Rome
Selby Wynn Schwartz, 2025 Joseph Brodsky Fellow in Literature, is collaborating with Isabelle Olivier, Foster Mickley, and Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Ilaria Puri Purini to curate a collective installation of black cat day dream’s shorelines.
At that time we were not called anything and so we cherished every word
Books are encounters, voices, thoughts, and dreams transmitted across time. A polyphony of writers, artists, and former Fellows of AAR and Villa Medici have been invited to echo Selby’s After Sappho— a book weaving the courage and poetry of many lives into a transforming “we”—by lending five books from their personal libraries, each marked at a ‘beautiful’ chosen page.
Unattributed, mingled, open, juxtaposed, they will form a chorus in spirals and archipelagos on the grounds of AAR, inviting guests into imagination and kinships.
The installation is imagined as of collective authorship, made by another us.
American Academy in Rome, June 2025
With: Johanne Affricot, Chiara Barzini, Valentina Amenta, Sarah Arvio, Katherine L. Beaty, Olivier Brossard, Theo Casciani, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Mark Doty, Claudia Durastanti, Lexi Eberspacher, Rosetta S. Elkin, Forrest Gander, Rachel Hadas and George Edwards, Kimiko Hahn, Sebastian Hierl, Edward Hirsch, Emilie Houssa, Ishion Hutchinson, Mai Ishikawa, Jahan Khajavi, Kojiro Kisaka, Clovis Maillet, Francesca Marciano, Dani Martiri, Foster Mickley, MP5, Lynn Nottage, Helen O’Leary, Isabelle Olivier, Muriel Pic, Sébastien Pluot, Ilaria Puri Purini, Robyn Schiff, Selby Wynn Schwartz, Nicole Sealey, Sheila Pepe, Raffaella Silvestri, Rob Spillman, Silvana Tamma, Nadia Terranova, Giancarlo Tursi, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Laura Vazquez, Rosanna Warren, Kyoko Yoshida.
Curation: black cat day dream, with Selby Wynn Schwartz and Ilaria Puri Purini
With the collaboration of Lexi Eberspacher, Cale Zepernick, Ana Paula Simoes, Olivier Brossard