Paul Harris

Paul Harris (November 5, 1925 – May 13, 2018) was an American sculptor and lithographer. He worked in a variety of media, but is best known for his life-sized stuffed and upholstered female figures.

Early life

Harris was born in Orlando, Florida. His father, Julian Harris worked as a broker for an orange farmer; his mother, Dorothy Haul, died from unknown causes when he was five years old, and he lived with his maternal grandparents until 1936, when his father remarried. His father's new wife, Helga Ebsen, and her sister Vilma were both dancers. Helga taught him to dance and she encouraged his interest in art. He spent the summer of 1943 with Helga and Vilma in Pacific Palisades, California, where he went to classes at the Chouinard Art Institute and worked as a riveter at Douglas Aircraft. During the war, Harris made many drawings of the sailors he served with on the Ault. On September 2, 1945, his ship was docked next to the , where the signing of the Japanese surrender took place, and Harris made a drawing of the ceremony. In 2017, he published these sketches in a book. He also taught at Stanford University, SUNY New Paltz, and the Rhode Island School of Design. received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, was a visiting artist at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Baltimore, and taught at New York University. The Lanyon Gallery, Palo Alto, California, 1965 Berkeley Gallery, Berkeley, California, 1965; The Candy Store Gallery, Folsom, California, 1967; the William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, 1969, 1971, 1987; Galerie Thelen, Essen, Germany, 1970; Galerie Redmann, Berlin, Germany, 1990, 1995; Fresno Museum of Art, Fresno, California, 1999; Yellowstone Art Museum, 2001. Harris's work was also included in two group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City: "Sculpture USA, 1959" and "Hans Hofmann and his Students" 1963.

Harris's work appears in the permanent collections of University of California Berkeley Art Museum; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut The Museum of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Neue Galerie der Stadt Aachen, Aachen, Germany; Montclair State University Collection, Montclair, New Jersey; the Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California; Although his body of work includes bronze sculptures, paintings, and lithographs, he is most known for his life-sized stuffed and upholstered female figures. Several of his lithographs from Tamarind are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Beginning in 1964, he spent much of his career working from his studio in Bolinas, California. He retired from teaching in 1992.

Publications and awards In addition to the Fulbright and the Guggenheim fellowships, Harris also won the Neallie Sullivan award from the San Francisco Art Association, and received a Lebovitz Foundation grant. His wide-ranging interests included dance, and he collaborated on a ballet called A False Alarm on the Nightbell Once Answered, based on "The Country Doctor," a story by Franz Kafka. He published a collection of short stories, and his drawings made during World War II were published in 2017 by Wrongtree Press.