Vital public space: Minneapolis artist-architect team wins national award
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At Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota, there is a corridor to infinity in the grassy landscape. At least that’s how the creative team behind the mirrored art installation, “Clearing,” describes it.
“They’re a series of paired mirrors that are on these repurposed City of Minneapolis lampposts,” says Jennifer Newsom, who is one half of the team with her partner Tom Carruthers. “We found them at a salvage yard and then rehabilitated them in some ways.”
Newsom and Carruthers were artists in residence at Franconia in 2017. They’ve followed how the public has interacted with “Clearing” ever since.
“It opens up a new field of scripts for people to interact in that particular place,” Carruthers adds. “So, you get people going up there for family photographs; you get people up there for games of hide and seek; you get people up there for fashion shows and drag shows.”
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That installation was part of the portfolio that won Newsom and Carruthers a major national architecture award: the Emerging Voices award from the Architecture League of New York. They are one of eight individuals and pairs throughout the U.S., Mexico, and Canada that received the recognition, demonstrating “distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism.”
While the awards were announced Feb. 8, they found out recently in Rome, where they are doing an architectural fellowship until August 2023.
The couple, who call themselves partners in work and life, run the art and architectural practice Dream The Combine. They founded the practice in Minneapolis — Newsom is from Minnesota, Carruthers is from Canada — and now bring it with them to Ithaca, N.Y., where they teach at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. And, of course, to Rome.
They always return to Minnesota, however, to live or visit. Recently, Dream The Combine did a temporary installation for The Great Northern Festival in the Twin Cities.
The Architecture League of New York award is a meaningful endorsement, Newsom says, as their practice is nontraditional, focusing on public art.
“We don't necessarily design the typical project types you might think an architect might design,” Newsom says. “We're primarily making public art installations. So, they're architectural in scale — kind of occupiable structures that you can move through — but they're not necessarily buildings.”
In addition to “Clearing,” the team cites projects across the country that reimagine the built environment and public space. These include the 2021 installation “Columbus Columbia Colombo Colón“ in Columbus, Indiana.
The installation, a series of 58 poles, represents 58 cities — from New York to Minnesota to Brazil — whose placenames reference Christopher Columbus.
Each pole offers a textual counter narrative to that of Columbus, says their artist statement, and the “Doctrine of Discovery — edicts which enabled the slavery of non-Christians and gave total right to lands encountered through exploration to the empires who found them, in disregard of the long histories of indigenous peoples.”
The team says they are interested in expanding the idea of authorship, including people who come to their installations.
“Not to sound sort of hokey, but this award, in a way, is an acknowledgement of the kind of expanded set of authorship that's beginning to exist around a set of concerns,” Carruthers says.
“That there really is a need for vital public space that fulfills and recognizes people's rights in public, and expands the kinds of narratives and publics that are welcomed in public space, and who, in fact, public space is for.”
Dream The Combine will give a public lecture 6:30 p.m. ET March 16, which will be hosted online by the Architecture League.
