Discipline: Architecture – design

Catie Newell

Discipline: Architecture – design
Region: Detroit, MI
MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

Catie Newell captures light and darkness. As the founding principal of the architecture, art, and research practice Alibi Studio and professor of architecture at University of Michigan’s Taubman College, Newell's research and creative practice has been widely recognized for exploring heartfelt design construction and materiality in relationship to location and geography.

Her work ranges in scale from buildings to products and explores the world most deeply with material systems and optical captures. The process of fabrication is a vital act in her work, often amplifying material effects and situational influences, intertwining the processes of making and design across the entire project. Her work has been shown in secret venues in Detroit, in the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale, in night-sensitive museum solo shows, and in the landscape of rural Michigan. Newell is a Lucas Fellow, a Kresge Artist Fellow, a WOJR/Civitella Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

At MacDowell, Newell expanded a set of works dedicated to the transition from life to death. This included a series of glass objects, short memory texts, and the slow evolution of a building from creating sawdust to supporting a secret forest. The glass works, Objects for Passing, were launched during Newell’s time as an artist-in-residence at The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass. The building and tree growth are under construction in Detroit, Michigan.

Portrait by Catie Newell

Studios

New Hampshire

Catie Newell worked in the New Hampshire studio.

New Hampshire Studio, originally named Peterborough Studio, was given to MacDowell by Mr. and Mrs. William Schofield, Mrs. H. A. Chamberlain, Mrs. Andrew Draper, and Miss Ruth Cheney. The studio was renamed in 1943. The Gilbert Verney Foundation established an endowed maintenance fund in 1990, and a bequest in memory of MacDowell Fellow Victor Candell underwrote the…

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