Jennifer Newsom

Jennifer Newsom is a licensed architect, artist, and principal of Dream The Combine cofounded with Tom Carruthers in 2013. Through her practice, Newsom has coproduced numerous site-specific installations in the U.S. and Canada that explore metaphor, perceptual uncertainties, and the boundary between real and illusory space. Dream The Combine are winners of the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 for their installation Hide & Seek and the 2020–21 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Newsom's research lies in the space between real, tangible bodies made of flesh, steel, glass, etc., and the perception of these bodies through vision. As scholar Sarah Lewis has noted, "Seeing has become a mode of reading the world. We make meaning of what we see through conditioned sight, and the question becomes what conditions the mode of seeing? When it comes to race and equity, this has become increasingly important to understand." As an architect, she examines racial constructs in the context of built constructions, where these spatial metaphors act as mechanisms for connectedness and engagement. People are the activating agents in her work, and their presence is needed for reconsideration — a "reconditioning," to use Lewis's term — of our bodies in relation to one another.