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Helen and Newton Harrison, California Work, September 19, 2024 - January 19, 2025

Exhibition curated by Tatiana Sizonenko. Exhibition organized and presented by La Jolla Historical Society with partner venues California Center for the Arts, Escondido; San Diego Public Library and the Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California San Diego, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time, Art & Science Collide, 2024-2025.
Monica Manolescu

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1The exhibition California Work offered a sweeping and masterful overview of the California-based projects conducted by American artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) over a period of over forty years (fig. 1). In preparation for the exhibition, curator Tatiana Sizonenko and La Jolla Historical Society organized a workshop in La Jolla in March 2022, entitled Listening to the Web of Life, which I was fortunate to attend and where I met Newton Harrison, who actively engaged with the speakers. On September 4, 2022, Newton passed away, leaving behind a prolific legacy to which the exhibition paid tribute.

Fig. 1: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 1980s

Fig. 1: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 1980s

Courtesy of the Harrison Family Trust

  • 1 See Allen for a description by the Harrisons of how they worked together.

2As California residents and founding members of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, the Harrisons had strong professional connections all over the San Diego area and California, but also beyond, in the United States, Europe and Asia. The exhibition succeeds in highlighting collaboration as a central principle of the Harrisons’ work, along several lines: collaboration with each other, with local actors and communities, and with experts from other fields, notably biology, engineering, and urbanism. The Harrisons, who were a husband-and-wife team, worked together from the end of the 1960s until the early years of the 21st century, along the lines of a “conversational aesthetic” (Kester) that emphasized improvisation, dialogue, and collective practice.1 The exhibition captures the resolutely ecological orientation they adopted in the 1970s and their embrace of ecosystems as frameworks for their art. Their emphasis on ecology and reclamation led to a reconfiguration of the artists’ prerogatives and missions, and to the adoption of procedures and modes of reflection typical of a variety of disciplines and professions such as urban planning, landscape architecture, and engineering. A certain conception of artists as involved citizens comes forth, suggesting that they can and should approach political and social issues on a par with politicians, decision-makers, and community leaders.

3The Harrisons’ backgrounds and higher education degrees were highly specialized, but their artistic partnership merged their competencies, fields of expertise and talents to produce an intermedial body of work that combined poetry, maps, photographs, performance, and restoration designs for distressed areas. Helen Mayer Harrison had degrees in literature, education and clinical psychology. She opened a Montessori school in Florence, Italy, in the 1950s and taught literature at the University of New Mexico, before moving to UC San Diego. Newton started out as a painter and sculptor with a degree in fine arts from Yale University (1965). Their art emphasized interdisciplinarity in the use of poetry and visual material, with a powerful conceptual undercurrent and an environmentally-based scientific approach. The recognition of their joint work led to a shared husband-and-wife professorship at the University of San Diego, where they interacted with various poets, artists and musicians, notably Eleanor and David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Allan Kaprow, Pauline Oliveros, Manny Farber and Italo Scanga.

4The Harrisons made a large number of site-specific, California-based projects between the late 1960s and 2000s, inspired by ecology, social justice and activism. The exhibition was presented in four locations that explored the Harrisons’ work according to four thematic clusters organized in chronological order: “Urban Ecologies” (La Jolla Historical Society), “The Prophetic Works” (California Center for the Arts, Escondido), “Saving the West” (San Diego Public Library) and “Future Gardens” (Mandeville Art Gallery). Several installations were recreated for California Work, which also included video recordings of performances and interviews, in addition to public programs created for the exhibition.

5I was able to visit two of these locations: the La Jolla Historical Society and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido. The main challenge in curating an exhibition devoted to the Harrisons’ art has to do with the kind of appeal that the public can derive from being exposed to works (or rather projects) that are most of the time not object-oriented and that have strong conceptual and documentary dimensions. The Harrisons’ works often feature large portions of text (as shown in fig. 2), alongside urban plans, drawings, photographs, and maps. Reading long texts in exhibition spaces can be challenging for certain (if not all) viewers, but it can be argued that, in this context, reading in a linear and integral way is not at all necessary in order to have a sense of the higher artistic stakes. The Harrisons humorously recall that when The Lagoon Cycle was exhibited, “the critics found it boring because of all the reading that was required” (Harrison, 2016 147). However, the works are not focused exclusively on reading. The Lagoon Cycle (shown in the exhibition at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido) articulates discursive and visual elements in a balanced way, with its epic dimension deployed in texts, photographs, drawings, and maps. Perfectly suited for a book format and for hypertext, the Harrisons’ texts foreground the linguistic and literary dimension of their reflection on art and ecology. The exhibition format and the book format are complementary. The exhibition catalogue of California Work, edited by Tatiana Sizonenko and published in impeccable graphic and visual conditions by Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin (2024), offers an in-depth reflection on the Harrisons’ long career.

Fig. 2: Helen and Newton Harrison, California Work

Fig. 2: Helen and Newton Harrison, California Work

Courtesy of La Jolla Historical Society

6The exhibition presented a chronological and highly informative itinerary through Harrisons’ California works, starting at the La Jolla Historical Society, which covered the period from the late 1960s to the 1990s. Tatiana Sizonenko’s research in the Harrison archives at Stanford University helped offer viewers a very detailed picture of the artists’ corpus, motivations, collaborations, and ambitions.

7Newton Harrison’s early experiments as a solo artist show his genealogy in post-conceptualism and earthworks, notably Making Earth (1969-1970, at Pepper Canyon Outdoor Studio at the University of California, San Diego), a private performance that took place over a period of four months, documented in photographs and video. It involved the production of topsoil starting from various kinds of matter (sand clay, sewage, sludge, leaves, chicken, cow and horse manure) and a sensorial engagement with the earth, through touching and smelling. Newton’s posture, shirtless and long-haired, handling a shovel, suggests a figure aligned with counterculture, and also an earthworks artist. One can point out the occasional stereotypical masculine/feminine activities that Newton and Helen specialized in at this point in their artistic careers. While Newton was making earth and handling a shovel, Helen was making strawberry jam in the performance of the same title (Making Strawberry Jam, 1974, reenacted by Barbara Benish for Califonia Work: video available here).

  • 2 See Nisbet 2014 for an analysis of the artistic interest in systems and total environments in the A (...)

8Other experiments from the late 1960s and beginning of the 1970s emerge from the synergy of art and technology that Newton pioneered, and his interest in collaborating closely with scientists in developing certain projects. The photo documentation and conceptual design drawings for Encapsulated Aurora Borealis (1969-1970) are a good example of Newton’s art and technology experiments, which involved plasma chambers or “glow discharge tubes.” It was an attempt to simulate an aurora borealis in vacuum tubes, featured at the Expo 1970 in Osaka and the Art and Technology show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. The plexiglas tubes were designed in collaboration with engineers at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A collaborator at the JPL encouraged Newton to expand the proposal to the atmosphere of the Earth, which resulted in drawings for a different, unfinished project, meant to create “rocket shots to altitudes of 40 to 1200 miles utilizing the vaporization of elements to generate images either by ionization or by solar reflection or in combination.” The objective was to create a luminous sky spectacle while also potentially gathering data about magnetic lines and winds (according to the archival material consulted by the curator Tatiana Sizonenko). The idea of an “encapsulated aurora borealis” suggests an interest in delimiting and reproducing certain phenomena in laboratory conditions or in controlled contexts, for purposes of visual observation (reminiscent of the sensory experience of a more traditional work of art) and scientific study.2

9This drive towards “encapsulation” can be seen at work in other examples, such as the seven Survival Pieces made in the 1970s, present in the exhibition through photographic and video documentation. The Survival Pieces were meant as alternative food production ecosystems growing inside museums, where “survival” refers both to their possible sustainability and to their becoming a source of food to be consumed. Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1971), commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, features handmade soil that filled a large 8’ by 6’ planting bed beneath overhead light boxes. As an intended model for life-supporting systems, it tried to consider how sufficient food could be produced without degrading the Earth. A somehow different take can be seen in Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard (1972, commissioned by the Art Gallery at California State University, Fullerton, and presented as an “installation with harvesting and feasting”), an indoor citrus grove that addresses the loss of biodiversity and considers the possibility (or future necessity) of growing vulnerable tree species inside, with the help of artificial light. In the garden of La Jolla Historical Society, a 2024 outdoor installation of twelve citrus trees functioned as a counterpart and interlocutor to the original indoor design (fig. 3). It should be noted that between June 2024 and January 2025, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a version of Portable Orchard with eighteen citrus trees presented in self-contained planters on the eight floors of the building.

Fig. 3: Exterior Orchard. A Conversation with Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard (2024)

Fig. 3: Exterior Orchard. A Conversation with Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard (2024)

Hexagonal planter redwood boxes, 2 feet tall x 4 feet diameter, an assortment of twelve living citrus trees. Photograph by Monica Manolescu

10Going one step further, a work such as Notations on the Ecosystem of the Great Western Salt Works with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp (1971) integrates living creatures. It was informed by conversations with marine biologists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The artists built a shallow pond with several sections, with water of varying degrees of salinity, with brine shrimp and algae. The water took several colors, like a color field painting, according to the artists’ comments. The reference to color field painting shows their self-positioning in relation to landmarks and movements in the history of art, while also striving to move in innovative technological and environmental directions. Experiments with shrimp also define Survival Piece II. A 25-pound Bag of Harvested Salt (1971), for which Newton Harrison harvested salt and used the brine shrimp to make a fish stew, which tasted terrible (according to the artists). The failure of the experiment is openly acknowledged. Failure is an outcome of some of the Harrisons’ heuristic projects which followed scientific models of hypothesis and experimentation, with or without convincing results. Documents from other Survival Pieces, such as Survival Piece IV: La Jolla Promenade (1971) and Survival Piece VI: Portable Farm (1972), are also included in the exhibition.

11The Survival Pieces of the 1970s mark a shift away from the procedures of earthworks (such as making earth) to an environmentally-oriented art which includes plants or living creatures. The shrimp appears in an anecdote told by Newton Harrison about how he met Robert Smithson in New York in the early 1970s (before Smithson died in 1973) and suggested growing shrimp on the Spiral Jetty, which Smithson refused (Raskin 139).

  • 3 The installation Survival Piece III. Portable Fish Farm (1971) was on view at the Hayward Gallery i (...)

12The Survival Pieces are by no means celebrations of the success and viability of indoor agriculture, on the contrary. They are not straightforward answers or solutions, but rather questions, in the sense that they offer tentative reflections on survival in the face of the decline in biodiversity and the pressure on cultivated land, in contexts of intensive agriculture, pollution, and rampant development. They appear prescient today, especially in the way they consider the loss of biodiversity and the necessity to think creatively about organic farming. However, the engineered indoor systems are not viable in their massive dependence on electricity, and they were sometimes contested on ethical grounds. The installation Survival Piece III. Portable Fish Farm (1971), involving the electrocution and consumption of fish in the gallery, was called into question by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.3

13Another important aspect of the Harrisons’ work, having to do with urban ecologies, shows their involvement with public art and their commitment to art as reclamation. Aerial photographs, conceptual design drawings and text panels for the Miramar Landfill Proposal (1992) show a project (never completed) for the San Diego landfill which intended to use native plants in order to restore the site. Several other projects on display focus on urban areas or rivers and watersheds. Two examples of the former are San Diego Round: Through Air, on Foot, Across Waters (1984), a proposal for an alternative vision for San Diego’s municipal development, which was not completed, and Horton Plaza Proposal (1977-1978). The Harrisons’ work on canyons, rivers and watersheds in California commented negatively on the generalized use of flood control channels and dams, detrimental to the water dynamic. Original designs of Arroyo Seco Release/A Serpentine for Pasadena (1985) consider the rehabilitation of the Los Angeles River, the creation of a natural reserve, and the transformation of a Pasadena debris basin into a recreational area. Poetry is part of their reflection (a poem is included in Harrison, 2016 176), together with conceptual sketches, photographs, maps, and engineering designs.

14The highlight of the exhibition presented at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido (entitled The Prophetic Works) was The Lagoon Cycle (1974-1984), in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, which had not been on show since 1997, when it was acquired by France. A monumental epic told in multimedia form, it stems from the Harrisons’ interest in miniature ecosystems kept in laboratory conditions and is carried by an innovative and ambitious conceptual drive. The epic focuses on an edible crab from Sri Lanka which is transferred to a laboratory at UC San Diego for growth and adaptation, in a move reminiscent of the Survival Pieces. The possibility of developing an aquaculture farm using this particular crab on a large scale in the Salton Sea is taken into consideration in the second part of the epic, but is abandoned because not feasible and sustainable, and illustrating monumental hubris. The poetic and dialogic component of the Harrisons’ work is nowhere more powerfully manifest as in The Lagoon Cycle, with its conversation between the two fictional characters discussing the work, the Lagoon Maker and the Witness, and its visionary descriptions of the oceans rising due to climate change. The Lagoon Cycle is stunning in its complex visual and textual display (it is a hundred meters long), which immerses the visitor in its combinations of poems, drawings, maps, and photographs (fig. 4 and 5). However, what we see and experience in the exhibition should be understood alongside its experimental, conceptual and performative components, for instance a trip to Sri Lanka and the heuristic process of growing and monitoring the crabs in the laboratory.

Fig. 4: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work

Fig. 4: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work

Courtesy of La Jolla Historical Society

Fig. 5: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work

Fig. 5: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work

15Through its impressive scope, California Work gave a sense of the extent and ambition of the Harrisons’ art, and of its interdependence with sites, ecosystems, and communities across California and beyond. The exhibition proved that the Harrisons understood their art as a contextualized one, mindful of the histories of the places they engaged with, open to dialogue with experts across disciplines, and with whoever wants to listen, discuss and engage. Their interweaving of poetics and politics, of art and science, of ecology and technology emphasized care for the world as a fundamental attitude and cast the artist as a socially and environmentally engaged figure. The artist emerges as a double figure in conversation: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison working together over five decades in order to invite us to “pay attention,” the major imperative in The Lagoon Cycle and of their work as a whole.

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Bibliographie

ALLEN, Jane Ingram. “A Marriage Made on Earth. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison.” Public Art Review, issue 38, vol. 19, 2008, no. 2, p. 28-32.

HARRISON, Helen Mayer, and Newton HARRISON. The Time of the Force Majeure. After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon. London: Prestel, 2016.

HARRISON, Helen Mayer, and Newton HARRISON. California Work. Ed. Tatiana Sizonenko. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2024.

KESTER, Grant. Conversation Pieces. Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

NISBET, James. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

RASKIN, David. “Jetties and Lagoons.” Tracing Cultures. Art History, Criticism, Critical Fiction. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994, p. 139-156.

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Notes

1 See Allen for a description by the Harrisons of how they worked together.

2 See Nisbet 2014 for an analysis of the artistic interest in systems and total environments in the American art of the 1960s and 1970s.

3 The installation Survival Piece III. Portable Fish Farm (1971) was on view at the Hayward Gallery in London. It created an uproar with its project of electrocuting catfish for consumption during a performance. See www.theharrisonstudio.net/portable-fish-farm-survival-piece-3-1971

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 1980s
Crédits Courtesy of the Harrison Family Trust
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27744/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 241k
Titre Fig. 2: Helen and Newton Harrison, California Work
Crédits Courtesy of La Jolla Historical Society
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27744/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 179k
Titre Fig. 3: Exterior Orchard. A Conversation with Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard (2024)
Légende Hexagonal planter redwood boxes, 2 feet tall x 4 feet diameter, an assortment of twelve living citrus trees. Photograph by Monica Manolescu
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27744/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 282k
Titre Fig. 4: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work
Crédits Courtesy of La Jolla Historical Society
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27744/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 85k
Titre Fig. 5: View of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, California Work
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27744/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 95k
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Monica Manolescu, « Helen and Newton Harrison, California Work, September 19, 2024 - January 19, 2025 »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27744 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i2f

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Monica Manolescu

Université de Strasbourg, SEARCH / USIAS – University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study

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