The La Jolla Historical Society is one host for the wide-ranging exhibition.
The La Jolla Historical Society opens its new exhibit “Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work” as part of a larger effort to bring the Harrisons’ ecological artistry home.
The Historical Society is partnering with the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego, the California Center for the Arts in Escondido and San Diego Central Library Art Gallery in Downtown; each campus will host its own portion of the comprehensive exhibition.
“California Work” celebrates the art, science and social activism in the work of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, a husband-and-wife duo who were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists.
The couple agreed that they would only take on projects that benefited the ecosystem and were known globally but this is the first exhibition to focus on their California work, which encompasses almost 20 projects produced between the late 1960s and 2000s.
The Historical Society’s portion is titled “Urban Ecologies” and opens with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept 19.
The entire exhibit, presented by the Getty Foundation’s “PST Art: Art & Science Collide” initiative and curated by Tatiana Sizonenko, is meant to be immersive, revisiting the Harrisons’ ecologically-focused projects through restaged performance pieces, drawings, paintings, maps and more.
A distinctive piece – and the most visible – at the La Jolla Historical Society is “External Orchard, a Conversation with Survival Piece V,” an orchard planted on the Historical Society’s Prospect Street lawn containing six different species of citrus trees.
It’s a recreation of one of the Harrisons’ “most important pieces,” LJHS Executive Director Lauren Lockhart said.
The original, called “Survival Piece V” and created at California State University, Fullerton in 1972, aimed to encourage the public to “take responsibility for growing their own food sources,” Lockhart said, “creating these closed ecosystems where, in the event of catastrophic situation, you could still” be self-reliant.
With the original piece, installed indoors with light fixtures to encourage growth, the Harrisons wanted to bring attention to “orchards in Southern California and changing landscapes,” Sizonenko said.
For the recreation, Historical Society Education and Public Engagement Manager McKenna Clifford Yahyai worked with local high school students to interpret the original drawings and construct similar Redwood planters, Lockhart said.
The team also consulted a horticulturalist for advice on the citrus species most likely to thrive here.
“It came together so beautifully,” Lockhart said, noting that the public response this far has been so positive, she hopes what was envisioned as a temporary piece will become a permanent fixture on the lawn.
“It is hard to find any other ecological artists” like the Harrisons, Sizonenko said.
And though the Harrisons’ work is well known in Europe and elsewhere, that’s not the case in California, where they lived in La Jolla and Santa Cruz from 1967 until Helen’s death in 2018 and Newton’s death in 2022.
Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison. Meditations on the Condition of the Sacramento River, the Delta and the Bays at San Francisco, 1976 – 1978. Photography, collage, graphite and ink. 50 x 13 x 3 inches. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
The Harrisons’ “main body of work that hasn’t been shown before altogether was done in California,” Sizonenko said; “California Work” is the first attempt at a retrospective to “look at their work cohesively.”
The exhibit took five years to come to fruition; Sizonenko realized the potential for such a project when she invited Newton to participate in a discussion as part of another exhibit in 2018.
From there, she visited Newton at his Santa Cruz home and developed a proposal for the exhibit, which involved trips to the Stanford University archives to pore through the Harrisons’ papers and culling pieces Sizonenko uncovered that Newton had “forgotten he had” at home, she said.
The magnitude of the exhibit and the unearthing and revitalizing of the Harrisons’ work – due to Sizonenko’s “Herculean efforts” and diligence – will highlight the importance of the Harrisons’ endeavors, Lockhart said, work that is as impactful today as it was in the 60s and 70s.
Noting the Harrisons were “pivotal, influential members of the visual arts program at UCSD,” the couple is “not recognized as much as you would have anticipated, especially in La Jolla,” Lockhart said.
The La Jolla Historical Society exhibit will run through Jan. 19, with keynote speakers and related events throughout its duration. Visit lajollahistory.org to learn more.
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