Opening Reception | Helen & Newton Harrison: California Work

As part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the San Diego Central Library Gallery 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. The exhibition locations will examine the California works chronologically and thematically: Urban Ecologies, The Prophetic Works, Saving the West, and Future Gardens.

Saving the West, presented at the San Diego Central Library Gallery, will invite the visitors to delve deeply into the series of works associated with the Harrisons’ research on the fragile and environmentally threatened ecologies of the Pacific Coast fog forest and the Sierra Nevada mountains that mapped out their complex ecosystems and watersheds – the focus of their work from the 1990s until 2014. Initiated by the Serpentine Lattice in 1993, the selected series of works shows the Harrisons’ increasing concern with the issue of global climate change (a topic the artists first addressed in 1974) and related environmental degradation.

This retrospective is organized by La Jolla Historical Society with additional venues at California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Central Library Gallery, and the Mandeville Art Gallery at UCSD.

Curated by Tatiana Sizonenko.

Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work is organized and presented by the La Jolla Historical Society with partner venues California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Central Library Gallery, and Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California San Diego.

This exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Funding provided by Joan and Irwin Jacobs, the M&I Pfister Foundation, The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, Michael Bernstein and Patti Harp, and Heath and Terry Fox.  Additional Support provided by Monica and Charles Cochrane.

About PST ART 2024: The third regional collaboration in the Getty series, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, will focus on the intersection of science and art 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.

For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, visit:

https://www.getty.edu/news/getty-announces-pst-art-art-science-collide-exhibitions/

https://pst.art/en/exhibitions/helen-and-newton-harrison-california-work

The Visual Arts Program provides access and connection to the arts and culture landscape in San Diego, offering unique opportunities to local and regional artists. Featured exhibitions can be viewed at Central Library’s Judith Harris Art Gallery. Rotating exhibitions by local artists, creative groups and hobbyists are displayed at several library locations throughout the year. The visual arts program demonstrates the library’s role as a cultural institution embracing a broad range of disciplines while assisting San Diego's emerging, mid-career and professional artists achieve wider local, regional, and national attention.  

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