Welcome to an Artist’s Workshop V2.0

In my workshop, I am in a constant state of dialogue with people and tools, both material and mental. Welcoming you from the Circle of Scholars each semester is, I hope, as great a value to you as it is to me. Although I name my seminars similarly, each one is unique. For a maker, a workshop is like a writer’s pencil with 1000 leads. I invite you to visit my workshop for a dialogue about the things we bring into the world through our mouths and hands, how they are shaped by history, and how history is shaped by them. In Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel writes that we do many things automatically, his System #1. For more complicated things we need to use Daniel’s System #2 –for things we need to think about carefully and deeply. Our workshop is about how to use all tools skillfully and thoughtfully.

Howard Newman studied architecture, anthropology and classics at Miami University of Ohio. He received a Master of Fine Arts from RISD and was awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy where he began making bronze sculptures. Howard and his wife, Mary, later returned to Italy for a year with their two young children, where he created the two bronzes on the grounds of the Newport Art Museum. During the 1990s, he taught drawing and three-dimensional design at RISD. Howard’s works are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Newport Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Newark Museum and San Francisco Fine Arts Museum. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Tiffany Foundation and The American Academy in Rome. Currently, the Newmans work as Newmans Ltd., Fine Art Object Restorers. Clients include Brown University, the cities of Newport and Providence, Yale University, the Newport Mansions and private art collectors. The Newmans restored The Trinity crucifix by Richard Lippold, at Portsmouth Abbey, made of a 22,000-foot gold wire web, receiving the Rhody Award for Historic Preservation, and the Honor Award for Historic Preservation from the American Institute of Architects. In recent years, Howard and his team have been involved in projects such as two new ceremonial maces for Yale University and the creation of the channel for Newport’s new Spring Park.