Writer and academic Mabel O. Wilson, architect Thomas Phifer, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Yale SoA Dean Deborah Berke are among the newly-elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters according to an announcement from the institution yesterday.
The quartet joined the Academy with fourteen other honorees in music, art, and literature on a list of names that included painter Charles Gaines and The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien.
Berke has served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture since 2016 in addition to operating her own New York-based practice, which she founded in 1982.
Phifer is the architect behind the recent expansion of Maryland’s Glenstone Museum and has been previously named an award winner by the Academy in 2013.
Wilson is the 2021 recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize, has been featured at the Venice Biennale and Storefront for Art and Architecture, and is the author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Van Valkenburgh was the architect chosen for the landscape design of the forthcoming Obama Presidential Library in Chicago. His New York-based firm has worked in major American cities like St. Louis and Dallas and recently collaborated with Johnston Marklee on the award-winning new Menil Drawing Institute in Houston.
The 300 member Academy began in New York City in 1898 and has in the past elected luminaries such as Mark Twain and Cass Gilbert and currently features 27 member architects including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, Elizabeth Diller, Meejin Yoon, Walter Hood, among others.
The 2022 selectees will now join the Academy as permanent members. Click here to see the full list of this year's newly elected Arts and Letters Academy members.
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