The Harrison Studio

The Harrison Studio consists of Helen Mayer Harrison (b. 1927) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932) who are among the earliest and the best known ecological artists.[1] Working with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists, the Harrison Studio initiates collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. They have had numerous international solo exhibitions, and their work is in the collections of many public institutions, including the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, the Harrisons became the first recipients of the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography.

Early life and education

Helen Mayer was a gifted student born on July 1, 1927 in New York City in the city's easternmost borough of Queens. Graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1943 at 16 years old, she earned a full tuition scholarship to attend Cornell University. She enrolled at Cornell and majored in Psychology for two years, but ultimately returned home to earn her Bachelors degree in English from Queens College in 1948. She also earned a Masters degree in the Philosophy of Education from New York University (NYU) in 1952.

Newton Abner Harrison was born on October 20, 1932 in New York City in the borough of Brooklyn and then raised in the nearby suburb of New Rochelle. Newton's grandfather Simon W. Farber was an enterprising tinsmith from Russia who immigrated to America in the late 19th century and established a small business for manufacturing kitchen utensils in downtown Manhattan. His initial idea in 1897 was to set up a shop on the Lower East Side to make brassware and ornamental objects for nearby families because it had been customary to import such items up to that time. Business grew slowly and steadily in the first decade until he transitioned from hand hammering to metal spinning with an automated machine lathe, which reduced the cost of labor and dramatically increased both production and sales. In 1907, Farber acquired a manufacturing plant in Brooklyn to further expand his line of cookware and branded the company Farberware. Newton attended Peddie Prep High School, a college preparatory school in New Jersey, and first expressed interest in becoming an artist at age 15. His parents abided, and arranged an apprenticeship for their son with a local sculptor in New Rochelle named Michael Lantz. He continued to assist Lantz in his studio in the off intervals of his schooling during the years 1948 through 1953 with plaster casting, building wood armatures, modeling, woodwork and building architectural scale models, as well as drafting and reading architectural blueprints. Newton completed several years of schooling at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio before reaffirming to his parents his intention to become a professional artist. He transferred to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1952.

Helen and Newton married in 1953. There is a notable collection of letters in the Harrison Papers at Stanford written and received by the Harrisons as a young married couple on their first trip abroad to Florence, Italy where they lived for three years, from 1957 to 1960, with partial funding from the Scheidt Memorial Scholarship awarded to Newton by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the rest financed by Newton's parents Estelle and Harvey Harrison. The Florence letters express the couple's experience coming of age as young Americans living abroad and honing their career ambitions in the postwar era. "Many thanks," begins one letter to Estelle and Harvey, for you both "enable us to find ourselves. The way of the artist is not an easy one, but the rewards for us are many, and the promise of being able to use ourselves significantly according to our capacities is the only promise that holds meaning for us."[2]

The Harrisons returned from Florence to the bustling New York City art scene in 1960. Newton initially found work teaching experimental painting to children at housing settlement projects and neighborhood centers. He then enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture to complete his Bachelor's degree, which he had left unfinished when he and Helen moved to Florence. Sewell Sillman and Al Held were two key mentors for Newton during his time at Yale. He graduated in 1965 at age 32 with both a Bachelors and Masters degree in Fine Art, and secured his first faculty position as Assistant Professor in Charge of Visual Fundamentals at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Now with four school-aged children and her own set of credentials and qualifications, Helen also went back to work at UNM teaching literature and acclimating to the world of higher education. However, she oriented her work in the field of education more broadly, endeavoring to raise the issue of equality and access to good education at every level of society. In 1965, she and Newton collaborated on writing an essay exploring new directions in education for high school dropouts, entitled "Dropouts and a 'Design for Living'," published in the book New Perspectives on Poverty.[3]

The Harrisons moved to La Jolla, California in 1967 when the founding chair of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, abstract expressionist painter Paul Brach, offered Newton a faculty position. And for the past 50 years, California has been their home. Helen began collaborating with Newton on the occasion of the "Furs and Feathers" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City, experimenting with new approaches to the production as well as display of knowledge in a work called An Ecological Nerve Center (1970-1971). 1972 is the year that Helen resigned from her director position with UC Extension Division's Education Programs to pursue art full-time. In her resignation letter, she wrote with affection, "I have had too much fun here! However, I am becoming an artist in my old age and I am doing what we have offered a number of Extension courses about - 'switching careers midstream'."[4] The Harrisons eventually both secured tenured faculty appointments in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego and subsequently emeriti faculty appointments in the Art Department at UC Santa Cruz.[5]

Studio practice

Helen and Newton recruited their youngest son Gabriel and Vera Westergaard to join them in establishing the Harrison Studio in 1993. The Studio relocated from La Jolla to Santa Cruz in 2004. The Harrison Studio's subject matter ranges across a large number of disciplines, yet always has at its core the eco-social well-being of place, context, or situation. Whether dealing with the reclamation of watersheds, reforestation, or modest projects in cities and their surrounds, whole systems thinking dominates the conceptual processes of their work. They have exhibited broadly and internationally with large-scale installations using diverse media that have critical and propositional thinking in them. They use the exhibition format in several ways, often in the sense of a town meeting, always with the intention of seeing their proposals moving off the walls, landing in planning processes, and ultimately resulting in interventions in the social and physical environment.[6]

The Harrison Studio locates their work within the conventions of both art and science. By operating in the domain of art, the Harrisons teach the ecological dimensions of the human condition better than they could were they working in the domain of science. By doing art with ecological content, the Studio implies that the human species should treat the planet as a sculpture. The first major collaborative work they produced in the early 1970s is known collectively as Survival Pieces, so named because they intended each installation in the series to function as a productive ecosystem. The Survival Pieces were exhibited in reputable galleries, commissioned by major museums, praised by influential critics, and studied by distinguished commentators. They were also eligible for inclusion in future histories of art because they heralded debates over the ethics, ontologies, and affects of BioArt. Living entities were claimed as art mediums, and biofunctions like waste, procreating, growing, evolving, dying, and decaying were adopted as art processes.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Adcock, Craig (Summer 1992). Conversational Drift Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2, Art and Ecology. p. 38.
  2. ↑ "Dearest Mother and Dad, Much Love, Us" (undated). Series 4. Correspondence, Box 121, Folders 2-4. M1797, Helen and Newton Harrison Papers, Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University.
  3. ↑ Shostak, Arthur B. and William Gomberg, eds. (1965). New Perspectives on Poverty. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
  4. ↑ Resignation letter from Helen to Dr. Martin N. Chamberlain, University Extension (August 25, 1972). Series 10, University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Box 178, Folder 1. M1797, Harrison Papers, Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University.
  5. ↑ 'Early life and education' is from Rogers, Laura Cassidy. "The Social and Environmental Turn in Late 20th Century Art: A Case Study of Helen and Newton Harrison After Modernism." PhD diss., Stanford University, 2017. https://purl.stanford.edu/gy939rt6115
  6. ↑ "Helen and Newton Harrison - InterSciWiki". 128.200.18.105. Retrieved 2016-02-19.
  7. ↑ Weintraub, Linda (2012). To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. UC Press. p. 74.

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