Black and white photo of a male artist behind a sculpture

Paul Harris, undated.

CCA Graduate Fine Arts and Bolinas Museum present: The Boy Sews Like An Angel: Paul Harris CCA(C) 1968–1992

Join us for a special program celebrating the practice and pedagogy of artist and former CCA(C) faculty Paul Harris.

With a career spanning most of the 20th century, Paul Harris (1925–2018) evaded definition materially, thematically, and aesthetically as he confidently forged his own path in art and life. His formal training in painting, Harris’s media ranged from crayon and pencil to oil paint, string, fabric, and bronze. Pedagogy was also key to his practice, and he taught at California College of Arts and Crafts, as it was then known, from 1968 to 1992. Robert Pincus Witten, writing in Artforum enthused, “Harris adores sensuously affronting color… and sews like an angel.”

This forum introduces Harris’s underknown art and legacy to current audiences and to consider the avant garde sculptor’s adventurous practice and pedagogy. Taking the artist’s engagement in a variety of disciplines and mediums, such as textiles, bronze, wood, printmaking, and painting and drawing and an experimental writing practice as a starting point, the evening will gather contemporary artists who studied at the college, and a curator and critic with a long history at California College of the Arts (CCA), to reflect on the artist’s ethos of risk taking and experiments. Each of the artists will respond to a work made by Paul Harris and touch on their own practices that relate to his tendencies and/or the mediums the artist worked across. The forum will revisit the artist and teacher's wildly popular, playful, radical coursework, such as the c. 1970s Sculpture Theater with newly discovered, rare found footage and conversations that look at the impact of his art and teaching, and that of the college's fine arts programs on artists working today.

The program takes place during the artist’s centennial and on the occasion of The Boy Sews Like An Angel, a survey of the restless, experimental postmodernist and Bolinas resident at Bolinas Museum, and is jointly organized by CCA, the Paul Harris Estate, and Bolinas Museum.