Celebrating Helen and Newton Harrison - 45 Years of Ecological Art

Since the 1970s, Helen and Newton Harrison have been creating art inspired by the earth and the environmental impacts of human development. They established a worldwide network among biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, politicians, and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues about ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

The definitive survey of the Harrisons' 45 year art career, The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce is on the Horizon​, was released by Prestel Publishing in 2016. The book offers an overview of almost five decades of works by these pioneers of the eco-art movement, including recent projects which show their unwavering commitment to educating people about global warming and designing large scale responses to the phenomena of climate change.

Join us March 9, 7-9 pm, to celebrate Helen and Newton Harrison, their influential practice, and the publication of this important and weighty book. Anne Spirn and William Fox, two of the essayists from The Time of the Force Majeure, will speak, followed by remarks from the Harrisons.

6:30 p.m. Wine and cheese reception
7 p.m. Program

This event is FREE and open to the public. Metered parking is available in the Performing Arts lot.

Presentations:

Anne Spirn, "Helen and Newton Harrison: The Art of Inquiry, Manifestation, and Enactment"

William Fox, "Winding up the Planet"

Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an award-winning author and distinguished landscape architect, photographer, teacher, and scholar. Her workis devoted to promoting life-sustaining communities: places that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, and artful, places that help people feel and understand the relationship of the natural and built worlds. Her books include The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), The Language of Landscape (1998), Daring to Look: Dorothea Lang's Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008) and The Eye is a Door: Photography and the Art of Visual Thinking (2014). She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the President’s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2001, she received the International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind.”

William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published fifteen books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Fox has researched and written books set in the Antarctic, the Arctic, the Himalaya, and the deserts of Chile, Australia, and the United States. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the Australian National University, the National Museum of Australia, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.