JOHN NEWMAN

John Newman began to work with large-scale minimalist sculpture early in his career, but after travelling abroad in the 1990’s he made note of how other cultures treated more modestly sized objects with reverence, and shifted his focus to more intimate, small-scale works and tabletop sculptures. This inversion carried stylistic consequences, as the work that followed was also more maximalist in style, despite its scale. Newman’s designs are often whimsical and bizarre, combining unrelated materials and forms into contemplative and curious objects. He has cited a longstanding interest in jazz as a source of inspiration, which is evident in the contrasting and improvisational materials and techniques that he employs. Indeed, there does not seem to be either rigid pre-established rule or limit to precisely what these will be.

Newman has had more than 50 shows internationally was born in Flushing, New York, and received his BA from Oberlin College. He attended the Whitney Museum Study Program in 1972, and received his MFA in 1975 from the Yale School of Art where he would later teach as Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture. From 1975-78, Newman was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1975-78. Newman has been awarded the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also the recipient of many other grants and awards including from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the Gottlieb Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Tiffany Foundation.