Opening Celebration of “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)