Welcome to an Artist’s Workshop V3.0

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. Please note that students should be comfortable with sitting on stools or standing in the art studio.

Howard Newman studied architecture, anthropology, and classics at Miami University of Ohio and received a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy, he began making bronze sculptures and later returned with his young family, creating two bronzes for the Newport Art Museum. In the 1990s, he taught drawing and three-dimensional design at RISD. Newman’s work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Newport Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others, and he has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Tiffany Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. He and his wife, Mary, now operate Newmans Ltd., Fine Art Object Restorers. Their restoration of Richard Lippold’s Trinity Crucifix at Portsmouth Abbey received major historic preservation awards, and recent projects include ceremonial maces for Yale University and work on Newport’s Spring Park.