The Harrison Studio consists of Helen Mayer Harrison (b. 1927) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932) who are among the earliest and the best known ecological artists. Working with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists, the Harrison Studio initiates collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. They have had numerous international solo exhibitions, and their work is in the collections of many public institutions, including the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, the Harrisons became the first recipients of the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography; they are professors emeriti at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Practice
The studio's subject matter ranges across a large number of disciplines, yet always has at its core the eco-social well-being of place, context, or situation. Whether dealing with the reclamation of watersheds, reforestation, or modest projects in cities and their surrounds, whole systems thinking dominates their processes of work. They have exhibited broadly and internationally in large-scale installations using diverse media that have critical and propositional thinking in them. 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 in the physical environment.
The Harrison Studio locates their work within the conventions of both art and science. By operating in the domain of art, the Harrisons teach the ecological dimensions of the human condition better than they could were they working in the domain of science. By doing art with ecological content, the studio implies that the human species should treat the planet as a sculpture. Paradoxically, Helen and Newton ultimately rejected the innovative installations that earned them esteem as eco-art pioneers in the 1970s. The work they abandoned is known collectively as Survival Pieces, so named because each installation in the series functioned as a productive ecosystem. The Survival Pieces were exhibited in reputable galleries, commissioned by major museums, praised by influential critics, and studied by distinguished commentators. They were also eligible for inclusion in future histories of art because they heralded arts venture into BioArt. Living entities were claimed as art mediums, and biofunctions like waste, procreating, growing, evolving, dying, and decaying were adopted as art processes.