Helen Mayer & Newton Harrison Newton Harrison, a Founder of the Eco-Art Movement, Dies at 89

The New York Times Sep 23, 2022

Newton Harrison, who with his wife, Helen Mayer Harrison, was a founder of the eco-art movement, creating work that married science, cartography, biology, urban planning, agriculture and other disciplines, died on Sept. 4 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 89.

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 were working as educators at the University of California San Diego — he was making sculpture and teaching art; she was painting and working as an administrator — when they became 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 work unconstrained by gallery walls.

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