John Newman is an American sculptor. He was born in

Flushing Flushing may refer to: Places * Flushing, Cornwall, a village in the United Kingdom * Flushing, Queens, New York City ** Flushing Bay, a bay off the north shore of Queens ** Flushing Chinatown (法拉盛華埠), a community in Queens ** Flushing ...

, Queens in 1952. He received his

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

from

Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...

(1973). He attended the

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude ...

Independent Study Program in 1972 and received his M.F.A. in 1975 from the

Yale School of Art The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painti ...

. He was a fellow at the

Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) has its origins in the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an arts and research center founded in 1967 by artist and teacher György Kepes ...

from 1975 to 1978. He is based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Career

Newman came of age as a sculptor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He has had over 50 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His sculptures, drawings, and prints are represented in numerous public collections, including the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, New York, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, New York, the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, New York, the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

in London, the

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

, Canberra, and the

Albertina The Albertina is a museum in the Innere Stadt (First District) of Vienna, Austria. It houses one of the largest and most important print rooms in the world with approximately 65,000 drawings and approximately 1 million old master prints, as well ...

in Vienna, and the Storm King Art Center, New York, among many others. Newman is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the

Rome Prize The Rome Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Rome, in Rome, Italy. Approximately thirty scholars and artists are selected each year to receive a study fellowship at the academy. Prizes have been awarded annually since 1921, with a hiatus ...

, the

Civitella Ranieri Foundation The Civitella Ranieri Foundation is an American artists’ community located at a 15th-century castle in the Umbria region of Italy. The Foundation provides four sessions of six-week long unstructured residencies every year to visual artists, ...

, the Guggenheim Foundation, the

Joan Mitchell Foundation Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artis ...

, the

Pollock-Krasner Foundation The Pollock-Krasner Foundation was established in 1985 for the purpose of providing financial assistance to individual working artists of established ability. It was established at the bequest of Lee Krasner, who was an American abstract expression ...

, and a Senior Research

Fulbright The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

Grant to India. In 2015, he completed a residency at the

Chinati Foundation The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati is a contemporary art museum located in Marfa, Texas, and based upon the ideas of its founder, artist Donald Judd. Mission The specific intention of Chinati is to preserve and present to the public perm ...

in Marfa, Texas. Newman is the former director of graduate studies in sculpture at the

. He currently teaches at the

New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at 8 West 8th Street, in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, New York State is an art school formed in 1963 by a group of students and their teacher, Mercedes Matter, all of ...

and the

School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by ...

in New York City. He has been commissioned to do several large-scale sculptures for the City of

Richmond, Virginia (Thus do we reach the stars) , image_map = , mapsize = 250 px , map_caption = Location within Virginia , pushpin_map = Virginia#USA , pushpin_label = Richmond , pushpin_m ...

Dai Nippon The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent forma ...

in Tokyo,

Storm King Art Center Storm King Art Center, commonly referred to as Storm King and named after its proximity to Storm King Mountain, is an open-air museum located in New Windsor, New York. It contains what is perhaps the largest collection of contemporary outdo ...

, and

Grounds for Sculpture Grounds For Sculpture (GFS) is a sculpture park and museum located in Hamilton, New Jersey. It is located on the former site of Trenton Speedway. Founded in 1992 by John Seward Johnson II, the venue is dedicated to promoting an understanding of ...

in Hamilton, New Jersey.

In print

In his interview with Newman, which was published in the April 2012 issue of ''

The Brooklyn Rail ''The Brooklyn Rail'' is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The ''Rail'' is based out of Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, criti ...

'', its co-founder

Phong Bui Phong H. Bui (born September 17, 1964, in Huế, Vietnam) is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of ''The Brooklyn Rail,'' a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 ...

addressed his use of different materials and techniques, including Calcutta basket weaving, Bengali brass casting, and hariko techniques, to mix them up with practices from the West. In response, Newman said: "''I want to be very careful not to be a cultural tourist! I’m the filter of all of those experiences, which only occurs after I am back in the studio. ..traveling allowed me to step out of the concealed contradictions that are embedded within a system; in this case the system is the art world, where so many of my contemporaries were making art about art, or how art connects to larger spheres of contexts, meaning the gallery space, the gallery system, or art’s possible social relevancy''..." In his ''Selected Writings'', the artist

Carroll Dunham Carroll Dunham (born November 5, 1949) is an American painter. Working since the late 1970s, Dunham's career reached critical renown in the 1980s when he first exhibited with Baskerville + Watson, a decade during which many artists returned to p ...

notes about Newman's work: "''Newman’s mature work has evolved in methodical opposition to these commandments. It is intimate, materially omnivorous, hyper-spatially curvy, dissonantly evocative, eccentrically constructed, and defiantly connected to a notion of sculpture as abstract statuary, a three-dimensional site of anthropomorphized contemplation (the sort of art Ad Reinhardt described as “something you back into when you’re looking at a painting”'')."

Solo exhibitions

Newman has exhibited his work since 1977. His earliest national shows were hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center Mall, New York and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2016, the Beeler Gallery at

Columbus College of Art and Design Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) is a private art school in Columbus, Ohio. It was founded in 1879 as the Columbus Art School and is one of the oldest private art and design colleges in the United States. Located in downtown Columbus, CCA ...

, in Columbus, Ohio, hosted “Possible in Principle.” In 2013, the Jaffe-Friede Gallery at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire hosted “Everything is on the Table.” Newman's exhibition “Instruments of Argument” was hosted by the New York Studio School Gallery in 2009 and in 2007, the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, presented an exhibition as well. In 2005, his exhibition entitled "Monkey Wrenches and Household Saints" was shown at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University (catalogue). In addition, he exhibited at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1999), Grounds for Sculpture, Johnson Atelier, Mercerville, New Jersey (1998), Tyler Graphics, Mt. Kisco, New York (catalogue) (1995), Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Ft. Wayne, Indiana (1993); Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock (catalogue)(1993), Reed College, Portland, Oregon (1981), and many others.

Statement

In 2013, Newman stated: "People often misunderstand my work as surreal, because they see these disparate things. And because it’s not seemingly geometric or representational, it’s something that is not easily categorizable.”

Works in public collections

* Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts * Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio * Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio * The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria * Albright-Knox Art Gallery * Arkansas Art Center * Art Institute of Chicago * Bank of Boston * Belger Family Foundation, Kansas City, MO * Boca Raton Art Museum * The Brooklyn Museum * Chase Manhattan Bank * Chemical Bank * Colby College Museum, Maine * Dallas Museum of Art * Dannheiser Foundation * Department of Transportation, Washington, DC * Deutsche Bank * Des Moines Art Center * Farnsworth Museum of Art, Maine * Fidelity Investments * First Bank System, Inc., Minneapolis * The Fogg Art Museum * Fort Wayne Museum * General Mills Corporation * Grand Rapids Museum * High Museum * Honolulu Museum of Art * Hood Museum, Dartmouth College * Joslyn Museum, Omaha, NE * Library of Congress, DC * List Center for the Visual Arts, MIT * Los Angeles County Museum of Art * McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX * Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania * Metropolitan Museum of Art * Minneapolis Institute of Arts * Mississippi Museum * Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa * The Morgan Library * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston * Museum of Fine Arts, Houston * Museum of Modern Art * The Nasher Collection, Dallas * The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University * National Academy Museum * National Gallery of Berlin * National Gallery of Australia, Canberra * Nelson Atkins Museum * New York Public Library * Orlando Museum of Art * Parrish Museum * Palm Springs Art Museum * Philadelphia Museum * Portland Museum of Art, Maine * Prudential Insurance * Sammlung Hoffman, Berlin * Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE * Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich * St. Louis Art Museum * Storm King Art Center * Southwestern Bell * Tang Museum, Sarasota Springs, NY * Tate Gallery, London * University of Colorado/Boulder Art Museum * Walker Art Center * Whitney Museum of American Art * Worcester Art Museum * Yale Art Gallery

Bibliography

2020 Sarah Bahr, Ensnared by the Fine Art of Scam”, NY Times, Oct. 12t 2016 Will Heinrich, “Art in Review: John Newman and Jo Nigoghossian,” NY Times, Nov. 18th Carroll Dunham, “Into words: the collected writings of Carroll Dunham: John Newman”, Badlands Unlimited Anderson Turner, “Intersections at Akron Art Museum will expand your horizons,” Akron Beacon Journal, October, 14th 2014 R.C. Baker, “The New Surreal”, Village Voice, May 14–20, Vol. LIX, No. 20 Peter Frank, “Get your Quick and Dirty Arts Education Haiku”, Huffington Post, September 5 2013 Ken Johnson, “ Going Solo Has Its Day, in a Hodgepodge Style”, New York Times, March 8 2012 “John Newman and B. Wurtz”, BOMB, No. 120, Summer 2012 “In conversation: John Newman with Phong Bui”, The Brooklyn Rail, April Peter Plagens, “Balancing Grit with Wit”, Wall St. Journal, March 17-18th 2009 Roberta Smith, “John Newman”’ New York Times, February 27th Stephen Mueller, “John Newman: New York Studio School”, Art in America, May Ben La Rocco, “John Newman”, The Brooklyn Rail, March Stephanie Buhmann, “Exploratory Territories”, The Villager, Volume 78, Number 37 February 18–24 2006 Roberta Smith, "Critic's Notebook: Chelsea Is a battlefield: Galleries Muster Groups”, New York Times, July 28 David Cateforis, "John Newman at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery", REVIEW, December 2006 Ken Johnson, "From carved creatures to Disneyland rugs", Boston Globe, September 26 Stephanie Buhmann, "Review", Sculpture Magazine, April 2006, Vol. 25, No.3 2005 Laurie Simmons, "Artists on Artists". BOMB, Summer 2005, Number 92 Linda Yablonsky, "Why Small Sculpture is Big", Artnews, December 2003 Roberta Smith, "John Newman", New York Times, Friday, May 30" Sandra Wolfer, "Sculptures find niche at seniors' home", Daily news, July 3 Roy Proctor, “Look up in the sky!”, Richmond Times Dispatch, Nov. 14th Paulette Roberts-Pullen, “Art around us”, Style Weekly, Richmond, Virginia, Nov. 26th 2001 Janet Koplos, "John Newman at Von Lintel and Nusser", Art in America, November Grace Glueck, "John Newman: Homespun", New York Times, Friday, May 18 Linda Yablonsky, "John Newman: Homespun", TimeOut, May 3–10, 2001 Mario Naves, "Creepy Fetishes, Lazy Eyes, Bad Boys in the West 20's", New York Observer Daniel Rothbart,"The Protean Forms of John Newman", NY Arts, April, Vol. 6, No. 4 Edith Newhall, "Talent-Material Culture", New York Magazine, May 7, 2001, Will Jones, "Station's sculpture stirs up a buzz", Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nov. 22 H. Peter Stern and others, "Earth, Sky and Sculpture: Storm King Art Center" Raphael Rubinstein, "A Stealth Revolution in Sculpture: John Newman", catalogue essay for GrandArts exhibition Nancy Princenthal, " Homespun", catalogue essay for Edition Von Lintel and Nusser Robin Trafton, ""C" is for Contrast", Kansas City Star, Dec. 7th, 2001 Janet Purcell, "Grounds for Celebration", Trenton Times, June 14

References

External links

John Newman

{{DEFAULTSORT:Newman, John 1952 births Sculptors from New York City Living people Sculptors from New York (state)