Harris Barron | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1926 |
| Died | October 22, 2017 (aged 90–91) |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts College of Art and Design |
| Spouse | Ros Barron |
Harris Barron (1926-2017) was an artist, educator, writer, pilot, and adventurer who founded both the ZONE visual theatre group and the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1970.
Harris Barron was born in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Barron enlisted in the US Navy in 1944 as a flyer, based at the Pearl Harbor Naval Air Station. After being discharged in 1947, he entered Vesper George Art School in Boston's South End. In 1949, he was exposed to many artists from New York City at a summer painting program on Nantucket Island. Barron moved to New York City and worked as a graphic artist. He met his wife, Ros at Massachusetts College of Art, in 1951, married in 1953. Both graduated with BFA's in 1954 as two of Professor Charles Abbott's six initial majors in his new Ceramic Art program. Barron also completed academic course requirements in Harvard's University Extension program.
Harris Barron began as a sculptor and painter, evolving into a performance artist, poet and writer. From 1956 to 1969 he was commissioned to design and execute many large scale architectural sculptures for new public buildings, collaborating with several prominent architects, including Walter Gropius, Hugh Stubbins, and Percival Goodman.
His work is found at the Mount Holyoke College theatre; Temple Israel in Boston; the West Hartford Community Center; Choate Rosemary Hall; the Wilmington Community Center; the Washington Park WMCA in Boston; The Parkside School in Columbus; and the Fitchburg Savings Bank, among many other places.
Barron's smaller-scaled sculptures have been shown in several solo exhibitions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Ward-Nasse Gallery and Sidney Kanegis Gallery, Boston; three shows with New York dealer, Bertha Schaeffer Gallery; at Clemson University, and in many group exhibitions in this country, including the Portland Museum of Art.
Harris and Ros Barron were Rockefeller Artists-in-Residence at WGBH—2, in the late 1960s, and involved with WGBH's New Television Workshop in the 1970s. Their experimental "visual theater" company, ZONE—formed with former studio assistant Alan Finneran— performed a major work, The Yellow Sound , at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and seeded the ideas behind the formation of the SIM program at MassArt. ZONE was active from 1968 to 1972 and produced a ten campus ZONE on Tour of New York State colleges, as well as six discrete works at venues such as MIT's Kresge Theatre (Computer Theatre); Harvard University (Grope Fest, a memorial to Walter Gropius); Ohio State University; and Brandeis University (Beyond Bauhaus Theatre), each of which was a major undertaking involving live performers with elaborate electronic costumes, large mobile set pieces, complicated original sound, text, and projection systems, custom hardware, and a knowledgeable technical crew. Fundamentally, ZONE was a laboratory for the exploration of art in a real-time/space context.
Since 1988, Barron works primarily as a writer of poetry, short fiction and a memoir—The Birth of Eagle Air. In 1988, along with another pilot from the MIT Soaring Association Frank Scarabino, flew an antique, open cockpit biplane from Massachusetts to California over a seven-day period. That unusual flight initiated a book, Spaces in the Air about "crossing America, at sometimes rather low altitudes, with nothing between me and the landscape below but air."
Harris Barron retired from his professorship at MassArt in 1988. His original inspirations and ideas are still the foundation for many of the curricular decisions made within SIM in its effort to combine performance, innovative technology, sound, light, projected image, considerations of space, wherein idea-based art-making is stressed. Barron's thesis maintains that original art originates in the mind; all else is application.
Barron was provocative and inspirational in the classroom. He had high expectations of his students and nothing went unnoticed. For many years, Barron's message to his students, "Shared experience creates community." was painted on the back wall of SIM's Longwood Theater on Brookline Avenue in Boston. This concept still infuses the Studio today.
After joining the MIT Soaring Club in 1975, Barron, as an instructor-in-training, taught student pilots to appreciate "motorless flight"—sailplane soaring—"using the mind and acute observation of atmospheric changes to sustain the self at altitude."
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919). Gropius was also a leading architect of the International Style.
WGBH-TV, branded GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Brian O'Doherty was an Irish-American art critic, writer, visual artist, and academic. He lived in New York City for over 50 years, serving as an art critic for The New York Times and NBC, as well as an editor for Art in America. He used a number of alter egos, including Patrick Ireland.
Charles Herbert Woodbury, was an American marine painter.
The World is a public radio international news magazine co-produced by the WGBH Educational Foundation and the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and co-hosted by Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler. The show is produced from the Nan and Bill Harris Studios at the WGBH building in Boston, Massachusetts.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, branded as MassArt, is a public college of visual and applied art in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1873, it is one of the nation's oldest art schools, the only publicly funded independent art school in the United States. It was the first art college in the United States to grant an artistic degree.
The culture of Boston, Massachusetts, shares many roots with greater New England, including a dialect of the Eastern New England accent popularly known as Boston English. The city has its own unique slang, which has existed for many years. Boston was, and is still, a major destination of Irish immigrants. Irish Americans are a major influence on Boston's politics and religious institutions and consequently on the rest of Massachusetts.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.
Russell Morash was an American television producer and director. Morash's many educational television programs such as The French Chef, The Victory Garden, MIT Science Reporter, This Old House, and The New Yankee Workshop, were produced through WGBH and aired on PBS.
The CatholicTV Network, commonly known as CatholicTV, is a Catholic television network based in Watertown, Massachusetts. CatholicTV first launched locally in Boston in 1955, making it the oldest Catholic television network in the United States. Today, it is distributed on cable television systems, internet television, and broadcast stations in sixteen U.S. states and the U.S. Virgin Islands and now worldwide.
Eliot Fette Noyes was an American architect and industrial designer, who worked on projects for IBM, most notably the IBM Selectric typewriter and the IBM Aerospace Research Center in Los Angeles, California. Noyes was also a pioneer in development of comprehensive corporate-wide design programs that integrated design strategy and business strategy. Noyes worked on corporate imagery for IBM, Mobil Oil, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse.
Karl Otto Heinrich Lange, Dr.-Ing. was a pioneer in aviation (soaring), atmospheric science, engineering education, and biomedical engineering.
Bad Girrls Studios was a popular Boston gallery and performance space from 1994 to 2006 initially located at 59 Amory Street and later moved to 209 Green Street in Jamaica Plain. Founded by School of the Museum of Fine Arts student Jessica Brand, the artist-run studio hosted numerous artistic and community events. Bad Girrls Studios operated under the slogan "Art is Not A Luxury."
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Martin L. (Marty) Demaine is an artist and mathematician, the Angelika and Barton Weller artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Interdisciplinary Arts was an academic department in the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Benjamin Queair Jones is an American artist, animator, filmmaker, and voice actor. He was a co-founder and member of the art collective Paper Rad from 2001 to 2008, as well as his own studio Ben Jones Studio, Inc. in 2008. He has worked on various animated television programs and web series for Animation Domination High-Def (ADHD). Since 2017, Jones is the creative director of Bento Box Entertainment. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Valerie Jean Maynard was an American sculptor, teacher, printmaker, and designer. Maynard's work frequently addressed themes of social inequality and the civil rights movement.
Donald Burgy is an American conceptual artist, author, and teacher. He is Professor Emeritus in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston in 1959 and a Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University in 1963. Burgy began his teaching career in 1960 teaching art in public schools in Quincy and Chicopee in MA, and in Brentwood, NY. From 1966 - 1973, Burgy taught Art History and Art Studio at the Bradford Junior College in Bradford, MA. He was the chair of the Art Department at Milton Academy in Milton, MA from 1973 - 1975. Burgy taught Studio Art at Harvard University before his tenure at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Studio for Interrelated Media in Boston from 1971 until 2001. Donald Burgy has studied neurology, cosmology, and Paleolithic art as the basis for his conceptual artwork since 1969.
David Berger (artist)
Article written on the occasion of Harris Barron's retirement from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988 by Ron Wallace; originally published in the Mass Art alumni/ae newsletter. Read Harris Barron .pdf