Centennial Journal

June 21, 2026

“The boy sews like an angel..”
Robert Pincus-Witten, Artforum, 1967

Bolinas Museum to open Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel in October 2026

Over 40 works spans six decades of the postmodernist’s adventurous, multidisciplinary practice, including rarely seen archival materia

Photograph of Paul Harris’s fabric and cloth sculptures in the artist’s studio, Bolinas, Calif., undated, Paul Harris Archives

Bolinas Museum recently announced Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel, a wide ranging retrospective of work made by the late American artist and former resident of Bolinas, on view in the museum’s historic 1800s buildings and courtyard from October 31, 2026 to January 3, 2027. Organized with the Paul Harris Estate, the survey spans six decades of the postmodernist’s adventurous, multidisciplinary practice, from the 1950s to the late 2000s, and includes nearly 40 works in fabric, bronze, papier-mâché, wood, crayon, pencil, and lithography, the majority of which were produced in the artist’s studio in Bolinas, from the museum. Taking place on the occasion of the artist’s centennial, this is the largest survey of Harris’s work in more than 25 years and includes special loans, such as an early example of his vivaciously colored stuffed fabric and cloth sculptures series begun shortly after the artist and his family moved to Bolinas in 1963, historical photography of the artist at work at Bolinas, and a rare vitrine presentation of the artist’s tools and sketches. The show will be accompanied by​ a fully illustrated catalogue with scholarship by Bolinas Museum Executive Director Jessica Shaefer and public programming celebrating the artist’s life and contributions to the history of Bolinas and to 20th century art.

Photograph of Paul Harris in his home, Bolinas, Calif., undated, Paul Harris Archives; Self Portrait, 1975, pencil on paper, 12 x 9 inches

Paul Harris (1925–2018) continues to evade definition materially, thematically, and aesthetically. Trained as a painter, he worked in oil, pencil, crayon, pastel, lithography, fabric, fiber, wood, and bronze. He was a recipient of a Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship (1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), and a MacDowell Fellowship (1977). “A postmodernist,” argues curator Leah Triplett in a specially commissioned #PaulHarris100 essay, “who wove wit, playfulness, and illusion into his work…[he] was among a vanguard of artists across the U.S. manipulating fabric, string, and batting.” After early experiments in pencil, string, and papier-mâché, the latter resulting in his inclusion in a show of new sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1959 alongside John Chamberlain (1927–2011) and David Smith (1906–1965), Harris made his reputation with highly experimental fabric and cloth works that he sewed and stuffed in Bolinas in the 1960s and 1970s. The late American critic Robert Pincus-Witten, writing in Artforum in 1967, enthused: “The boy sews like an angel.” He was soon included in groundbreaking sculpture exhibitions at the American Craftsmen’s Council’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York in 1966 (now the Museum of Arts and Design) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1967. This was followed by well-received solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1972 and the Stanford University Museum of Art in Palo Alto, California in 1982 (now the Cantor Arts Center). A restless and versatile innovator, he turned to bronze in the 1960s, which Jessica Holmes, former deputy director of the Calder Foundation, argues, also on the occasion of  #PaulHarris100, “from this more muscular, firm matter—so unlike cloth—he was nonetheless able to tease out a parallel eroticism that evidences a profound engagement with form.” A socially and politically progressive human being, Harris was also a beloved teacher who taught for 25 years at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts) on the recommendation of his close friend Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993). 

Installation of exhibition Paul Harris, Poindexter Gallery, New York, May 19 – June 6, 1958, Paul Harris Archives

In 1951, Harris received his M.A. in Painting and Sculpture at the University of New Mexico. Previously, as an undergraduate student at the university, his classmates included Agnes Martin (1912–2004) and Diebenkorn, who eventually became “perhaps his closest friend.” By 1952, Harris, married and a new father, moved with his family to Jamaica—“we just wanted to get out of this country as a protest,” he later told a National Public Radio affiliate—where he began teaching at a Quaker school. A scarcity of material motivated Harris to experiment with newspaper, papier-mâché, fiber, and string, resulting in fantastical wall-mounted masks. A selection of these masks, not shown together since the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City at the legendary Poindexter Gallery in 1960, will be similarly installed in the museum’s main gallery, including the benevolent and vertical Official (1953) and the richly embellished, painted Man Hearing (1954).

Woman Giving Her Greeting, 1964, cloth on metal, 67 x 21 x 15 1/2 inches, Gift of Christopher and Nicholas Harris, Collection of the Fresno Art Museum

An early example of his vividly colored stuffed fabric and cloth sculptures, Woman Giving Her Greeting (1964), begun shortly after the artist and his family moved to Bolinas in 1963 and made with found materials, punctuates the survey. “I couldn’t afford bronze, and I don’t think I had the physical structure for working in stone,” he told an interviewer. “I just had to look around because of the problems of money; and when I came to Bolinas, in a house that we rented, someone had had a fire and had left clothes…and she left some mattresses. And so I stuffed these and made stuffed figures for quite a while that I sewed. It did express something that I needed to say at that point.” Many of Harris’s figures incorporate a chair or seating; this example, on loan from the Fresno Art Museum exclusively for the presentation—and included in the ambitious American Sculpture of the Sixties at LACMA in 1967—is a regal and powerful six-foot production in a hand-sewn, floor-length royal blue gown. 

Polaroid and drawings of Woman with Puffed Sleeves, 1992, bronze, 18 x 32 x 14 inches, Paul Harris Archives

More than a dozen of the artist’s bronzes and in a variety of scale and subject matter will be installed across the museum’s galleries and courtyard, including the artist’s first work in the material, the slender, seven-foot-tall Standing Man (1960). Harris presented a plaster version of the work that same year at Poindexter Gallery, and the artist and art critic Lawrence Campbell, writing in ARTnews, enthused, “Paul Harris creates a special ambiance of surprise, of theater…all these pieces have an essentially magic quality—both for Harris and for the spectator. The figures seem to be alive.” Other achievements in bronze include the balloon like Bouquet (1968), the sensuous floor work Anna Turning (1989), cast at the acclaimed Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque, New Mexico, and the cartoonish, sartorial Woman With Puffed Sleeves (1992), the latter of which which will be accompanied by a rare preparatory sketch.

The exhibition includes two self portraits. An early and glowing pastel on paper, 1956, was made as the artist began working as an editorial associate for ARTnews, under Executive Editor Thomas Hess, a champion of the first generation of Abstract Expressionism and alongside fellow reviewers including the painter Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) and writer and poet Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). While a psychological 1975 pencil on paper, pictured, was made the same year that the monograph Paul Harris (Harry N. Abrams, New York) was released with an essay by sculptor, land artist, painter, collagist, and art critic Denis Leon (1933–1998) and chair of the sculpture department at California College of Art Crafts. Other sheets, with built-up color and surfaces, depict Bolinas, such as The Way Down to The Sea (1983) and Shells in Grey Bowl I (1999).

“This exhibition recognizes Paul Harris as one of the most adventurous and unsung artists of his generation. Harris helped shape the creative spirit of Bolinas for more than six decades, and his work remains startlingly fresh—playful, inventive, and impossible to categorize,” said Jessica Shaefer, Executive Director of Bolinas Museum. “On the occasion of his centennial, we are honored to present the most comprehensive survey of his work in decades, bringing together sculpture, works on paper, and archival materials in the very community where so much of it was created, and offering visitors a fuller understanding of the wit, humanity, and restless creativity that defined his life and art.”

“We are delighted to partner with Jessica Shaefer and the staff and board of the Bolinas Museum to realize a retrospective of this variety and depth,” said Rich Kalin of the Paul Harris Estate in Bozeman, Montana. “It is very meaningful to assist in reuniting work Paul Harris made in a variety of disciplines and representing every period of his studio practice in Bolinas, a community that nourished him for many years, and mere feet from where he worked.”

Opening and Community Celebration, Bolinas Museum

Saturday, October 31, 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
The public is invited to the grand opening of Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel.

A schedule of programming will be announced.