The Brooklyn Rail

Nobody ever applies for the title “visionary.” It is a title that can only be bestowed in a person’s life by the cognoscenti. In life, it is easier to attach the title “maverick” to someone who is misunderstood or controversial. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a visionary as “one that has foresight and imagination. One who finds unique opportunities. A leader that tries new ideas, activities, or processes with the ability to remain focused. Individuals may describe leaders as resilient and resolute because they are motivated to get through the challenge and achieve their goals.”

Merriam-Webster defines a maverick as an “unorthodox or independent person.”

Jim Harithas fits both those definitions. By the time I met him in 1975 he was 43 years old and had already shook up the art world by putting a television in the museum, recognizing that a lot of artists were expressing their ideas in video. Jim saw the future and created the first video department with its first video curator, David Ross. Having already created many firsts. The Prison Project, Joan Mitchell’s first museum exhibition, to name just a few of many. Now check the “visionary” box, please. These exhibitions took place in Syracuse at the Everson Museum. In San Francisco, where we met, he described taking his video program and vision to the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. The man did not fit my stereotypical idea of museum directors, one that carefully comports themselves mostly like the institutional front person, careful in speech, a speaking quality that was slightly aloof mixed with congeniality, and an art historian sense of connoisseurship. On first impression, Harithas emoted none of those characteristics. Later I realized he could call them up, when necessary, if it meant advancing his ideas for his programs. Dressed in denim with a blue jean jacket, he carried himself like he was free from the constraints of any institution. Maverick? The source of the word is mid 19th century: from the name of Samuel A. Maverick (1803–70) a Texas rancher who did not brand his cattle. Being something different was embedded in Harithas’s DNA by birth.

People often ask me to describe Jim and his personality. I tell them that if they want to understand everything about Jim Harithas, all they have to do is understand how he drove a vehicle. When traveling on a smooth concrete highway, he was the worst, he was bored, no challenge to it, get to a destination fast and once there, that would be the start of the journey, moving point to point. Sometimes on an empty highway less traveled by other vehicles, he would drive past the speed limit, taking the speedometer needle past the numbers where it couldn’t measure any further. At these high speeds, he paid attention. Get off the road, into the desert, on dirt roads with deep ruts in the jungles of Central America, over bridges half destroyed, partially destroyed narrow roads on the side of mountains, then you couldn’t ask for a better person in charge of the vehicle. Alert, clear thinking, with an active mind fully engaged with the task at hand.

I have spent a lot of time, in a car or truck, with Jim on both fast roads and no roads, sometimes weeks at a time in the war zones of Central America ( in Jim’s words, “Let’s check out US foreign policy first hand and maybe visit some Mayan ruins in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras”), Easter week with the indigenous Indians in tiny villages in Mexico in a car that broke down every two days in the middle of nowhere, a spur of the moment idea to go from Houston to Waco and see the destruction of the Branch Davidians compound, drive from Houston to Mexico City to get papers to fly to Havana and meet artists, see the Cuban Biannual, visit schools, donate medicine, film, and photo paper (all in short supply) during the special period. Several trips to the border past Laredo to Miranda city to participate in several sacred Peyote ceremonies at the invitation of persons from the Native American Church. One time I was on a road trip zig-zagging across the west half of the United States and stopped in Houston to visit Jim and his wife Ann. He asked where I was headed next, and when I said Los Angeles he asked to join what would normally be a two and half day trip that turned into twenty-three hours with stops for gas, a short stop in San Antonio to say hi to the painter Caesar Martinez, and a stop at the General George Patton Museum in the Palm Desert.

I never went on a vacation with Jim to relax, all of these trips were challenging and were not what you can call relaxing, on the contrary, they were sometimes physically challenging and dangerous to your life. They were always consciousness-raising, learning fresh information that you could never learn from media, books, or television news. During the war in Central America, in Guatemala we were stopped on dirt roads in the jungle an average of ten times a day by the armed military, an occasional death squad (in a war zone you can consistently tell who killed, just read their eyes, no joke), and road robbers that wear no uniform but have guns. With each stop your vehicle would be searched and a bribe would be extracted. When they would ask too much of a bribe, Jim would always confront them back in anger, despite thinking this was a bad idea, they would be momentarily shocked, and to my amazement, they backed off and sent us on our way.

Some of our trips didn’t involve vehicles, a few times we went to the bombed-out Bronx to witness Santeria initiations and masses. Seeing the elaborate time-consuming shrines in basements made to evoke the spirit of their personal orishas. We would be moved by the deep sincerity and originality of their art without the pretense of the isms i.e. popism, conceptualism, or whatever isms.

Paying no attention to the commercial success of an artist, Jim Harithas throughout his life stayed committed to the work of artists he thought were great and continued to support their growth. One of the last exhibitions of mine titled: “Evidence of Phantoms Made Real Between Thoughts,” was originally curated by his wife Ann for the Six Point Museum, Victoria, Texas, he brought it to the Station Museum in Houston. Despite fighting several cancers and four heart attacks, he chose the art, oversaw the catalog design, and designed the layout of the museum.

He would remain “maverick” to the end. I know in the future, people will say his name and “visionary” in the same breath.