The Harrison Studio consists of Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (1932–2022) who are among the earliest and the best known social and environmental artists. Often simply referred to as “The Harrisons”, Helen and Newton have produced multimedia work across a vast range of disciplines. They worked in collaboration with biologists, ecologists, historians, activists, architects, urban planners and fellow artists to initiate dialogues and create works exploring biodiversity and community development. Helen and Newton Harrison were both Professors Emeriti at University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of California, San Diego. 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 San Jose Museum of 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. Stanford University Libraries acquired The Helen and Newton Harrison Papers, an extensive archive that documents their life and work with a significant amount of audiovisual material and born-digital files.
Early life and education Helen Mayer was born on July 1, 1927, in the easternmost borough of New York City Queens to an academic family: Both parents were schoolteachers, and her father a mathematician. Helen graduated Forest Hills High School in 1943 at sixteen years old, earning a full tuition scholarship to Cornell University. At Cornelle, she was encouraged to study mathematics due to her natural ability, but instead majored in psychology for two years; ultimately she returned home to earn her bachelor's degree in English from Queens College in 1948. In 1952, she earned a master's degree in the philosophy of education from New York University (NYU).
Newton Abner Harrison was born on October 20, 1932, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and raised in the nearby suburb of New Rochelle. Newton's grandfather Simon W. Farber was a tinsmith who emigrated from Russia seeking prosperity in the late 19th century. He opened a small brassware shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan selling kitchen utensils and ornamental objects; 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. Meanwhile, Newton was riding his bicycle all over New Rochelle. He located the New Rochelle's celebrated sculptor Michael Lantz. Newton showed Lantz a horse he made the year earlier. Lantz responded that he hadn't done a horse that well at 14. Lantz accepted him as his apprentice. Newton assisted Lantz during school breaks during high school and intermittently during his 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.Mrs. Catherine Biddle Cadwalader Scull, whom along with her husband Mr. Richard Barclay Scull commissioned Newton to create a rooftop sculpture for their home in the Radnor Township of Villanova, likened Newton's Love Groups (1957) to the work of Auguste Rodin, citing The Kiss (1889) as a comparable example of two nudes embracing. See Mrs. Scull quoted in "Nude Statues on Roof Cause Traffic Jam on Main Line" and Thomas Hovenden, "Plastic Nudes in Quaker Land: Ups and Downs of Works Raise Stock of Plymouth Mtg. Sculptor," The Times Herald (undated) in Scrapbook 1 (1957-1958). Series 7, Early Work by Newton Harrison, Flat Box 290. M1797, Helen and Newton Harrison Papers, Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University.
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.""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.
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 Henry Street Settlement and neighborhood centers. He then enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture to complete his bachelor and master'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 his 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.
Helen was extremely involved with various humanitarian activities in the early 1960s. Helen "threw herself into a cultural scene that merged the art world, the folk music world and the peace movement. She hosted concerts and Hootenannies to raise funds for the civil rights movement and other causes, befriending musicians ranging from the Clancy Brothers to Archie Shepp. She founded the Tompkins Square Peace Center. The group she helped put together included Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, Dave McReynolds of the War Resisters League, Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, David Dellinger of the Pacifist Anarchist Group, Robert Gilmore from the American Friends Service Committee. She was the first New York coordinator for the Women's Strike for Peace, a major force in the anti-war movement and a critical organization behind the 1964 Nuclear Test Ban treaty."
Newton had begun to feel that 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.Shostak, Arthur B. and William Gomberg, eds. (1965). New Perspectives on Poverty. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
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.The "Early Life and education" segment of this page is adapted from Eliasieh, Laura (née Rogers). "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 Hints of Helen's growing artistic collaboration with Newton were already apparent in during this time. "The sense from the literature and lecture circuit was that Newton was the “alchemist” and builder; Helen the scholar and theorist who also brought photography and text to the practice; this is rhetorically embraced in an early scripting of their collaboration..."
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.The "Sculpture in the expanded field" segment of this page is adapted from Eliasieh, Laura (née Rogers). "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
Switching careers midstream 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.