The Brooklyn Rail

In September of 1972, Jim Harithas walked into my life and changed it forever. I and a dozen other students had shown up for an evening seminar at the Lowe Art Center at Syracuse University. As a freshman, I felt particularly fortunate to have received approval for this upper-level class taught by the dynamic new director of Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art. But after waiting almost half an hour for him to show up, most of the students were ready to give up. Then, suddenly, Jim burst into the room along with the painter Norman Bluhm. With neither introduction nor apology, they launched into a three-hour conversation that seemed like it had been going on for years, with the seminar just another location for their dialogue to evolve. Their back and forth was rapid and revelatory; they touched on the history of painting, works by Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and others, and the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists. They assumed we knew who they were talking about. There was no syllabus or reading list: if you wanted to catch up, you’d better run fast and jump onto their moving train.

For the next three years, I spent all my free time hanging around the Everson Museum. I learned so much from watching Jim: privilege artists over museum politics; prioritize direct contact with artworks over criticism and theory; cultivate authentic friendships and close working relationships with artists; don’t be afraid of controversy, and don’t be afraid to show work you believe in, even if it isn’t well known or well established. The year of that seminar, Jim showed bucolic abstract paintings by Joan Mitchell, made in the French countryside during the late 1960s, and an exhibition of Nam June Paik’s work that traced the origins of video art. His Yoko Ono exhibition, which opened on John Lennon’s birthday, took my breath away. And, always the showman, he also brought Hermann Nitsch to Syracuse to re-create Orgies Mysteries Theatre, an assailing performance involving ritualistic sacrifice, blood, and entrails.

During the early 1970s, museums were evolving. Jim’s generation wanted to change the direction of things: they wanted to see visionary curators running museums, not stodgy administrators, and they were looking beyond the usual cadre of established artists to support those whose careers were just beginning. Jim deeply admired the work of his peers—Thomas Hoving, who helped launch an age of blockbuster exhibitions for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, James T. Demetrion, who transformed the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s contemporary collection, and Martin Friedman, who strategically grew the Walker Art Center into one of the nation’s most distinguished art institutions. These leaders renewed the energy and influence of US museums, shaped art history’s trajectory, and were some of the first to insist that artists have a place of privilege within public institutions.

In 1974, when Jim was appointed director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), I followed him to Texas. In my mind, the opportunity to work for him was once-in-a-lifetime and a much better bet than graduate school. I was an intern at first, then hired full time as a curator. In January 1975, I took the first of what turned out to be many road trips with Jim, first to Amarillo, Texas, where we spent three days with John Chamberlain, who was making monumental steel sculptures at Stanley Marsh’s ranch. Those works, which Chamberlain had been making by himself, were so large they filled two exhibitions in New York, but they were perfect for the open warehouse space of CAMH. Within months, Jim had arranged a showing. We then went on to visit James Surls, who was working in Dallas. This was an early period in his career, and Jim offered him a solo exhibition with the caveat that he had six months to prepare work for it. It was like that with Jim when he saw an opportunity: there was no time like the present. Over the next four years, CAMH hosted artists as varied as Juan Downey, Antoni Miralda, Joe Ray, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Peter Voulkos. Slowly, Jim cultivated a new creative community in Texas, with Houston at its center. In 1976, Jim even saved the museum from disaster after a flood filled the basement with wastewater and debris. He recruited dozens of artists to contribute works for a fundraising auction and, along with garnering government support, was able to put together enough money to fix the damage.

More than anything, though, for me, Jim was a supportive and generous mentor. For nearly forty years, I had the privilege of being the son he never had. He came to my most important exhibitions and was there for me when the critics weighed in. When Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s got a devastating review in the Sunday New York Times, he called me that morning and said, “I’m coming to see you next week—this sounds like the best exhibition you've ever done!” We would look at all kinds of art together—contemporary sculpture, Greek antiquities, religious painting, you name it. There were no hierarchies for Jim, all art was important and all great art was timeless.

In 2022, I was visiting Jim in the Los Angeles hospital where he came almost every month for treatment for the cancer that was killing him. I had just been to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which was hosting major posthumous retrospectives of Joan Mitchell and Nam June Paik. Jim was too ill to travel there, but he spent hours looking at the exhibition catalogues, recalling the glorious revelations and challenges he had collaborating with both Joan and Nam June, whose works he had championed so fiercely. I was reminded again of what he had taught me when I was just starting out: that to be for art is to be for artists, and that to be a good curator is to be a strong advocate, committed not just to objects, but to the people who made them.