Harris Barron - Artistic Practice

Artistic Practice

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."