HELEN AND NEWTON HARRISON: CALIFORNIA WORK
Tatiana Sizonenko,
is an art historian. She earned her PhD in Renaissance art history with a specialization in Venice and its artistic connections to the Mediterranean from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently a guest curator at the Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego, and art history faculty in the Department of Art, Media, and Design at California State University, San Marcos, and the Design Institute of San Diego. She is the author and editor of Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2024). Her chapter on architectural transmission in the Renaissance is included in the book edited by Alina Payne “The Land Between Two Seas” (Brill, 2022). She also published other peer-reviewed articles in the United States and in Russia.
Abstract
This review highlights the recent monographic exhibition Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, curated by Tatiana Sizonenko, PhD, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time, Art & Science Collide, 2024-25. The exhibition, which was presented across the four art galleries in San Diego, provided an overview of Helen and Newton Harrisons’ collaborative artistic practice that bridged conceptual art, science, and ecology. The Harrisons dedicated five decades of their pioneering work to the restoration of ecosystems. By agreeing “to do no work that does not benefit the well-being of the Web of Life,” the Harrisons reimagined the responsibility of the artist and the arts towards the unfolding planetary crisis.
Keywords: ecological art, climate change, ecosystems
Introduction
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, a groundbreaking 17,600-square feet immersive exhibition and accompanying scholarly catalogue, was recently held in San Diego as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, Art & Science Collide, the well-established region-wide arts initiative in which over 70 museums and art organizations participated in 2024-25. The exhibition was fully funded by the Getty Foundation, with additional private funds provided by the hosting venues. California Work explored the fusion of art and science, art and ecology, and art and social activism in the work of Helen and Newton Harrison, collectively known as the Harrisons, who were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists. By focusing for the first time on their California works, developed between the late 1960s and 2018, the exhibition highlighted the extraordinary achievements of these two talented University of California San Diego faculty members, whose achievements in forging new ways of art-and-science collaboration founded an entirely new field, ecological art. The exhibition traced the development of their breakthrough concepts, processes, and techniques, by which the Harrisons would ignite and inspire the art world for decades to come. Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work also challenged certain existing criticisms of their work as being a kind of speculative fiction. Instead, the exhibition argued that they generated new knowledge and added new dimension to science through their strategies of asking creative questions, independent research and experimentation, and the mapping, design, and performative artistic visualization of otherwise incomprehensible scientific data.
Photo 1: Photo of Helen and Newton Harrison, 1980s. Courtesy the Harrison Family Trust
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work was curated by Tatiana Sizonenko, PhD, an art historian and award-winning curator working across the Renaissance, Modern, and Contemporary periods. Ideas for Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work were first discussed with Newton during Ms. Sizonenko’s visits to Santa Cruz in the summer and fall of 2019. Serendipitously, Heath Fox, the Executive Director of La Jolla Historical Society at the time, invited her to contribute an exhibition proposal as part of the grant competition for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide 2024. With encouragement from the Getty’s PST staff, the preliminary application was modified to propose a four-part retrospective exhibition about the Harrisons who, as a couple, played such a pioneering role in ecological art.
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work was presented simultaneously in four locations in or near San Diego, including the La Jolla Historical Society (the organizer of the exhibition), the California Center for the Arts (Escondido), the San Diego Central Library Art Gallery (downtown), and the Mandeville Art Gallery (UC San Diego). The exhibition examined the Harrisons’ California works chronologically and thematically: Urban Ecologies, The Prophetic Works, Saving the West, and Future Gardens. Based on new research involving 260 linear feet of their papers from the Stanford University Libraries, the exhibition was developed in direct consultation with the late Newton Harrison (Oct 20, 1932-Sept 4, 2022). Dr. Tatiana Sizonenko, curator, has worked with Mr. Harrison since 2019 on exhibition themes and the selection of pertinent objects for display. The 220-page exhibition book features critical essays, a selection from interviews reflecting on the development of the California works, and 120 full-color images documenting many of the exhibited artworks for the first time.
Through immersive re-created installations, projections, archival and video documentation of performances and interviews, and public programming created especially for the occasion, California Work highlighted the innovative ways in which the Harrisons engaged with science and how, grounded in prescient concerns about the issue of climate change (a topic they first addressed in 1974), they took on an increasingly planetary frame of reference. Across its four venues, California Work explored the potential for the Harrisons’ art to generate vital new meanings by engaging viewers in a dialogue about the unfolding environmental crisis, perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. The exhibition reached out to a wide cross-section of audiences comprising ethnically and economically diverse populations, from urban to suburban, from student to older adult, as well as local and international visitors.
Helen and Newton are towering figures in American art who viewed themselves as post-conceptual artists. They reintroduced an ethical dimension into contemporary art by deciding that they would do no further work unless it benefitted the ecosystem. The Harrisons’ commitment to bettering our world by bridging art with science, social policy, and the environment resulted in a new interdisciplinary artistic practice known today as ecological art, which they actively practiced as Survival Art. California Work spotlighted the Harrisons’ belief that art can change the world for the better, not just by enrichment and engagement but by proposing solutions to problems uncovered by artists in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and social planners. Aesthetically, the California works served as a laboratory and a playground for attempting, developing, and mastering unique artistic ideas and strategies that they would later employ elsewhere around the world.
In keeping with PST’s interest in interrogating the collision of art and science, several key questions spotlighted the collaborative principles operating in Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work. What does it mean for an artist to work in the domains of science, urban planning, design, and policy development? What does an artist bring to those tasks that differs from the perspective and methods of professionals working in such fields? How does engagement with science and these other domains affect artistic practice and its products? Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work offered answers to such questions and highlighted the Harrisons’ role in shaping the way art responds to and interacts with the environment, social practice, science, and technology.
The exhibition venues
The first venue, La Jolla Historical Society, hosted California Work: Urban Ecologies in its three galleries located in the vibrant urban artistic core of La Jolla, next door to the newly renovated San Diego Contemporary Art Museum. Within 1490 square feet of display space, California Work: Urban Ecologies traced the formulation of an ecological framework for the Harrisons’ collaborative practice during the late 1960s-1990s. The installation highlighted the beginning of their artistic collaboration, the development and evolution of their ideas about ecosystems, and the discovery of different approaches to land reclamation, the restoration of canyons and watersheds, and the repair of natural balance in compromised ecosystems in urban contexts. Starting at a time when ecology was just becoming a fashionable term, the Harrisons pushed the framework of late-Sixties conceptual art in a new direction by choosing ecology as a “ready-made” practice replete with ethical questions. Viewers of the exhibition explored how the Harrisons had decided that they would only do work that benefitted the ecosystem.
Gallery 1 invited the viewer to encounter how the artists reacted to the array of technological, economic, and environmental challenges that marked the 1970s, and how their artworks both functioned as an early warning system for environmental catastrophe and offered suggestions for surviving calamitous times. To showcase the Harrisons’ growing support for the restoration of topsoil, which is endangered in many places, as well as their concern about environmental threats and dwindling natural resources, all seven Survival Pieces were displayed alongside photographic documentation and video projection: Making Earth (1970), Hog Pasture (1971), Brine Shrimp (1971), Portable Fish Farm (1971), La Jolla Promenade (1971), Portable Orchard (1972), Portable Farm (1972), and Crab Farm (1972). Calling for a transformation of the industrialized food system and its inherent pollution, these first eco-critical works provided design prototypes for indoor and backyard farming. With the “Survival Pieces,” the artists commenced making aesthetic choices informed by scientific knowledge; conducting experiments while talking to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Harrisons invested themselves into the earth by growing things in it to advocate how people might assume responsibility for their own production.
Photo 2: Installation view in Gallery 1 with Making Earth (1969) and Survival Piece I (1971) at the La Jolla Historical Society opening-reception. Courtesy La Jolla Historical Society and Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work
Galleries 2 and 3 introduced the viewer to other influential California works by the Harrisons that were either proposed or enacted into policy to restore natural balance to compromised ecosystems and urban spaces. In Gallery 2, viewers examined the issues of land reclamation and regional ecological development through a series of proposals for San Diego never exhibited since their original viewing in conferences. These included Horton Plaza (1978), San Diego Round Through Air, On Foot, Across Waters (1984), and Miramar Landfill (1992), urban development projects that were each designed as a public amenity and an addition to the well-being of the whole community. Gallery 3 featured the Harrisons’ later eco-critical works that showcased their key ecological concerns: how to restore endangered rivers, watersheds, and canyons fragmented in California by dams and flood control channels. Viewers were able to see the original design proposals, photographs, and documentation for Arroyo Seco Release, A Serpentine for Pasadena (1985). Although unrealized, the project mapped out urban ecologies compromised by a wide-spread use of flood control channels in greater Los Angeles.
Photo 3: Installation view of the Gallery 1 showing The Lagoon Cycle (1974-84) at the California Center of the Arts in Escondido. Courtesy La Jolla Historical Society and Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work
Showcased for the first time since its original presentation, Devil’s Gate, A Refuge for Pasadena (1987) was a large-scale multi-part installation highlighting the artists’ commitment to the restoration of natural habitats, regional parks, and watersheds. Invited by the Pasadena Garden Club, the artists had investigated ecological conditions in the lower Arroyo, which had been cut in half, leading to eco-system fragmentation and the destruction of the original habitat. Their design, later realized, proposed the transformation of a large debris basin full of toxic waste into an enlarged Oak Grove Regional Park near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Through area photographs and original drawings, viewers encountered the artists’ vision of a new narrative for the region, restoring a lake, waterfalls, and natural habitats while also improving the containment and flood control properties of the debris basin. This work alone highlighted the Harrisons’ approach to ecological reclamation and the restoration and reinvention of specific watersheds and finite environmental systems in Los Angeles, organizing into a cohesive narrative such factual materials as archival maps and photographs of environmental despoliation.
Viewers were also able to grasp issues surrounding urban development in California by becoming acquainted with the fully realized California Wash, Santa Monica Promenade (1988-1997), the Harrisons’ award-winning design for the city’s walkway and wash garden of native California plants. Through original design drawings and area photographs, viewers became aware of disappearing native ecosystems and unhealthy urban transformation yet also how neighborhoods, especially in underserved communities that often lack parks, could be enriched with ecologically designed green spaces.
California Work: Urban Ecologies displayed nearly fifty artworks comprising drawings, photographs, photomurals, design proposals, photomontages, and maps, aided by slide projections. All works came as a loan from the Harrison Studio in Santa Cruz. In accordance with the Harrisons’ transformative quotidian aesthetics, the public reception, some of the exhibition programs, and related workshops took place on the lawn of the La Jolla Historical Society grounds, as well as around the Venturi Pergola and Garden, while public lectures and other events were presented in the Balmer Annex, a specially outfitted lecture room. To emphasize the performative character of their art, the front lawn was utilized for recreating two of the Harrisons’ works, Making Earth (1969) and Portable Orchard (1971). In the early 1970s, Helen and Newton constructed fish farms, movable orchards, and flat pastures to host community feasts in such places as the Hayward Gallery in London, the New National Gallery in Berlin, the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and several university art galleries. The Harrisons always used the exhibition format with the intention of seeing their proposals move off the walls and ultimately produce interventions directed towards social and environmental justice.
California Center for the Arts in Escondido, a cultural nexus for one of the largest suburban and rural environs in San Diego County, presented California Work: The Prophetic Works in three galleries totaling 6800 square feet of display space. This exhibition introduced the viewer to the Harrisons’ forward-looking research and visualization about the existing conditions of Northern California’s water system, their reflections on the intensive irrigated farming in the Central Valley, and their prophetic whole systems research, solutions, and reflections on the greenhouse effect and accelerating climate change.
Visitors had a rare opportunity to experience the Harrisons’ monumental installation and landmark early work The Lagoon Cycle (1974-84), a complex 360’ photo mural in 60 parts that was originally exhibited at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University (1985) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1987) and later acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. This work has never been displayed in totality in San Diego, nor seen in public since its acquisition by France in 1997. Therefore, the largest gallery, Gallery 2, was assigned in its entirety to this distinct conceptual and ecological art project, developed as a visualization of the Harrisons’ original experimental scientific work. Initiated by the Crab Farm (1972), the Lagoon Cycle was first conceived as an aquatic farming prototype that could be maintained within the conditions of a museum or art gallery as a work of art. The Lagoon Cycle mapped out a research framework addressing how living organisms react to a specific environment and was, according to the Harrisons, “the basis for a decade of work.” Made as both a set design and a multi-media monumental mural, the Lagoon Cycle takes the Harrisons’ real-life research investigations of lagoons and frames the data in the form of poetic dialogues between the Crab—a central figure and a hero—and the Lagoonmaker, whose stories are recounted by mythical alter egos, in some ways exaggerations of Helen and Newton themselves. The Lagoon Cycle laid the methodological foundations for a work of art being a research project concerned with understanding complex ecosystems (such as lagoons and watersheds) as well as regenerative agriculture, water usage, and the reality of accelerating climate change. It ends with a prophecy about what is happening now: ocean rise, ecosystem collapse, and civilization itself under stress. The Lagoon Cycle engaged the visitors not only through its striking visual form, around which one could walk about while viewing, but also through the reenactment of its poetry, read by student actors to mirror Helen and Newton’s original performances.
Gallery 1 highlighted three more monumental and philosophically consequential artworks: the Meditations on the Great Lakes of North America (1977), the Meditations on the Sacramento River, the Delta (1976-77), and the Meditations on the Gabrieliños, Whose Name for Themselves is No Longer Remembered Although We Know that They Farmed with Fire and Fought Wars by Singing (1976). Viewers encountered visually stimulating installations addressing natural resource management in California, starting with the ecological intelligence of native peoples such as the Gabrieliños, their genocide leading to ecocide by Spanish colonial rulers, and the development of modern exploitative agricultural practices. The Harrisons’ work would help viewers discover the extent of state and federal agricultural subsidies that reinforce intensive irrigated farming in California’s Central Valley for maximum corporate profits. These works made during the 1970s have even stronger resonance today as we grapple with prolonged droughts and increasingly severe wildfires. The Harrisons’ research and findings present an argument for reductions in irrigated farming, advancements in water recycling, and improvements in outreach and public participation in setting water policy.
Visitors also encountered other large-scale immersive installations embodying the Harrisons’ growing concern about accelerating climate change, river and watershed restoration, and the need for policy changes in natural resource use and management in California. The Tower Gallery featured The Bays of San Francisco Become a 162000-hectare Estuarial Lagoon When The Ocean Rises Three Meters (2007-2013), which explored the consequences of rising waters brought about by rising temperatures and melting ice.
In summary, all three galleries were dedicated to presenting twelve of the Harrisons’ multi-part installations. These included multimedia works comprising large-scale photomurals, specially-designed maps, photo-text panels, drawings, video and audio interviews with the artists, and digital projections. The loans for this exhibition came from the Harrison Studio in Santa Cruz, San Diego Contemporary Art Museum, Various Small Fires Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
San Diego Central Library hosted California Work: Saving the West in its single 2900 square-foot gallery atop the city’s new nine-story, ultramodern main library at the center of San Diego’s urban core. Saving the West allowed visitors to delve deeply into a series of works resulting from the Harrisons’ research on the fragile and environmentally threatened ecologies of the Pacific Coast fog forest and the Sierra Nevada mountains, with mapping these complex ecosystems and watersheds the focus of their work from the 1990s until 2014. On display was a 44-foot map of the Pacific Coast fog forest and a large-scale study of its watersheds, both part of Serpentine Lattice (1993); seven large photo-text & map panels comprising the initial and final proposals for Sierra Nevada, An Adaptation (1998-2011); a 36-foot interactive floor map from Sierra Nevada (2011); sixteen watershed depictions from Sierra Nevada (2011); a video projection of the Serpentine Lattice (2014); and a video of Fires in the West (2016). Initiated by the Serpentine Lattice in 1993, the selected series of works showed the Harrisons’ increasing concern with the issue of accelerating climate change and environmental degradation, specifically the urgent need for policy changes in natural resource use and management in California and worldwide. The Fires in the West (2016) addressed irreversible ecological degradation of forests in California, negatively impacted by climate change, industrial processes, and enacted state policies. Through immersive and interactive displays, gallery talks, panels discussions, and readings of the Harrisons’ poetic texts by student actors, visitors explored environmental issues of planetary importance while also witnessing the Harrisons’ astute engagement with complex currents of environmental and ecological science. The loans for this exhibition, adding to a total of thirty-six artworks, came from the Harrison Studio in Santa Cruz and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Photo 4: Installation view showing Sierra Nevada, An Adaptation (1998-2011), comprising seven large photo-text & map panels and a 36-foot interactive floor map from Sierra Nevada (2011) at the San Diego Central Library Art Gallery. Courtesy La Jolla Historical Society and Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work
Located at the heart of UC San Diego in La Jolla, with its 35,000-student population, the Mandeville Art Gallery presented California Work: Future Gardens. Displayed in a single 2500 square-foot gallery, Future Gardens, conceived as part of the Force Majeure series, spoke 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 was able to 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). Viewers learned about 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. When they set up the Center for the Study of Force Majeure (2012-present) at UC Santa Cruz, the Harrisons adopted that legal term, referring to circumstances that are beyond the control of the parties involved, to describe the state of the planet. As co-directors of the Center, they collaborated with small teams of biologists, climate scientists, urban planners, and other experts to redesign culture in anticipation of global environmental events—rising waters, storm surges, shrinking coastlines, and fires engulfing immense land masses—that trigger corresponding human disasters.
The Harrisons showed that concerted effort must be invested in the design of future ecologies that would be able to function in new temperature regimes and environmental conditions. Future Gardens is a series of proposed solutions that anticipates major planetary events and demands corresponding adaptation. Throughout both Sagehen: A Proving Ground and Future Garden for the Central Cost of California, the Harrisons developed a counterproposal to what was projected to happen from rising temperatures, the loss of snowpack, and other abrupt changes to environmental conditions. At its core, their proposal involved re-terraforming, assisting the migration of species to higher altitudes and latitudes, and experimentation with species that will be able to adapt to hotter temperatures in the future. In collaboration with scientists, the artists assumed a new kind of agency as re-terraformers, planetary gardeners responsible for the mitigation of species, creation of succession ecosystems, and reorganization of human settlements.
Perfectly suited to a university setting, Future Gardens engaged a population of students and wider audiences to question the limits of artistic agency, inviting viewers to contemplate the greater possibilities of an artwork: as a work of cross-disciplinary science, as a work of preemptive bioregional planning, and as a re-terraforming work that is more than simply an unrealizable metaphor in the face of ecological extinction. The Harrisons’ work stretched not only the methodology but also the content of both art and science, assuming an entirely new ethical dimension while contributing to an active production of knowledge. The loans for California Work: Future Gardens, a total of thirty artworks, came from the Harrison Studio in Santa Cruz.
Conclusion
Across its four exhibitions, Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work presented the audience with wide-ranging media including large scale photomurals, drawings, photographs, photo-text collages, photomurals, maps, design sketches, and proposals. California Work would not have been possible without the generous support and commitment of many people. Heather MacDonald and her colleagues from the Getty Foundation’s Program Department and from PST Art encouraged and supported this ambitious project from its inception. Heath Fox, Lauren Lockhart, Bonnie Domingos, Ceci Moss, and all participating museum staff embraced the project and helped to bring it to fruition. The selection comprised over 100 individual pieces and 12 large-scale multi-part immersive installations (the Lagoon Cycle itself comprising 60 parts) that came on loan from the Harrison Studio in Santa Cruz, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Nevada Museum of Art, San Diego Contemporary Art Museum, and several private collectors via Various Small Fires Gallery in Los Angeles, which represents the artists.
Note:
Exhibition Catalogue: https://www.amazon.com/Helen-Newton-Harrison-California-Work/dp/3422802118
Reference for citations
Sizonenko,T. (2025). Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 6(2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://en.ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)