Helen and Newton Harrison:
California Work
September 28-December 7, 2024
As part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego presents Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, a retrospective exhibition about the work of husband-and-wife team of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, who were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists. Founding members of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, Helen and Newton were local San Diego artists for nearly four decades, where they developed their pioneering concepts of Ecological Art.
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work is the first exhibition to focus on their California work, including nearly 20 projects produced between the late 1960s and 2000s. Responding to growing environmental awareness, the Harrisons pushed conceptual art in new directions, from their efforts to make topsoil—endangered in many places—to their transformation of a Pasadena debris basin into a recreational area. The couple agreed that they would only take on projects that benefited the ecosystem. California Work revisits the Harrisons’ groundbreaking ecological concepts through re-staged performance artworks, drawings, paintings, photography, collages, maps, archival documentation of large-scale installations, and unrealized proposals for real-world ecological solutions. A 17,600-square feet four-part exhibition about this pioneering couple is presented as a multi-site exhibition in four locations around San Diego simultaneously in Fall 2024: La Jolla Historical Society, California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Central Library Gallery, and the Mandeville Art Gallery. The exhibition locations examine the California works chronologically and thematically: Urban Ecologies, The Prophetic Works, Saving the West, and Future Gardens.
Future Gardens, presented at the Mandeville Art Gallery, speaks to the Harrisons’ hope of saving the planet in the face of the crisis posed by climate change and its threat to Earth’s many ecosystems. The viewer will enjoy original drawings, phototext panels, photographs, and conceptual design proposals documenting Tibet as a High Ground (1990-2016), Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains (1995/2003-8), Sagehen: A Proving Ground (2007-ongoing, in the High Sierras near Tahoe), and the Future Garden for the Central Coast of California (2018-ongoing, at the Arboretum at UC Santa Cruz). Through immersive installations, Future Gardens will reveal the Harrisons’ concept of Force Majeure and their adaptive responses to the pressure on planetary systems that are negatively impacted by industrial processes as global warming accelerates.
Curated by Tatiana Sizonenko (UC San Diego, PhD '13)
Image: Helen and Newton Harrison, Tibet is the High Ground, Part III, 2013-16 (Credit: The Harrison Family Trust)
See more Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work at:
About PST ART
Southern California’s landmark arts event, Pacific Standard Time, returns in September 2024 with more than 50 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence. Art & Science Collide will share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. Art & Science Collide follows Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
(September 2017–January 2018), which presented a paradigm-shifting examination of Latin American and Latinx art, and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (October 2011–March 2012), which rewrote the history of the birth and impact of the L.A. art scene. PST ART is a Getty initiative.
For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art
Public Programs
Opening Celebration of "Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work"
Saturday, September 28th from 2-6pm
Location: Mandeville Art Gallery
Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis
Keynote Lecture with introduction by Dr. Alena Williams (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts)
Tuesday, November 19, 2024, 6:30 pm
Location: SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, known as ‘the Harrisons’, dedicated five decades to exploring and demonstrating a new form of artistic practice, centered on “…doing no work that does not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life.” Their collaborative practice pioneered a way of drawing together art and ecology. They closely observed, often with irony and humor, how human intervention disrupts the dynamics of life as a web of interrelationships. The authors ‘think with’ the Harrisons, critically tracing their poetics as a re-imaging and reconfiguring of the arts in response to the unfolding planetary crisis. They draw parallels between the artists’ poetics and rethinking in the philosophy of science, particularly drawing on the philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers.
Thinking with the Harrisons is for anyone concerned with the implications of ecological thought and practice as a reimagining of public life, including the interaction of art and science. Throughout their joint practice, the Harrisons sought to engage policy makers, governments, ecologists, artists, and the natural world, sensitizing us to the crises that emerge from grounded experiences of place and time.
Anne Douglas is a Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland, exploring the changing place of the artist in public life. This research has increasingly focused on art and the environmental crisis from a practice-led research perspective. She co-produced the Harrisons’ work “On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland” (2017) in collaboration with Newton Harrison and the Centre for the Study of the Force Majeure, University of California Santa Cruz.
Chris Fremantle is a researcher and producer of award-winning projects. He was producer on the Harrisons’ project “Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom.” He is a longstanding member of the international ecoart network and co-editor of “Ecoart in Action,” a collection of activities, case studies and provocations drawn from the network. He lectures at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland.
Future Gardens as Eco-Cultural Collaborations
Panel Discussion
Saturday, November 23, 2024, 2:00-4:00 pm
Location: Mandeville Art Gallery
The Harrisons describe their first Future Garden, the Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains (1995), proposed for a museum in Bonn as “...a multi-layered story told with artifacts, media events, texts, and living materials, which all together engage the probable Greenhouse future directly. It is a work of art that will be garden, prediction, and promenade, a voyage of sorts... The task we set for this work is the exploration of eco-cultural collaborations that would make for a future no longer based on extraction. ... these gardens look at what a future could be like if conscious, mutually beneficial collaborations between human cultures (civilizations in all their complexities) and the cultures of nature (the life webs complicating and diversifying up to the space and energy available) became a norm.”
What does this multi-layered story look and feel like in the present?
Join us for a panel discussion with people who have collaborated with the Harrisons on Future Gardens including current on the ground proposals. The panel is moderated by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle. Featured speakers include:
- Josh Harrison, son of Helen and Newton and currently director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz.
- Laura and Benny Filmore, Elders of the Washoe Tribe who worked with Helen and Newton Harrison on the Future Garden at Sagehen and continue to advise that project.
- Leslie Ryan, landscape architect and Co-Investigator for the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz.
- Barbara Benish, artist and Advisor to the United Nations who is developing a Future Garden at ArtMill in the Czech Republic.
Barbara Benish is a California-born artist, who moved from Los Angeles to Prague in 1992 as a Fulbright scholar. She founded ArtMill (est.2004) in rural Bohemia (Nalžovské Hory, in the Czech Republic), an international eco-art center. From 2010-2015 she served as Advisor for U.N.E.P. in Arts & Outreach, and since 2015 is a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center, (University of California, Santa Cruz). Benish is developing a Future Garden under the project title “Transformative Territories: Inter-Species Refuge” at ArtMill. Benish has worked with and written about the Harrisons.
Joshua Harrison is a filmmaker, environmentalist and educator. After a lifetime of connection to their process, principles, and outcomes, he began working directly with his parents Helen and Newton Harrison in 2012 to support strategy, large projects and overall development for the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz. He became Director following the recent death of Newton Harrison in 2022. Josh has been engaged in the intersection of art and ecology since participating in middle school demonstrations on the first Earth Day in 1970. His work centers around bringing together artists, scientists, engineers, planners and visionaries to design regenerative systems and policies that address issues raised by global temperature rise at the scale that they present.
Leslie Ryan is the lead Investigator for the Future Garden climate-adaptation projects within the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz, a research and educational center established by Helen and Newton Harrison. She is a registered landscape architect and long-time consultant and collaborator on the Harrisons' projects. Ryan is developing a Future Garden for University of California San Diego/The Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Laura Fillmore is an artist and community organizer whose current work includes collaborating with artists and firefighters around reintroducing cultural fire on the landscape with the BOD for the Center for the Force Majeure, establishing a community makerspace, and working on a community-led futurist curriculum as part of her focus on directing the Woodfords Indian Education Center, a California Office of Education wrap-around program offering an integrated program of indigenous arts and culture, rigorous academic instruction, recreation, and anti-racist, community-based social justice.
Benny Fillmore served on the founding board of directors for Wà:šiw Wagayay Mangal “House Where Wà:šiw is Spoken,” a language immersion school run by Wà:šiw “itlu Gawgayay,” a non-profit founded by the Wàši:šiw “Washoe People from Here.” He founded Demlu ‘uli Mongil, on the Dresslerville Ranch, and stewards it still. He was recently appointed to the Washoe Cultural Resources Advisory Board (WCRAC); a board of culturally competent Elders who make decisions about what the Washoe Tribe will honor (or avoid) in regards to the work of educators, cultural workers and the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO). A ceremonial leader, Benny is often asked for his help by others when healing is needed. A traditional singer, he is currently working on bringing back Wà:šiw songs and teaching his sons and grandchildren for the future, and contributing to the work of The Center for the Force Majeure in forests and future gardens on his homelands.
Moderators:
Anne Douglas is Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland, exploring the changing place of the artist in public life. This research has increasingly focused on art and the environmental crisis from a practice-led research perspective. She co-produced the Harrisons’ work “On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland” (2017) in collaboration with Newton Harrison and the Centre for the Study of the Force Majeure, University of California Santa Cruz.
Chris Fremantle is a researcher and producer of award-winning projects. He was producer on the Harrisons’ project “Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom.” He is a longstanding member of the international ecoart network and co-editor of “Ecoart in Action,” a collection of activities, case studies and provocations drawn from the network. He lectures at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland.