Lickwar, founding principal of FORGE Landscape Architecture and associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Austin; Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and architects and educators Mireille Roddier and Keith Mitnick of Michigan-based collaborative design practice Mitnick.Roddier.
In addition to the 2021–2022 Rome Prizes, the Academy has also announced the recipients of the Italian Fellows, a complementary program in which five Italian scholars and artists are invited to live and work at the Academy alongside their American counterparts. As detailed by the Academy, this cycle of the Rome Prize competition received 874 applications, representing 46 states. The group of just-announced winners marks one of the most diverse group of fellows in the Prize’s history, with 44 percent of the winners identifying as BIPOC and 62.5 percent being women—both new highs for each respective demographic. (You can watch the full Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony here.)