Helen Harrison: 1927–2018

Helen Mayer Harrison was born 1 July 1927 in Queens, NY. Helen as a child was so empathic that her friends called her “St Helen.” As a late adolescent, she ranked so high on the New York honors list that she graduated Forest Hills High School at 15 and was immediately given a full scholarship to Cornell University. At Cornell she was urged to become a mathematician because of her grasp of mathematical theory, which she had partially invented on her own. She studied psychology for two years before deciding to attend Queens College, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. She then earned a Masters degree in Philosophy of Education from New York University and began her teaching career during the 1940s in the New York public school system. By the time she was 22, she had attained a level equivalent to full professor in the New York school education system.

She came from that kind of family. Her uncle Dave discovered ACTH cortisol. Abraham and Hannah Stone, another aunt and uncle, joined Margaret Sanger in demonstrating for birth control. Her uncle Leo Perla wrote in depth about peace on Earth and later submitted his writing to the United Nations in book form, entitled Can We End the Cold War?

This is the milieu from which Helen emerged. Her long and productive career followed an unlikely path that reflected and eventually integrated her many interests. She was a kind of polymath, who easily entered disciplines as diverse as mathematics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, ecology and, of course, art.

In the early 1950s, she met, fell in love with and married a young artist, Newton Harrison. Later in that decade they moved, with their two young children, to Florence, where they lived for three years. There she cofounded a Montessori school, working closely with Maria Montessori’s nephew Mario.

Moving back to the Lower East Side of New York in the early 1960s with a family that now included four young children and a well-traveled German shepherd, Helen threw herself into a cultural scene that merged the art world, the folk music world and the peace movement. She hosted concerts and hootenannies to raise funds for the civil rights movement and other causes, befriending musicians ranging from the Clancy Brothers to Archie Shepp. She founded the Tompkins Square Peace Center. The group she helped put together included Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, Dave McReynolds of the War Resisters League, Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, David Dellinger of the Pacifist Anarchist Group and Robert Gilmore from the American Friends Service Committee. She was the first New York coordinator for the Women’s Strike for Peace, a major force in the antiwar movement and a critical organization behind the 1964 Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

In 1965, the Harrisons were both offered teaching positions at the University of New Mexico—Newton teaching sculpture and Helen teaching literature. In a state with a large marginalized Native American population, Helen invented extremely creative curricula to accommodate Native American children, who often had to leave school to assist their families with harvesting.

Fig. 1.

Helen Mayer Harrison with Newton Harrison, working on the First Lagoon, map of Sri Lanka on the table, 1976. (Image courtesy Newton Harrison; photographer anonymous.)

Two years later, they were offered positions at the University of California in San Diego; Newton in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego and Helen directing the UC Extension Division’s education programs. She was in line to become the first woman vice chancellor in the history of the university. In about 1970, she began the collaboration that would last the remainder of her life, working with Newton to make art that would benefit the ecosystem. Their collective work began with Making Earth, in which Newton made topsoil and Helen grew food in it, and continued with the Survival Pieces (1970–1972).

Helen introduced elaborated narrative and photography to the works, and by the Lagoon Cycle (1974–1984) (Fig. 1), she and Newton were equal collaborators on the works. She resigned from her role...