The Brooklyn Rail

In 1971, a friend hired me to photograph the Everson Museum’s newly appointed director. I’d never seen the new art museum or met an art museum director, so I was unsure what to expect. Ushered into his austere skylit corner office in the I. M. Pei-designed art museum, I stood awkwardly in front of his desk, waiting for him to look up from signing some papers on his desk. Time moved slowly. I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

I was in a particularly foul frame of mind stemming from an unpleasant political situation I’d recently experienced. I was caught up in an anti-war dust-up with the administration at Syracuse University, where I was beginning my senior year. As such, I was in no mood for any more bullshit. An impatient and self-important twenty-one-year-old, I took this seemingly endless delay as a personal insult and sought the upper hand—photographically speaking. I simply wanted to take his picture and get the fuck out of there.

So, I tried to insult him. I assumed he could not see a future I believed I grasped fully, so I said, “This museum you’ve taken over is totally full of shit, and if it doesn’t become a television station, it will be obsolete in a decade.” I was proud that during my junior year of journalism school, I had discovered portable video, and I was sure it would usher in a whole world of changes. He looked up slowly from his desk, stared directly at me, and said, “Well, if you’re so fucking smart, why don’t you come to work for me as my assistant.”

I was stunned into a kind of silence rare for me and stood slack-jawed in front of the guy. “I’m just a senior at Syracuse,” I stammered.

“I didn’t ask you that,” he interrupted sharply, “maybe you’re full of shit?”

“I don’t think I am,” was my feeble comeback.

“Well, then show up tomorrow morning at nine,” and he pointed to a door in a small room adjacent to his office. “If not, then we’ll both know.”

As I took his picture, he again half-smiled and pointed to my new office. Walking out of the museum and to my car, I began to sense that I’d met my match and perhaps the mentor I’d been searching for. And, it seemed I had a job in an art museum.

Not just any art museum, but one run by Jim Harithas, a man I came to love and admire, a character who seemed to invent and reinvent himself repeatedly and loved to get into what the late John Lewis called “good trouble.”

Shortly after I started working with him, he began telling me stories. I assumed it was his way of educating me, or perhaps he was just testing to see if he could trust me. He told me he had twice crashed single-engine planes and walked away from both events unharmed. He told me of his time in Algeria while serving in Army Intelligence and, handing me a well-worn copy of The Wretched of the Earth, offhandedly remarked that he had been an undercover agent tasked with supporting Algerian revolutionaries in their struggle for independence from France, had met and befriended Frantz Fanon, and that this book helped set him on his life’s path. I had to wonder, who was Jim Harithas? Perhaps he was just a talented storyteller? I was hooked and decided it didn’t matter; I was in for a pound and would believe whatever he told me.

On the day I met and photographed him in his office, he had what seemed to me the remnants of a black eye. I asked him about this, and he recounted a Rotterdam bar fight with the revered German artist Joseph Beuys, who was loudly criticizing America’s role in the Vietnam War. And even though Jim essentially agreed with Beuys, he thought it wrong for this former Nazi Air Force pilot to speak critically of the US. Words were exchanged, and then an all-out fight ensued.

One day, he brought me to a studio inside his house to show me a series of silver paintings. He then let me know he had invented a pseudonym, Joseph Brenman, and had been making these abstract paintings for a few years. He told me that he did this to demonstrate that the art world was corrupt and gullible by creating a successful artist that didn’t exist. He kept at it for many years.

When I asked him how he wound up at this small museum in Syracuse, he told me that he had quit his directorship at the Corcoran Gallery after a fight with his trustees over their cancelation of a Pablo Casals performance that Jim had planned. The Corcoran trustees opposed the great cellist’s openly-stated opposition to the Vietnam War and summarily scrapped the performance. Jim was proud to have quit and equally proud that his friend Barnett Newman withdrew a long-term loan of his great sculpture Broken Obelisk (1969). But the whole episode made Jim question the idea of a museum career, and he thought perhaps he’d leave the profession entirely. He went on to insist that he had no intention of continuing to work in museums, that they were inherently reactionary, and that he was through with them. But his wife went behind his back, applied for the Everson directorship, and convinced Jim to pursue the job. He had three daughters; they needed the income. The trustees of the newly built museum in downtown Syracuse were thrilled to offer him the position. Harithas decided to give it another try. In retrospect, I don’t think either of them knew what was in store.

I slowly came to understand that Jim was truly dedicated to a simple but profoundly radical musicological philosophy. “The art museum is a social instrument,” he told me and everyone in his circle of friends and acolytes. “Either you actively use it to help create a more just world, or it will remain another source of oppression.” And use it, he did.

He invited the local anti-war hero Daniel Berrigan to hold an ecumenical mass in the museum theater. He brought the embattled Marxist priest Ernesto Cardenal to Syracuse to help select Nicaraguan artists for an exhibition. He invited Angela Davis to lecture about the role that art played in the struggles for freedom around the world. And, of course, Yoko Ono’s hugely successful exhibition This Is Not Here was not only an extraordinary opportunity for the world to see this influential artist’s work in-depth, but it initiated the beginning of active collaboration with John Lennon and Yoko, the museum, and Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan and Onondaga Nation, in a highly public struggle to prevent the State of New York from taking a large swath Onondaga land for a massive highway expansion.

Jim’s commitment to social change wasn’t mere lawn-sign liberalism. It was a series of actions taken by an art museum director intended to redefine the museum’s role in what the literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha would later define as “a site for the contest of values and ideas.” It was evident to all paying attention that Jim loved art and art museums yet felt strongly that there was no such thing as apolitical art—every act reflected a political choice.

After less than a year at the Everson, Jim convinced the warden of the nearby Auburn maximum-security prison to provide him with carte blanche access to the facility and unimpeded permission to conduct an art workshop for this institution housing an overwhelmingly African American population. I often accompanied him there, and no single experience has ever had more of an impact on my understanding of Jim or the world as he saw it. And nothing exemplified Jim’s fearless commitment to racial justice than his insistence that the museum had to serve this population as well as other previously ignored communities. I observed at close range how he inspired these men through wide-ranging conversations about art. He described the creative act as a step towards empowerment. Jim talked about how art could change the world. And he listened to them talk about their lives, and what it meant to be incarcerated Black men in America.

Together, they produced From Within, an exhibition of the paintings created in the workshop. The show contained a mix of abstract paintings and portraits (primarily of Angela Davis). Jim somehow arranged for it to be viewed in Washington, DC, at the National Portrait Gallery after its Everson debut. Two of the men from our workshop lived with me for a year after their parole release. Jim gave them jobs as museum guards. A third worked as my assistant, later becoming the museum’s second Curator of Video Art.

Like others in Jim’s circle, I became increasingly engaged in the idea that an art museum could do far more than collect, preserve, and educate. It never occurred to me that an art museum might be where I could do socially meaningful work. Yet I saw first-hand that what mattered to Jim was his devotion to artists—especially those on the margins or who had been overlooked—and a commitment to the full range of communities the museum was obligated to serve.

In this respect, I will always be grateful that Jim insisted that I learn directly from artists. He introduced me to dozens of great artists like Yoko Ono, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, Ron Gorchov, and Nam June Paik. One day he said to me, “you need to see what it means to be a painter, what it takes to make a painting.“ Jim bought a portable video camera and recorder and assigned me to videotape Norman Bluhm making an abstract painting from start to finish while expounding on the process. He had me do the same with Kenneth Callahan, Adolph Gottlieb, and others.

During the installation of Joan Mitchell’s first major museum exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, Jim asked me to be the artist’s drinking companion and listen to her. Joan understood how difficult and often humiliating it was to be a woman artist in an overwhelmingly male-dominated art world. She had a lot to say. I listened and tried to understand how this great artist could make works of extraordinary beauty that transcended her anger and pain.

Ron Gorchov was both an innovative painter and a great teacher. He quickly understood that I had much to learn but was pleased that I loved listening to his stories about his student days in Chicago. He made me a Xerox copy of John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art, a long out-of-print book by the White Russian emigree painter that had been central to the development of Gorchov’s approach to art. He used it as a textbook and talked me through it, page by page. We made the book available to visitors to his exhibition.

Spending nearly a year assisting Jim with Yoko Ono’s first museum survey exhibition led to my life-long friendship with the artist. It also began my fascination with the world of Fluxus, which continues to this day. But beyond that and the celebrity madness we did our best to encourage and manage, This is Not Here was about Yoko’s life-long engagement with peace activism and the power of love. And though much has been written about this landmark exhibition, what may only be apparent to those involved was that it was Jim’s way of opening the Syracuse community to new ways of thinking about the power of art to change the world.

And then there was Nam June Paik. Jim took my taunt seriously in our initial meeting. Though I had intended that off-handed insult as a simple provocation, I had indeed meant it. At the time, I didn’t realize that Jim already understood quite well that new technologies like video would inevitably create paradigmatic social change, which would necessitate changes in the structure and purpose of museums and many other social constructs.

Working closely with Paik was an absolute privilege. Like Jim, Paik was deeply concerned with how technology could and would be misused and how it would change social relationships and the institutions that reflect them. Jim’s notions of a radically engaged museum and Nam June’s equally radical notion of subverting technology resulted in remarkable conversations, the formation of the world’s first museum video art program, and Paik’s first survey exhibition, Videa ’n’ Videology.

Appointing me as Curator of Video Art, Jim introduced me to the Chilean architect, sculptor, and video pioneer Juan Downey, the founders of Radical Software Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot, their friend and co-founder of Raindance, Frank Gillette, Shigeko Kubota, Peter Campus, Andy Mann, and so many others. Like many of us fortunate to play a supporting role in Jim’s universe, I remain grateful for these gifts.

I do not doubt that Jim’s support and tutelage established the trajectory of my museum career. I’ve never hidden that before working as Jim’s assistant and later as the Video Curator, I had no formal museum training or schooling in art history. It still confounds me that he had so much faith in me.

After being fired from the Everson for presenting Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theatre, Jim was quickly offered directorship of the beleaguered Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. We discussed whether I would join him there and decided against it. Paul Schimmel, then a precocious student at Syracuse, followed him to Texas. With Jim as his mentor, he became one of the most productive and controversial art museum curators of the late twentieth century, forming deep relationships with a wide range of artists in pure Harithas style.

I was offered the job of Deputy Director of the Long Beach Museum of Art, where I would find support to create a video art exhibition and collection program, an artist’s video editing facility, and help design a new city museum—one built with a television channel integrated physically and programmatically. The city abandoned the museum project, and I knew it was time for me to find another job. With Jim’s support, his friend Jim Elliott hired me as Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Berkeley Art Museum. My Berkeley job led to directorships at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Whitney, and SFMOMA, where Jim’s ongoing advice and support became even more critical. As I headed into a different level of museum work, one with far broader responsibilities and subject to internal politics and complex community pressures, I was glad to have Jim’s help understanding and navigating. And though Jim had a notorious take-no-prisoners approach to museum politics, his advice to me was far more nuanced and instrumental.

After saving the Houston CAM from a disastrous flood and the threat of dissolution, he was once again pushed out of a directorship for insisting that the city needed an independent contemporary museum. But he didn’t leave Houston. Instead, with his wife Ann, Jim created his own privately funded institution, the Station Museum. He produced a new model of a hyper-politically engaged museum, one that fearlessly served artists and the Houston community.

While struggling through several rounds of cancer surgery and treatment, he continued to run the Station Museum. And though I had left museum work, returned to New York, and started teaching, we remained in touch. It was during this time that I was glad to bring him a gift. I connected him with the Australian painter and documentary filmmaker George Gittoes. An anti-war artist, Gittoes had spent nearly half a century working in war zones. His work is about art’s power, especially when made under the most brutal and terrible conditions. I introduced them in a three-way phone call, and within a few minutes, Jim offered George a complete survey exhibition. I knew Jim would immediately appreciate George’s courageous work as an artist/witness.

Though he had cancer for quite a long time, Jim didn’t complain; he just kept working. I spoke with him and visited him as often as I could. On his last visit to New York City, Yoko Ono’s MoMA retrospective was in its final weeks. I called Yoko and asked if she would accompany Jim through the exhibition. She and Jim were age-mates, and though healthy at the time, she was beginning to show signs of slowing down. Still, she responded enthusiastically and immediately planned for them to spend several hours together at the museum. The MoMA retrospective took place nearly fifty years after This Is Not Here at the Everson, and the sight of the two of them slowly strolling through the exhibition and talking together was quite moving.

Seeing Jim begin to fail physically was alarming, but somehow, he managed to live to the age of 90. I thought about him often and called to keep in touch, to let him know in no uncertain terms how I loved and admired him, and how grateful I was for all he had done—for me and others. But after these calls, I returned to my questions about who he was and what had set him on this path. For as voluble as he was, he kept many things hidden.

I knew he was the proud Greek-American son and grandson of career military men and came from Lewiston, a city in Maine. This I knew. And I could never forget that he said he did anti-colonial espionage work during the 1950s. He had told me that he wanted to be an artist as a young man, but his father scoffed at the idea. And I recall my surprise when I learned that as a teenager, he was sent to Institut Montana, an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. This seemed so unlike him and at odds with the man I thought I knew. But I assumed that it was a part of his life that he chose to bury. I was not surprised that when I asked him about it, he just shrugged it off and spoke no further.

It wasn’t until his memorial that his older sister’s eulogy filled in the missing details. For Jim’s father was not just career-military, he was a military judge during the Nuremberg Trials and was stationed in Germany for years after the war ended. That was why he was sent to a private school in Switzerland. This would ensure that he received proper education nearby, yet far from the trials of monstrous Nazi generals and Holocaust administrators. He was kept far from the horrors until his father thought that as a fifteen-year-old, he should see with his own eyes the level of inhumanity of which humanity was capable—and took him to see the concentration camp at Dachau. I wish I’d had the opportunity to speak with him about that experience, but he kept that to himself like so much else in his complex and complicated life.

I and so many will always be grateful for what we did see: a man who worked till the day he died exploring and celebrating the wellspring of humanity that flows from artists’ work and the transformative power of art.

Rest in power, Jim.