Grossmont College’s Hyde Art Gallery is holding “From Abstraction to Activism: Harry Lum’s Later Works, 2000- 2020” from Feb. 3 through March 6. A Gallery reception will be held on Feb. 11 from 4-6 p.m.
Spanning six decades, Lum’s powerful artistic legacy culminated in works that directly confronted pressing social and political issues: the Jim Crow South, Asian American discrimination, forced institutionalization, post-9/11 American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflicts. While these later works represent his most overt political statements, themes of social justice thread throughout his career, beginning with his earliest abstract paintings of the 1950s.
“From Abstraction to Activism,” presents the first major retrospective of this important artist’s work since his passing in 2022. The exhibition, presented by the Hyde Art Gallery at Grossmont College where Lum taught for over two decades (1972- 1995), shows his most politically charged works, created during the last 20 years of his life.
Spanning six decades, Lum’s powerful artistic legacy culminated in works that directly confronted pressing social and political issues: the Jim Crow South, Asian American discrimination, forced institutionalization, post-9/11 American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflicts. While these later works represent his most overt political statements, themes of social justice thread throughout his career, beginning with his earliest abstract paintings of the 1950s.
Lum strongly identified as an artist and educator, putting the bulk of his energy into those two activities. Still, over his six-decade painting career, Lum exhibited regularly on the West Coast, mounting solo exhibitions at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, San Jose Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Richmond Art Center, Grossmont College, and at the Berkeley Gallery and Dana Reich Gallery, in San Francisco. He was also included in many group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Mills College Art Museum, Richmond Art Center, Palace of the Legion of Honor and De Young Museum, San Francisco, San Diego Museum of Art, and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.
Lum was born in 1930 in Walnut Creek, California, the fourth son of Chinese immigrant parents. His family moved to San Francisco in 1933, and he spent his youth in the city’s vibrant Chinatown. Lum graduated from Lowell High School and enrolled at University of California at Berkeley. Encountering films about the Holocaust in one of his classes, he eventually gave up chemistry to study art, receiving his BA in 1953 and an MA in 1954. Influenced by an older generation of the Bay Area Figurative painters, like Paul Wonner and Richard Diebenkorn, Lum saw figuration as a means “to explore what it meant to be human.”
After a stint in the Army, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris from 1959 to 1960. Studying the drawings of the great French artist, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, led Lum to experiment with abstraction and upon his return, while he took up teaching at U.C. Berkeley and the Richmond Art Center from 1961-1972. In 1972, he accepted a full-time position at Grossmont College in El Cajon, where he taught until his retirement in 1995, after which he relocated to Nevada City, California.
The Hyde Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges this generous loan of paintings by the Harry Lum Estate. For more information about the artist, please visit www.harrylumart. com.
All Hyde Art Gallery exhibitions and events are free and open to the public. Visit www. hydeartgallery.com for more information.
