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.
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.
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.
[7] 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.
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 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.
She expanded the reach of UC Extension Division's education programs to more than ten school districts in the county and introduced one-day and two-week conferences that drew participants from across the country.
[11] In the wake of second wave feminism, Helen's concern for equality and social justice had grown to include, in a more direct way, her own rights as a woman to use herself significantly according to her own capacities and to be recognized for her contributions.
In his review of the "Furs and Feathers" exhibition, Richard Elman described gazing at "a large white map of the world in the main entranceway that was annotated densely with print, especially the U.S. portion, in tones of red and gray to distinguish 'endangered' from 'exterminated' species of wildlife."
As Helen recalls in a typewritten statement reflecting back on the exhibition: “I had just finished assisting Newton Harrison with a work called Strawberry Wall and he suggested that I do a performance of making jam, since I did the feasts for his growth works, and I thought—what goes in a bottle but Jam.” On a separate piece of paper, torn from an old notepad of the English Language and Literature Department at the University of New Mexico (where Helen taught from 1965 to 1967), she recorded a stream of consciousness that further elaborates on her creative process: “One of the things to do with a bottle is fill it.
She wondered how the medium of photography would serve as a tool of preservation or perhaps continuity, not of the fruit itself, but of the knowledge and skill required to plant, grow, and harvest strawberries in cycles of regeneration with moments of abundance and scarcity.
She also produced a third and compelling image in which she placed just three jars on top of a short stack of books, including Jack Burnham's The Structure of Art, and printed several copies such that she could modify the composition using collage techniques.
But the closing of the exhibition on March 23, 1974, would coincide with a special celebration explicitly called "A Woman Made Day" to include an array of events such as a gynecological self-help slideshow by the Feminist Women's Health Center, a karate and self-defense demonstration by Karen Iwafuchi, an open forum on survival and power by the Commission Against Rape, a presentation about the creation of the Feminist Studio Workshop (the entity that founded the Women's Building), and a jamming performance by Helen.
These two strawberry works also signaled a turning point in a new politics of knowledge—an affirmative politics—by which Helen and Newton Harrison began combining scientific research on environmental issues like pollution and global warming with self-critical introspection, mixed media technologies, and the live action of performance art to energize the epistemologies and ontologies of academia and civic life.
They use the exhibition format in several ways, often in the sense of a town meeting, always with the intention of seeing their proposals moving off the walls, landing in planning processes, and ultimately resulting in interventions towards social and environmental justice.
These phases are the Prophetic, the Urban, the Bioregional, the Global, and finally the Force Majeure, which is focused on understanding how all life, not just humanity, will survive when faced with climate change far into the future as entropy inevitably increases.
Displayed inside were repeating images of a satellite's view of California that focused on varying landmarks, such as topography, borders, and bodies of water, surrounded by written meditations and critique of the irrigation practices and their impact on the environment and biodiversity.
The last prophetic work that the Harrison's did is the final text in their Lagoon Cycle,[33] a poem that envisions the world Ocean rising and mass migration to cooler regions.
[36] In The Lagoon Cycle, the Harrisons attempt to synthesize biology, history, economics, mythology, geography, aquaculture and geology to generate a new paradigm for thinking about global realities-with water rather than land as the basis for evaluating ideas.
In it, the Harrisons found that the center of the city of Atlanta had redeveloped itself into very large buildings with single entries, uninviting, and with all parking lots surrounded with barbed wire.
In quick succession is a work called Barrier Island Drama,[43] invited by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in which the Harrisons take on the destruction of the mangrove swamps and raising awareness for this throughout the region.
For instance, in "The Green Heart of Holland," a request came from the Netherlands’ cultural council to save the Groene Hart which had been damaged by pollution and threatened with unchecked urban development.
The Harrisons invented a work entitled "California Wash." They developed a serpentine walk down from Pico Boulevard to the promenade that ran between Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
The title came from Helen Harrison who imagined herself several miles tall, casting a green net over the region which lands on the 2 Roman roads, and the 2 giant public parks on either side.
[71] Ultimately this work won the CIWEM prize for doing the most to alert the citizenry of the island of Britain to raise awareness of how global warming was going to effect their lives in the near future.
It could be argued that early prototypes of Future Gardens first appeared in the 1990s as sketches of greenhouses in Frankfurt[77] or as an outcome of the Endangered Meadows of Europe installation in Bonn, which both explored similar themes.
A fundamental part of the proposal is to choose a region that is cold today, but will be warm enough and habitable to humans and other wildlife after the global temperature rises, evoking a kind of rustic futurism.
Harrison proposes that desire-driven problem solving is determined in part by the desire of charitable organizations cannot possibly succeed in saving the world from self-simplifying due to exploitation stresses it now faces.