Iwan Baan: Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses – SCI-Arc

SCI-Arc Gallery

March 20, 2026 – April 26, 2026

Opening reception and Artist Talk: March 20 at 6pm

In 2022, the American Academy in Rome organized From Las Vegas to Rome, an exhibition that revisited the relationship between Rome and Las Vegas through seventy photographs by Iwan Baan. Both cities carry heavily constructed images, and with them, polar assumptions: Las Vegas is surreal, thin, dishonest, new; Rome is authentic, thick, honest, ancient. The exhibition took a transnational look at resonances in architecture, urbanism and the social uses of space between two legendary cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

In Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, Baan presents a curated selection of photographs made in 2022 and 2023, offering insight into both architecture and photography today. Fifty years after Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s now canonical Learning From Las Vegas (1972), the images move from sky to street across both cities, revealing unexpected similarities and rediscovering Las Vegas’s extravaganza in the streets of Rome.

Source: Iwan Baan: Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses – SCI-Arc