Newton Harrison, who along with his wife, Helen Mayer Harrison, was one of the founders of the eco-art movement, creating works that married science, cartography, biology, urban planning, agriculture and others disciplines, died Sept. 4 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 89 years old.
His son Joshua said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Long before climate change was in the public consciousness, the Harrisons were focused on its consequences. They worked as educators at the University of California, San Diego – he sculpted and taught art; she was painting and working as an administrator – when they were galvanized by the environmental movement. She had read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” he was thinking about cellular structures, and it was the heyday of conceptual art, with artists beginning to imagine works unconstrained by gallery walls.
“If we’re going to survive as a species,” Ms. Harrison later said of their first pivot to environmentally-focused art, “we’re going to have to learn how to grow our own food and take care of ourselves at one point or another. So we started looking at what that means.
The Harrisons bred catfish and then Sri Lankan crabs, simulating the monsoons of the crabs’ native seas to encourage them to reproduce. They studied soil science to create topsoil, cultivated meadows and orchards, and demonstrated the effects of global warming on alpine plants in a 2001 video that shows flowers, grasses and lichens blooming then fading away.
Their work was meditative and poetic, mixing texts, photographs and maps. It could also be instructive and normative: they investigated ecological perils and proposed solutions; for example, in a 2008 work, they proposed a forest planted with ancient species that could not only survive climate change, but also mitigate its effects.
They collaborated with government agencies, scientists and city planners, and they often obtained grants from scientific organizations. A commission from a cultural organization in the Netherlands prompted them to create a design that preserved parks and farmland for a growing population, instead of paved over as the developers had proposed. The vision of the green heart of Holland is now a permanently protected open space. Other projects were more theoretical or experiential and sometimes confused their audience – or were completely thwarted.
One of the first facilities, “Hog Pasture”, was an indoor field specially planted with whatever a pig could find delicious, and intended to graze a real pig. It was created for “Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Elements of Art”, a 1971 group exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This show also included work from Andy Warhol, who provided Mylar balloons, and Christo, who wrapped the walkways in Fenway Park. But the museum was reluctant to employ a live pig, despite Mr Harrison’s argument that it was ‘a random moving part in our room and not an animal’.
(Mr. Harrison liked to say, “I like to approach everything with an open mind and a bad attitude.”)
In 2012, the Harrisons returned the work to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. They invited a lovely six-month-old piglet named Wilma to sniff around the mini-meadow, which she did with tremendous focus and energy, piercing her audience. In a video of that performance, Mr Harrison said: ‘That pig, Wilma, has got to fix the mistake the Boston museum made 40 years ago.’
And then there was the great catfish scandal. In an installation titled “Portable Fish Farm”, part of a group show of Californian artists at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1971, they filled six 20-foot-long tanks with catfish, oysters, lobsters and brine shrimp to explore how humans might feed in a polluted environment. The conclusion of the work would be a fish fry – a feast of silent puppies made from these catfish. But trouble arose when someone discovered that the way these fish would be harvested was by electrocution, which is apparently the most humane way to distribute them.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested the “ritual slaughter” of helpless fish, and comedian Spike Milligan smashed a gallery window with a hammer. A compromise was reached, as Time magazine reported at the time: The feast would continue, but the fish would not be killed in public. Time added that Americans who missed the London show could catch another Harrison exhibit in San Diego, Snails Nibbled by Ducks, and that “whatever the ducks leave behind will be served to art lovers in the form of snails”.
Newton Abner Harrison was born October 20, 1932 in Brooklyn and raised in New Rochelle, NY His mother, Estelle (Farber) Harrison, was a homemaker; her father, Harvey Harrison, worked in his wife’s family business, the Farberware cookware company.
Newton’s family tried to recruit him into the cookware business, but failed. he wanted to be an artist. He attended Antioch College in Ohio before being drafted into the army during the Korean War in 1953, the same year he married Helen Mayer. After serving for two years, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
In the 1960s, the Harrisons lived in a cold water apartment in the East Village; entertained local musicians like the Clancy Brothers and saxophonist Archie Shepp; and threw themselves into the social justice movements of the time. Mr. Harrison taught painting at the Henry Street Settlement; Ms. Harrison was the New York coordinator of Women Strike for Peace.
Mr. Harrison earned both a BFA and an MFA from Yale in 1965. (Ms. Harrison had a master’s degree in philosophy of education from New York University and taught in New York public schools.) Later within the decade, the couple moved to San Diego to take up positions at the University of California. Mr. Harrison was also working as a sculptor at the time, making light installations. Ms. Harrison’s practice included a concept performance piece in which she made strawberry jam.
In addition to his son Joshua, Mr. Harrison is survived by two other sons, Steven and Gabriel; one daughter, Joy Harrison; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Ms Harrison died in 2018.
As Joshua Harrison recalled, his father described his collaboration with his mother thus: “She’s smarter than me, and I’m smarter than her. We take turns.
The Harrisons were professors emeritus at UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz, where they founded the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, an organization that brings together scientists and artists to work on projects that deal with the climate change.
When Ms Glueck of The Times summed up their work in 1980 as cosmic in scope – she noted pieces that tackled melting ice, acid rain and other issues – she asked Mr Harrison why such efforts should be considered art.
“When you read Dostoyevsky, why don’t you call it social science? he has answered. “He took his own dealings with the world and translated them into images and stories. We do the same. We can best describe ourselves as a kind of storyteller.
Mr. Harrison also told Ms. Glueck: “We have been way out of our resources, but our probation is over. The idea that technology can redeem us from our problems is an illusion. We are going to have to make vast changes in our consciousness and behaviors because if we don’t, we won’t be here.
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