Visual Arts Alumnus Kamrooz Aram ’03 Wins 2023 Rome Prize

Visual Arts alumnus Kamrooz Aram ’03 has been announced as one of the winners of the prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. This highly competitive fellowship supports advanced research and creative work across a variety of fields. 

The Rome Prize is granted to a select group of artists and scholars each year, allowing them to live and work at the American Academy in Rome for six months to two years. The fellowship provides a unique environment for creative and intellectual growth, fostering interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration among fellows.

“This class of Rome Prize winners once again includes some of America’s most gifted scholars and artists,” Mark Robbins, President and CEO of the American Academy in Rome, said. “Their fellowship experience, living and working in a multidisciplinary community in Rome, has an enduring impact individually and on the wider intellectual and cultural sphere.”

Aram’s work investigates the complex relationship between traditional art forms and contemporary artistic practice, often scrutinizing cultural and historical narratives. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

"The Rome Prize Fellowship will be my first opportunity as an artist to work outside of New York, because I have been working in New York City since I did the MFA program at Columbia,” Aram said. “The American Academy in Rome offers a quiet and serene workspace in an incredibly stimulating city... stimulating in a very different way than New York. For me, the quiet and focused time in the studio will be as important as the visual research I plan to take on in the city and other parts of Italy. I am so grateful to have this opportunity at this time and I'm so honored to have been recognized by this particular jury.”

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a highly competitive national competition. A full list of the 2023-24 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows can be found here. Mary-Evelyn Farrior, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Classical Studies, and Elif Batuman, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of English at Barnard College, have also received the award.

Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work disrupts the false opposition between ornament and abstraction, and challenges ornament’s relegation to discourses of criminality and excess. In his wide ranging exhibitions, he stages an encounter between the Euro-American avant-garde and non-western forms of abstraction, interrogating the boundaries between art, artifact, and modes of display. His lyrical paintings and arrangements break down the hierarchies of modernist aesthetics, asking that we rethink its categories and re-encounter these ideas and objects anew. Combining painting, sculpture, collage and exhibition design, he creates an interdependence between object and display, revealing the significance of design and architecture in affecting the interpretation of art.