Harrison, Helen A(my) 1943-

views updated

HARRISON, Helen A(my) 1943-

PERSONAL: Born December 4, 1943, in Richmond Hill, NY; daughter of Joseph and Helen (Quortrup) Harrison; married Roy William Nicholson (an artist), August 26, 1967. Education: Adelphi University, A.B., 1965; attended Brooklyn Museum Art School, 1965-66, and Hornsey College of Art, 1966-67; Case Western Reserve University, M.A., 1975.

ADDRESSES: Home—R.D. 1, Box 447A, Sag Harbor, NY 11963. Office—Guild Hall Museum, 158 Main St., East Hampton, NY 11937.

CAREER: Artist, curator, and writer. Sculptor, 1967-73; independent researcher and curator, 1975-77; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, curator, 1977-78; New York Times, New York, NY, art critic, 1978—. Guest curator at Queens Museum, Flushing, NY, 1979-81; consultant curator at Guild Hall Museum, 1982—. Executive director of Public Art Preservation Committee, 1981-82.

MEMBER: Association International des Critiques d'Art, American Association of Museums, American Studies Association.

WRITINGS:

Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair, 1939-1940, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

Larry Rivers (monograph), Harper (New York, NY), 1984.

(With Lucy R. Lippard) Women Artists of the New Deal Era: A Selection of Prints and Drawings, National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), 1988.

Silkscreen: Arnold Hoffmann, Jr. and the Art of the Print, Museums at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY), 1995.

(Editor) Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Constance Ayers) Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Contributor of articles and reviews to art journals, exhibition catalogs, and newspapers, including New York Times.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on Sara and Gerald Murphy and their surrealist circle in East Hampton prior to World War II.

SIDELIGHTS: Helen A. Harrison is an art critic and curator as well as a writer. She writes about the world of art, those who inhabit it, and its history. In 2000 she edited a book titled Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. Pollock, who died in 1956, was always seen as a troubled and radical artist, though in more recent years he has been hailed as brilliant. Harrison compiled a collection of writings, interviews, and even personal responses from Pollock about his life and paired them with photos of his work in an attempt to demystify the artist.

Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach is a chronicle of the artistic legacy of the Hamptons from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s and 1970s. The Hamptons developed into a traditional summer and weekend haven for artists, and Winslow Homer, Andy Warhol, James Fenimore Cooper, and John Steinbeck were among those who visited there. Harrison recounts beach trips, art gallery openings, and everyday life, complete with photographs. Mark Rozzo, reviewing the book for the New Yorker, praised Hamptons Bohemia as "a colorful ode to the Hamptons' often overlooked cultural legacy."

Describing her career in the arts, Harrison once told CA: "During my original career as an artist, a period of residence in England stimulated my curiosity about public art patronage and ultimately led me to return to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in art history, concentrating on the federal patronage programs of the New Deal era. This is my major area of scholarly research.

"Work on catalogs and exhibitions developed out of my graduate study, and my critical writings began as a consequence of my curatorial activities. Thus, each aspect of my professional life has been vital to the growth and development of my career, and I consider my early training in art to be an essential part of my life as a scholar, critic, and curator. Without this preparation, I would not have the practical background I believe to be essential to my work today.

"The role of art critic is perhaps the most challenging aspect of my professional life, for it involves the publication of subjective judgments based on personal experience, rather than the disinterested examination of historical facts or the rigorous objectivism of scholarly discourse. It does not necessarily involve interest in and curiosity about the artists themselves, but in my case, I am familiar with many of the artists about whose work I write.

"The fact that I write primarily for newspaper readers implies that my audience is broad and general, and I feel it is my responsibility to speak to them in terms they can understand without 'talking down' and presuming them naive. My function, I feel, is to stimulate interest in and appreciation of art without offering hard-and-fast rules for interpretation or evaluation.

"I stress that art must be experienced before it can be judged, and that only through exposure and open-minded examination can the viewer form a valid opinion. On the other hand, I do not shrink from expressing my own opinions but I feel obliged to back them up with solid reasoning. In this way, I hope to encourage readers to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions."