Philip Van Keuren Accepted to Visiting Artist Residency at American Academy in Rome

Art professor Philip Van Keuren (B.F.A. ’74, M.F.A. ’77) will be trading the Dallas skyline for the streets of Italy starting next February, following his acceptance to the prestigious Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome (AAR) for his photography work.

Van Keuren will travel to Rome in February to join the international institution of AAR, which supports innovative artists, writers and scholars in one of the oldest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world. After a rigorous application process, he was accepted into the program with the intention of expanding his body of work in an historically rich environment providing a plethora of new visual images containing poetic and symbolic meanings from both the built and natural world of Rome.

“I have made an extensive body of work in Amsterdam, Paris and New York and always wanted to go to Rome to pursue the same artistic intentions, photographing the unique natural and built worlds of the city and its surrounding environment,” explains Van Keuren.

The body of work that Van Keuren intends to build upon, titled Toward What Sun?, is comprised of copperplate photogravures that gather seemingly unlike things. The visual juxtapositions found in locations such as New York, Paris and Amsterdam allow for photographic documentation of seemingly ordinary, but disparate, visual, cultural, and historical entities that go by largely unnoticed.

Van Keuren’s month in Rome will allow him extended time to observe and study the built and natural environments of the city, photographing places and things that expand his body of work that will later be printed as copperplate photogravures gathered in boxed portfolios.

Ultimately, his time in the Visiting Artists & Scholars program at AAR will result in a significant addition to his existing Toward What Sun? body of work, while experiencing interdisciplinary exchange and innovation with other artists from around the world.

To view Philip Van Keuren’s collections, click here.

To learn more about AAR and their Visiting Artists & Scholars program, click here.