Newton Harrison (Cert. ’57) started out his artistic career in sculpture. “When I was 14, I apprenticed myself to a sculptor. A year later, I could make larger figures,” says Harrison. “My earliest influences were not modern. I was studying Donatello and the Renaissance sculptors.”

At age 17, Harrison was accepted to Yale but decided to enroll in Antioch College to gain more experience first. He discovered that the traditional college setting wasn’t working for him. “I wanted to go where all the artists were, and all the artists were at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.” Harrison was only at PAFA for six months before he was drafted into the Korean War. When he returned, he attended PAFA from 1953-1957, and won the Schiedt Travel Scholarship, which he used to live in Italy for three years, along with commissions and money he received from the United States Army.

In 1967, Harrison co-founded the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego. Harrison started a partnership with his wife, artist Helen Mayer Harrison in 1969 with a mapping of the world’s endangered species, for an exhibition entitled Fur and Feathers at the Museum of Crafts in New York City. They decided to only produce world that benefited the world’s ecosystems.

As he explains, “While many artists worked intermittedly with growth systems and things like that, Helen and I worked with the world ocean, with watersheds, large farm systems, while at the same time doing many urban works, with city ecologies.” Harrison says that any environmental art is automatically political. “You cannot work ecologically, given how we’ve changed our planet, without working politically at the same time.”

The Harrisons have exhibited at museums in the United States and Europe and at such prestigious venues as Documenta 8, two Venice Biennales, and two Sao Paolo Biennales.