Boss Visiting Artist Lecture: Dream the Combine

Dream The Combine is the collaborative practice of Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers. They produce site-specific installations that explore metaphor, imaginary environments, and perceptual uncertainties at the boundary between real and illusory space. Their critiques often respond to the literal and socio-political dimensions of sites in order to destabilize our known understanding of the world. Dream The Combine were named a 2023 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League, 2022-2023 Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome, 2022 Fellows in Architecture and Design by United States Artists, 2021 Visual Artist Fellows by the McKnight Foundation, 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize winners by Landmark Columbus, 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program winners by The Museum of Modern Art, and have been Artists/Architects-in-Residence at Franconia Sculpture Park (2017), Art Omi (2018), and MASS MoCA (2024).

Their work has been exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Lesley Lokko, the Graham Foundation for the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial curated by The Floating Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, MadArt Studio in Seattle WA, and sites in Rome, Lisbon, Vancouver BC, Minneapolis/St. Paul MN, and Columbus IN. Their writing and interviews have appeared in Wallpaper, Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, MasContext, Log, Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. Current exhibitions include work in the Metropolitan Museum catalogue and exhibition Flight Into Egypt: African-American Artists and Egypt from 1867 to Now on view until February 17, 2025.

Jennifer and Tom are both faculty at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and graduates of the Yale School of Architecture.

Image: (Detail) Dream the Combine, Lure, 2019. Steel, netting. 24’-3” x 59’-11” x 57’, Seattle, WA