Opening Reception Saturday, September 21, 2024  | Noon - 2 p.m.
Exhibition September 21, 2024 – January 19, 2024

As part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the San Diego Public Library’s Visual Arts Program presents Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, featuring the pioneering work of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. As founding members of UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department, the Harrisons developed groundbreaking ecological concepts. Presented as a multi-site exhibition in four locations around San Diego simultaneously, the exhibitions will examine the California works produced between the late 1960s and 2000s: Urban Ecologies, The Prophetic Works, Saving the West, and Future Gardens.

San Diego Central Library Art Gallery will host California Work: Saving the West. Saving the West will allow the visitors to delve deeply into the series of works associated with the Harrisons’ research on the fragile and environmentally threatened ecologies of the Pacific Coast fog forest and the Sierra Nevada mountains complex ecosystems and watersheds – the focus of their work from the 1990s until 2014.

Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work is organized and presented by the La Jolla Historical Society with partner venues California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Central Library Gallery, and Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California San Diego.

Curated by Tatiana Sizonenko

This exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Funding provided by Joan and Irwin Jacobs, the M&I Pfister Foundation, The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, Michael Bernstein and Patti Harp, and Heath and Terry Fox.  Additional Support provided by Monica and Charles Cochrane.