The Harrison Studio

Helen Mayer was a gifted student born on July 1, 1927, in New York City in the city's easternmost borough of Queens where her parents worked as schoolteachers.[2] Graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1943 at sixteen 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 bachelor's degree in English from Queens College in 1948. She also earned a master's 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 a tinsmith who emigrated from Russia to seek prosperity in America in the late 19th century. He opened a small brassware shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Kitchen utensils and ornamental objects sold well. Customers appreciated the immediacy and quality of his product as compared to the expensive brassware imported from Europe. When Simon transitioned from hand hammering to metal spinning with an automated machine lathe, both production and sales dramatically increased. In 1907 he opened a manufacturing plant in Brooklyn to further expand his line of kitchen utensils, which he branded Farberware. The Meyer Corporation acquired Farberware in 1997 and promotes the company as one of the oldest and most trusted brands in American housewares.

At age fifteen Newton told his parents Estelle Farber and Harvey Harrison that he wanted to become an artist. They asked that he continue his studies at Peddie Prep High School, a college preparatory school in New Jersey, but arranged a fine arts apprenticeship with New Rochelle's celebrated sculptor Michael Lantz. Newton assisted Lantz in the off intervals of his high school and college years from 1948 through 1953. The apprenticeship included lessons in modeling, plaster casting, woodwork, and the creation of architectural scale models as well as drafting and reading architectural blueprints. Newton attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio for several years before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia to formalize his study of sculpture. PAFA faculty and local art collectors encouraged Newton to develop his Rodin-like approach to the human figure: his ability to convey the poetic motions of the body and soul using clay.[3]

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 on their first trip abroad to Florence, Italy where they lived from 1957 to 1960 with partial funding from PAFA's Scheidt Memorial Scholarship and the rest financed by Newton's parents Estelle and Harvey. The Florence letters express the couple's experience living abroad and contemplating the purpose of their lives. Helen was the director of the International Nursery School in Florence for two of the three years they lived abroad, although the focus of the letters is Newton's resolve to become a professional artist. "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."[4]

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 in fine arts. The Korean War draft had interrupted progress towards his bachelor's degree at PAFA. He enrolled in 1952, but was then obliged to serve two years in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955. The Harrisons' time living abroad in Florence had further postponed completion of the bachelor's degree. In the early 1960s New York City was ground zero for the Greenbergian ethos of abstract painting, emphasizing the autonomy and primacy of paint applied to a transcendent picture plane. The conventions of figure modeling and perspective had become extremely passé. With these influences, Newton set sculpture aside and began establishing himself as a painter. Sewell Sillman and Al Held were two key mentors for Newton during his time at Yale. Combining lessons in color theory with Sillman and lessons in hard-edged abstraction with Held, he painted bold compositions. Yet those paintings retained their objectness. They appeared as if pigmented sculptures set in relation to the surrounding architecture.

Newton graduated from Yale in 1965 at age thirty-two with both a bachelor's and master's degree in fine art. He then secured his first faculty position as Assistant Professor in Charge of Visual Fundamentals at the University of New Mexico (UNM). With four school-aged children and her own set of degrees, Helen also went back to work at UNM teaching literature, although she oriented her work in the field of education more broadly. Helen wanted to raise the issue of equality and access to good education at every level of society. She and Newton collaborated on writing an essay exploring new directions in arts education for high school dropouts. Entitled "Dropouts and a 'Design for Living'," the essay was published in New Perspectives on Poverty.[5]

The Harrisons moved to La Jolla, California in 1967 when abstract expressionist painter Paul Brach, the founding chair of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, recruited Newton to join his faculty.[6]

Newton had a peripheral relationship to the structuralist theory of Rosalind Krauss presented in her seminal essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."[7] In this essay Krauss describes a trend in American art after modernism and the Greenbergian ethos of abstract painting. She observed between 1968 and 1970 that American artists began to challenge the ontology of art objects and to see artistic agency as extending beyond the confines of the museum and art gallery. Working in the expanded field could no longer be described as modernist. This essay published in 1979 made an important contribution to the discourse on transformations of the late 20th century avant-garde. After arriving at UC San Diego in 1967, Newton began a three-year period of intensive experimentation in the expanded field. During this time he engaged directly and freely with engineers, biologists, politicians, and even corporations outside the domain of art. He participated in Billy Kluver's Experiments in Art and Technology as well as Maurice Tuchman's Art and Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He produced schematic designs for artworks exploring the organic and interactive behavior of living and technological systems, and began thinking about growth processes and transformations as the work of art more so than images and objects.[8]

Helen and Newton proceeded along different paths and at different speeds to transform their careers after arriving at UC San Diego in 1967. The unsettled period of reflecting on ideas about science, technology, equality, and justice in the late 1960s is key to understanding their decision to begin collaborating with one another in 1970 on the occasion of the "Furs and Feathers" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City. In a work called An Ecological Nerve Center presented at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, they inaugurated a career of experimenting in the production as well as display of art as knowledge informing social and environmental change.

Moving to California in 1967, Helen enrolled at United States International University (known today as Alliant International University) to begin an interdisciplinary doctoral program in the Graduate School of Leadership and Human Behavior. With continuing concern for equality and social justice, she was looking to refresh and synthesize three areas of expertise—language, learning, and social psychology—so that she could contribute research towards ensuring that all students have equal prospects for living well. However, Helen withdrew from the doctoral program after joined UC Extension Division as an education program coordinator in 1969 and promoting to a director position in 1970. During her tenure as director of UC Extension Division's education programs, enrollment and course offerings rose from an average of forty-two classes to fifty-five classes per quarter. Helen's goal was to provide teachers of San Diego County with courses to enhance their level of expertise in subject areas, while also providing them with a deeper understanding of psychology and childhood development. She expanded the reach of UC Extension Division's education programs to more than ten school districts in the county and introduced one-day and two-week conferences that drew participants from across the country.

While studying at United States International University, Helen also collected writings by the vanguard of the Women's Liberation Movement including: Alice S. Rossi's "Status of Women in Graduate Departments of Sociology: 1968-1969," accepted for publication in The American Sociologist (Fall 1969) and made available through the Women's Caucus of the American Sociological Association at their San Francisco convention; Beverly Jones and Judith Brown's "Toward a Female Liberation Movement," published by New England Free Press; and Naomi Weisstein's "Kinde, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female," published by New England Free Press.[9] In the wake of second wave feminism, Helen's concern for equality and social justice had grown to include, in a more direct way, her own rights as a woman to use herself significantly according to her own capacities and to be recognized for her contributions. It is this alchemy of ambition and social consciousness that led Helen to begin collaborating with Newton in the conceptualization and making of An Ecological Nerve Center (1970-1971) at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City.

Helen actually took the lead in producing An Ecological Nerve Center for the "Furs and Feathers" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. She assembled students from the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego into a small research team to expand on information that she had requested from the World Wildlife Fund regarding the destruction of natural habitats and resident species that suffer from that destruction; their fleshy bodies subject to the insatiable demands of the world market economy. Her influence is especially apparent in the team's approach to presenting the information in the context of a museum. Artists experimenting with art and technology in the late 1960s, including Newton, had been working with information. They had been using new computer technologies to program sculptures as self-regulating cybernetic systems built on the concept of feedback to explore the relationship of machines (perhaps as proxies for humans) to their surroundings.[10] Helen's approach was different. She worked with students to produce a Rolodex (appreciating the simplicity of the rotating desktop card index invented in 1956 by the Danish engineer Hildaur Neilsen) as a sculptural object containing didactic yet poetic descriptions of species extinct, endangered, formerly endangered, and in over supply, and constructed in a way that would permit change as new data became available. She and the students then created a 4'x14' chart visualization of the data contained in the Rolodex to be hung on the wall of the museum gallery, as if a painting, alongside a 14'x14' world map produced by Newton interpreting the Rolodex data as a spatial narrative. It is important to recognize the work that Helen and the students produced for An Ecological Nerve Center as politically entangled, unspectacular, and strong because of it. The Rolodex invited people to participate in the tactile process of retrieving and making sense of information, rather than stand in awe before an eye-catching digital media display. The chart asserted that people are already equipped to process the gravity of species extinction and take decisive action. "The numbers always change" explained Newton in the exhibition catalog "and research shows that an endangered form can regenerate itself when protection is enforced, and again assume its role in the life cycle."[11]

In his review of the "Furs and Feathers" exhibition, Richard Elman described gazing at "a large white map of the world in the main entranceway that was annotated densely with print, especially the U.S. portion, in tones of red and gray to distinguish 'endangered' from 'exterminated' species of wildlife." Even more impressionable was an accompanying audio recording that Elman recalls as "a litany, a casualty list, intoned in a flat dispirited voice. On and on it went for quite some fifteen minutes about the hunting pursuits of the sheiks of the Arabian peninsula, entire populations of sea birds, monkeys, lions, vincuñas, and the great auk."[12]

So why, after many months of working with students to prepare An Ecological Nerve Center for exhibition, is Helen's name conspicuously absent from the exhibition catalog, Elman's review, and other promotional materials? Neither the "Furs and Feathers" curator nor critic acknowledged her contributions. It would take yet more time and dedication, in the wake of second wave feminism, for Helen to come forth as an artist equal to Newton. She resigned from her director position with UC Extension Division's education programs in 1972 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'."[13]

Pivotal to the story of Helen solidifying her career as an artist are two solo works through which she arrived at her own avant-garde understanding of participation in growth form and growth activism. Strawberry Jam (1973), the first solo work, began when Dextra Frankel, Director of the Art Gallery of California State University at Fullerton, contacted Helen in February 1973 to inquire if she would like to participate as a solo artist in a large group exhibition entitled "In a Bottle." As Helen recalls in a typewritten statement reflecting back on the exhibition: “I had just finished assisting Newton Harrison with a work called Strawberry Wall and he suggested that I do a performance of making jam, since I did the feasts for his growth works, and I thought—what goes in a bottle but Jam.” On a separate piece of paper, torn from an old notepad of the English Language and Literature Department at the University of New Mexico (where Helen taught from 1965 to 1967), she recorded a stream of consciousness that further elaborates on her creative process: “One of the things to do with a bottle is fill it. One of the basic things to fill a bottle with is food. One makes the food and preserves it in the bottle. Collecting bottles and filling them with food…imagine there is no food for us this year and we have to make next year’s food—Food Wall—give up its yield to other people in a series of feasts—abundance ritual—record it.”[14] Strawberry Jam thus became an endurance performance in which Helen made fifteen jars of strawberry jam per day for six consecutive days using only natural ingredients like lemon juice and wine to thicken the mixture, and as little sugar as possible to acquaint herself with the sweet flavor of the fruit itself. The recipes varied each day based on the sweetness of the berries plucked from the plants, and the jam became increasingly tart as Helen came to appreciate the way lemon and wine enhanced the acidic undertone of the berries. The initial five days of the performance took place in private. On the sixth day, Helen staged the making of Strawberry Jam for an audience at the Art Gallery of California State College at Fullerton. And on the seventh day, she rested.

Six months later Helen resumed making strawberry jam as an artistic research project. She had continued ruminating on the conceptual imagery of the bottle and its attendant ideology of preservation. She wondered how the medium of photography would serve as a tool of preservation or perhaps continuity, not of the fruit itself, but of the knowledge and skill required to plant, grow, and harvest strawberries in cycles of regeneration with moments of abundance and scarcity. As a studio experiment, Helen used square wall-mounted shelves to arrange a canvas-like grid composition of jars filled with jam left over from the Fullerton exhibition. She then entreated Philip Steinmetz, a conceptual artist and photographer who in 1971 had joined the Visual Arts Department faculty at UC San Diego, to make two color images: one of abundance with all the jars in place so as to fill the shelves, and one of scarcity with only a few jars in place. She also produced a third and compelling image in which she placed just three jars on top of a short stack of books, including Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art, and printed several copies such that she could modify the composition using collage techniques. With collage, Helen could adjust the quantity of jars and stack them in different cumulative formations as a way of reflecting on the merits of growth form and growth activism by women in relation to the so-called structure of art.

Off Strawberry Wall (1974), Helen's second solo work, began when feminist art historian Arlene Raven invited Helen to participate in the exhibition program at the Women's Building of Los Angeles. Helen paired up with Joyce Shaw for a three-week exhibition at Grandview One Gallery inside the Women's Building. The artist statement that she produced for this show further demonstrates the fluidness of her thinking about time, labor, culture, art, preservation, and continuity of life. In this statement, she explained that both strawberry works are “spin-offs and amusements from feasts and performances that I have done in other contexts. I am interested in the relationship between the morphologies and transformations that happen in living and growing and cooking and the transformations that we call art. I am especially interested in those intentional transformations that make objects stand for process. The play of time, nature and artifice is an important element in my work and I am intrigued by the juxtaposition of real growth strawberries, shelf-life for the jam and the instantaneous transformations of the camera and collage.”[14] On the largest wall of Grandview One Gallery, Helen hung the Steinmetz photographs alongside her exploratory collage that questioned the merits of work by women in relation to the structure of art. On an adjacent wall, she installed a low-lying horizontal pasture of strawberry plants in modular container-like forms that Newton had designed for Survival Pieces. But the closing of the exhibition on March 23, 1974 would coincide with a special celebration explicitly called "A Woman Made Day" to include an array of events such as a gynecological self-help slideshow by the Feminist Women's Health Center, a karate and self-defense demonstration by Karen Iwafuchi, an open forum on survival and power by the Commission Against Rape, a presentation about the creation of the Feminist Studio Workshop (the entity that founded the Women's Building), and a jamming performance by Helen.

With Strawberry Jam (1973) and Off Strawberry Wall (1974), Helen reaffirmed the work of art as an opening for participants to learn, sense, and even bond with their food sources as precious—and in turn to see themselves as capable of making growth and form choices that benefit society without degrading the earth. These two strawberry works also signaled a turning point in a new politics of knowledge—an affirmative politics—by which Helen and Newton Harrison began combining scientific research on environmental issues like pollution and global warming with self-critical introspection, mixed media technologies, and the live action of performance art to energize the epistemologies and ontologies of academia and civic life.[15]

A decade or two later, the Harrisons both became tenured faculty in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego.

Helen and Newton recruited their youngest son Gabriel Harrison 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 and community. Whether dealing with the reclamation of watersheds, reforestation, or modest projects in cities and their surrounds, whole systems thinking guides the conceptual processes of their research. 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 towards social and environmental justice.[16]

The Harrison Studio locates their work within the domains 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 Helen and Newton produced in the early 1970s is known collectively as Survival Pieces, so named because they intended each installation in the series to contribute to the design of a productive and sustainable food system (e.g. hog pasture, a catfish farm, and a citrus and avocado orchard). The Survival Pieces were exhibited in reputable galleries, commissioned by major museums, praised by influential critics, and studied by historians as well as philosophers. The work heralded future histories of BioArt and debates over the ethics, ontologies, and affects of non-human or posthuman life. The Harrisons worked with living entities as art mediums, and adopted biofunctions like waste, procreating, growing, evolving, dying, and decaying as art processes. Helen and Newton began working with global warming in the late 1970s as a result of a career-defining work called “The Lagoon Cycle”. All the work the Harrison Studio does involving this issue assumes that the world's oceans are indeed rising and reshaping the planet; they too are sculptors. This poetic idea is especially prominent in the Harrison Studio’s ongoing series “The Force Majeure” (2007–Present).

The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, founded by Helen and Newton Harrison at UC Santa Cruz, operates on the principle that "We as a species must adapt ourselves to a very different world...proceed[ing] on our assertion that ecologically based, large-scale systems of adaptation to the extreme changes in the ever-warming environment are necessary for collective survival and so must be invented. Seen metaphorically, two frontiers are emergent and evolving exponentially: One is a wave front of water, advancing on the edges of all continents that touch the oceans; the other is a heat wave that is increasingly (apparently slowly, but in fact exponentially) and covering, touching, and affecting the whole planet and the lives on it. These are different from all other frontiers that have been part of human experience, frontiers that we have advanced toward, most often by conquering or exploiting to our own advantage. These new frontiers move toward us, and our habitual responses of exploiting resources for production, consumption, and profit are no longer meaningful behaviors. Rather, we must adapt ourselves to meet these two frontiers on the scale on which they operate."

One of the Harrison Studio projects from 1993, entitled Serpentine Lattice, was quite successful. It was an installation that measured 10’x36′, and consisted of a dissolving slide mural of the disappearing North American Pacific Coast Temperate Rain Forest. The installation also included a 12’x36′ hand drawn map, text and forest image photo panels. At the time, 95% of the old forest growth had been harvested, and the cutting of the trees had left around 75 thousand miles of disturbed river and stream. The Studio created a design that would require controlling the high ground from the San Francisco Bay to Yakutat Bay in Alaska. This would create a scaffolding for the sustainable reclaiming of the Pacific Northwest Temperate Coastal Rain Forest. The main idea was to generate an eco-friendly security system, not too different from the social security system, and to use 1% of the Gross National Product to try and fight against the seemingly endless destruction of the environment. Included in this installation was a piece of writing to better explain their ideas and reasoning. This project took place at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Susan Fillin-Yeh supported the Harrisons in this endeavor. Douglas F. Cooley, from the Memorial Art Gallery of the college, commissioned the project. Serpentine Lattice is now in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art.

Harrison Studio works are mainly done by invitation and commission. They often come when they are asked to begin research, propose ideas, and discuss with leaders in the area to try to make a change. They leave when they feel their work is done, or they have done all they are able to do.[17]

The Harrisons are represented by Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, California and Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City, New York.

• Harrison Studio
• The Harrisons, Various Small Fires
• Center for the Study of Force Majeure

Collections

• The Harrison Papers at Stanford 257.85 linear feet housed at Stanford University Libraries