Carla Fendi Rome Prize

The award was established in 2022 by Maria Teresa Venturini Fendi, President of the Carla Fendi Foundation, with the aim of supporting visual artists through a five-month residency at the American Academy in Rome.

KAMROOZ ARAM 2024

During the McKim Medal Gala on June 5th, 2024, an event supporting artist and scholar residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Iranian-American artist Kamrooz Aram received the 2024 Carla Fendi Rome Prize. Kamrooz Aram's selection for the residency in Rome was motivated by his ongoing research into the boundaries between art, architecture, and artifacts, and the intersection and clash of Eastern and Western influences. The project he completed during his residency (February–July 2024) is titled Renegotiating Ornaments and explores the connections between the Euro-American avant-garde and non-Western forms of abstraction through painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and exhibition design. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

TONY COKES 2023

Cokes’s project, The Daily Practice of Representation: The Artist and the Studio, was inspired by Gerhard Richter’s book The Daily Practice of Painting. The artist developed a series of written texts and video installations that critically reflect on the visual and textual representations associated with the figure of the artist — his activities, spatial contexts, and their related ideological effects.

“Why does artistic practice carry with it particular desires, codes, and expectations regarding space, and what do these notions imply for creative practices as social and political phenomena?” Cokes asks. “For example, how has the artist’s live/work loft become a lifestyle model for urban dwellers, including those who are not professional creatives?.” His works are held in major international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles,the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.