The setting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters — two stately buildings designed by McKim, Mead & White and Cass Gilbert — has always been reason enough for the long trip uptown. Currently, gallerygoers have another motivation: an elegant exhibition honoring the work of more than 50 writers, composers, artists, and architects.

Nine of the honorees are newly elected academy members, and the rest recipients of an almost bewildering number of awards: 20 Academy Awards, two Gold Medals (this year honoring lifetime achievement in sculpture and fiction), and numerous other fellowships and purchase awards targeted at specific fields. Seven of these awards went to participants in the academy’s previous installation, an invitational exhibition of visual artists.

If the selection process sounds a bit unwieldy, the installation is anything but. Though it spans four disciplines, the work fits handsomely in the academy’s spacious galleries.

To be sure, the accomplishments of the writers and composers make for less dramatic presentations, with musical scores, books, notes, manuscripts, and photographs displayed in glass-topped cabinets.

On view are samples by Gold Medal recipient John Updike, as well as Harper Lee, Amy Hempel, Allan Gurganus, and two dozen other writers receiving awards or newly elected as members. The honored composers include new member Steven Stucky and the winner of the Charles Ives Living Award, George Tsontakis.

Five architects have been allotted fairly large, separate spaces for displaying models, drawings, and photographs. To a surprising degree, these presentations reflect contemporary art world trends toward multimedia and installation art. A series of attractive tiles mounted on the wall behind Billie Tsien’s presentation would look at home in a Chelsea gallery. Eight large drawings of abstract patterns dominate the small architectural models in Lebbeus Woods’s cubicle. Tom Kundig’s neat array of building materials and mechanical widgets would easily pass for installation art.

Conversely, one of the most intriguing works by artists intrudes into the turf of the architects — literally. American Academy Award winner Sarah Oppenheimer’s “552-1251” (2007), which consists of a sizable, eyelevel opening cut into a juncture of the walls separating the architectural presentations, becomes a kind of portal between three different worlds. Lined with neatly curving sections of wood, the angled aperture is not only an arresting visual experience, but also an impressive feat of engineering.

Other works manipulate space in more traditional ways. Two of Bryan Hunt’s three sculptures are silvery, curling, 10-foot-tall tendrils; they seem to grapple with the space between them. A number of painters in the exhibition engage pictorial space through internal tensions. Julian Hatton’s three abstracted landscapes show a particularly vigorous and discriminating sense of color. The hues in his smallish, square panels are fullbodied, yet modulated to press upon or yield to one another, turning his paintings into evocative journeys. In “Tree Line” (2006), long, winding diagonals distantly connect what may be a pond, located palpably beneath one’s point of view, to a small cloud at the panel’s opposite extreme.

Other paintings reflect an edgier, more postmodernist approach. Jackie Gendel’s three portraits, naïve in sophisticated ways, deal as much with conventions of depiction as tensions of form. Her images combine faithful observations of light and volumes with such truisms of rendering as cupid-bow lips and almond-shaped eyes. Rounding out the five artists receiving Academy Awards is Dana Schutz, whose tart, cartoonlike colors and fluid brushwork locate ordinary objects in an unsettling scenario. In her large canvas “Telepathy” (2006), people, plants, and machinery populate an office space, pursuing some vaguely ominous goal. (Whatever it is, it involves a gadget — a camera or microphone? — suspended above a man on a doctor’s exam table.)

The exhibition includes works by more than a dozen other artists, among them this year’s other Gold Medal recipient, Martin Puryear. Typical for this sculptor, his two large pieces seem organically self-generated, as if the natural massings of simple materials. An untitled piece from 1990, with a rounding fullness suggestive of a teardrop or slipper, consists on close inspection of tar-covered wire mesh. Wooden armatures, seamlessly bolted together, become the streamlined, canteen-like “Vessel” (1997–2002); the structure encloses a curious, giant tar-and-mesh ampersand. Both sculptures seem at once svelte and hulking, attaining an almost hieratic presence even while exposing every detail of their humble facture.

The art award winners include no video or installation artists, but otherwise the academy’s exhibition provides a provocative cross section of current trends. For the still unsatiated, there’s plenty more to savor at the academy’s neighboring institution: the Hispanic Society, which boasts paintings by Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya, as well as remarkable collections of sculpture and decorative arts.

Until June 10 (Audubon Terrace on Broadway, between 155th and 156th streets, 212-368-5900).