The Paul Harris Figures Were Sewn on Wharf Road. The Bolinas Museum Had to Borrow Them Back.

The figure sits on a bare metal chair frame. It has a stuffed cloth body, a twisted torso, and no legs or face. Paul Harris called it Woman Looking Out to Sea and made it in 1964 and 1965. The sea in the title was a short walk from where he sewed it. Today the piece belongs to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Harris's sons, Christopher and Nicholas, gave it to that collection. For the next several weeks it is on loan to a room in Bolinas, a few steps from the studio where it was made.

That trip back home is the point of Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel, the Bolinas Museum's centennial retrospective, which is on view through January 3, 2027. Pieces that now belong to museums in Berkeley and Fresno are back on Wharf Road for one winter.

A Studio on Wharf Road, a Gallery in Manhattan

Harris arrived with his family in 1963. In 1964 and 1965 he was sewing in a studio at 105 Wharf Road, and the Paul Harris Estate's announcement of the show includes a photograph of him at work there. The museum's own exhibition text says the fabric sculptures were made in his Bolinas Lagoon studio "just steps from the museum," which sits at 48 Wharf Road.

The work went to New York almost right away. The Poindexter Gallery gave Harris a solo exhibition from December 20, 1966, to January 14, 1967. Both Woman Looking Out to Sea and Woman Giving Her Greeting, a 1964 cloth-on-metal piece, were in that show. In the March 1967 issue of Artforum, the critic Robert Pincus-Witten wrote that Harris, "in these large stitched and stuffed dolls … displays an accomplished sense of planar simplification and supple, surface modulation … The boy sews like an angel."

That last line gives the show its title. Today much of Harris's work sits in museum collections far from Wharf Road. The Point Reyes Light's 2018 obituary lists Harris's work in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

What Came Back for the Centennial

The estate calls this the largest survey of Harris in more than 25 years. It has nearly 40 works in pencil, crayon, papier-mâché, fabric, bronze and lithography, shown alongside archival and studio material. The work fills the museum's historic buildings and extends into its outdoor courtyards. KQED's fall arts guide picked it as one of the season's shows to see.

A few pieces show how far the work traveled and how much of it is tied to this town:

• Woman Looking Out to Sea, 1964–65. Stuffed cloth on a metal chair frame, 43 by 26 by 31 inches. It is on loan exclusively from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
• Woman Giving Her Greeting, 1964. Cloth on metal, on loan from the Fresno Art Museum. Curator Jessica Shaefer describes it in the catalogue as a "hand-sewn robe, opened and askew to reveal one exposed breast, palms raised theatrically in what could be surprised delight, magnanimous welcome, or fearful defense."
• Standing Man, 1960. Harris's first work in bronze, seven feet tall.
• Woman Bending Over, 1978. Bronze and paint. Jessica Holmes, former deputy director of the Calder Foundation, notes in the catalogue its "cartoonish proportions of the swell and scale of Harris's fabric sculptures of women."
• The Way Down to The Sea, 1983, and Shells in Grey Bowl I, 1999. Works on paper with built-up color that show Bolinas itself.

Harris once explained why he worked in cloth at all. "I couldn't afford bronze, and I don't think I had the physical structure for working in stone," he told an interviewer, as quoted in the estate's announcement. His wife, Marguerite Harris, told the Point Reyes Light the same thing about the cloth women, some of which went to the 1965 New York World's Fair: "We didn't have enough money to cast them." So the sewing that earned the Artforum line started as a way to keep costs down.

Shaefer is the museum's executive director as well as its curator, and in the estate's announcement she frames the show around its location. "Bringing his work together here in Bolinas, just steps from where so much of it was created, offers a rare opportunity to celebrate both his remarkable artistic legacy and the profound influence of this place on his practice," she said.

The Bronzes Grew Out of the Mesa

Most of the bronze work happened up the hill, away from the Wharf Road sewing studio. In 1963 Harris, his sons, and local laborers built a two-story house on Ocean Parkway with a view of the Pacific, with the kitchen upstairs and the studio below. In the rear atelier, the Light reported, the wooden floors were covered in layers of splattered wax from making the positives for bronze castings. The yard held clay originals and plaster molds among lemon, grapefruit, sour orange and plum trees.

The estate's announcement says many of the bronzes "were conceived of and installed" in the grounds around that home and studio. Shaefer notes that "traces of wax still mark the studio floor." The house is a private residence, and it matters here only as the setting where these pieces were made. The estate's announcement names the 1986 Puella and the 1989 Anna Turning among the bronzes that show his delight in the material.

That fits what the museum's text says about the town's role. Harris's home was also his studio, and his art was made "alongside family life, gardening, friendships," with the beaches and daily life of the community showing up again and again in his drawings and paintings. Some of those sheets hang in this show, including The Way Down to The Sea from 1983.

Why the Family Came, and What It Left on the Town

The Harrises found Bolinas through a Navy connection. Harris had served on the destroyer U.S.S. Ault in the Pacific, and on a trip to California the family visited the ship's captain at his home in Bolinas. According to the Light, Paul took to the place immediately, while Marguerite worried there would be no work in so small and remote a town.

Marguerite, known in town as Meme, became part of a different Bolinas story. The estate's announcement says she led the 1971 moratorium on new water permits. Orville Schell, a former New Yorker contributor and Bolinas resident, wrote about that fight in The Town That Fought to Save Itself, published in 1976. She later earned a master's degree in history from Montana State University. Her 1977 thesis on environmental protectionism in Bolinas, the Light reported, traced the moratorium's unintended effects on the town. That moratorium still shapes the town today, as we covered in how a water meter can outweigh the view in Bolinas.

Rich Kalin of the Paul Harris Estate, speaking in the estate's announcement, credits Meme Harris, who lived from 1929 to 2023, with "the foresight and wisdom" that made the legacy work possible. He also thanks Christopher and Nicholas Harris for their contributions.

Two Days in Oakland, Five in Bolinas

Harris kept most of his week in Bolinas by fitting his teaching into two days. On the recommendation of his close friend Richard Diebenkorn, he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts for nearly 25 years, and the estate dates his time in the sculpture department to 1968 through 1992. The Light described how he arranged it. He taught on Mondays and Tuesdays, slept in a small apartment near the college, and spent the rest of the week working in his home studio. "He wanted to put his energy into his work, not making money," his son Nicholas told the paper.

That teaching job is how the show gets its one event outside Bolinas. On Wednesday, December 2, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., California College of the Arts will host a free public evening on Harris. Shaefer gives the keynote, followed by a screening of newly digitized footage from Harris's experimental Sculpture Theater class, filmed around the 1970s. Critic and curator Glen Helfand then moderates a conversation with artists Diedrick Brackens and Sarah Hotchkiss, both alumni of the college. The event is listed on the CCA calendar, and RSVPs are free. The estate notes that the evening is part of a series on the college's legacy as it nears the end of its final academic year.

Seeing It Before the Loans Go Home

The museum is open Friday from 1 to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission to the galleries is always free. The show closes January 3, 2027, a Sunday. After that, Woman Looking Out to Sea goes back to Berkeley and Woman Giving Her Greeting goes back to Fresno.

If you're bringing guests out for a holiday weekend, here's an order that follows the show's argument:

1. Start with the sewn figures from the 1960s, the work that made Harris's name in New York.
2. Move to the bronzes, starting with Standing Man and ending with the later Puella and Anna Turning.
3. Finish with the works on paper that show Bolinas itself, such as The Way Down to The Sea.
4. Step out into the courtyards, where the show continues outdoors.

For more on the town around the museum, browse our Bolinas neighborhood page.

A home in Bolinas often comes with a history like this one: a studio, a garden, a family that helped shape the town. If you care about that history, whether you're placing an heirloom property or looking for one, B.G. Bates can help you tell it well. Begin your West Marin story. Connect with B.G. Bates.