Dream The Combine

Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are architects, artists, and co-founders of Dream The Combine where they have produced numerous site-specific installations that explore metaphor, perceptual uncertainties, and the boundary between real and illusory space. They consider these works perceptual frameworks for vision and movement that complicate the relationship between body, space, image, and environment. The scale of their work and the industrial materials they use (steel, glass, construction textiles) link their work to infrastructures that order our reality. They question the rigidity of spatial and social systems by making structures meant to bring people together through visceral experience. Their work serves as a critique of what we take for granted.

Dream The Combine was the winner of the 2022-2023 Rome Prize in Architecture, the 2022 United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, the 2021 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1, and the 2018 Art Omi Architecture Residency.

Their work has been exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, MadArt Studio, and sites in Vancouver, Rome, Minneapolis, and Columbus, Indiana. They have also been featured in publications such as Wallpaper, Metropolis, MasContext, Log, Architectural Design, Curbed, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. Dream The Combine is dually based in Ithaca, NY and Minneapolis, MN.