Draft:Harry Lum

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From Abstraction to Activism

"I did what I wanted to do all my life."[1]

Harry Lum (1930 – 2022) was an American painter and professor. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Immersed and evolving alongside multiple California art movements, Lum’s stylistic legacy lies in his later political realist work. Informed by his time as a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne and influenced by Bay Area Figurative painters (Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner, and Elmer Bischoff), Lum’s work depicts stylized human forms that effuse emotion, atmosphere, and the physicality of artistic labor. Layers of embedded historic references to marginalization and resistance mirror Lum’s own grappling and invite the viewer’s engagement with the weight of America’s contested histories. Lum’s four decades of abstract art invites a meditative grappling with human form, while his latter two decades of figurative art offer a provocative critique of the same America in a new millennium.

Grossmont College's Hyde Gallery Director Alex DeCosta noted the weight of revisiting these moments—especially as dismantling of the Department of Education and erasure of histories are underway—"it’s important that we do not forget about the atrocities that, as 'the good guys,' have [been] committed.”

Art Historian Karen Hjalmarson discussed in Grossmont's Exhibition Catalogue, "Some of Lum’s most provocative and humorous pieces emerged during the later portion of his life, from 2000 to 2019. Lum’s sharp intellect attempted to explain the horrors and cruelty of the new millennium. Many of his paintings from this period were both satirical and indignant."

Biography

Harry Lum was born in 1930 in Walnut Creek, California. In 1933, Harry’s family moved to the tenements of San Francisco's vibrant Chinatown where he spent his youth. One of four children raised by Cantonese-speaking immigrants, Lum was confronted with the emotional and social realities of a haunted America. Harry graduated from Lowell High School and enrolled in chemistry at University of California at Berkeley. Encountering films about the Holocaust in one of his classes, he found himself drawn to the power of art and gave up chemistry, receiving his BA in 1953 and an MA in 1954. Emulating an older generation of the Bay Area Figurative painters, like Paul Wonner and Richard Diebenkorn, Harry saw figuration as a way to explore what it meant to be human.

After a brief stint in the US Army, Harry was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris at the Sorbonne from 1959 to 1960. Having studied in depth the drawings of the great French artist, Jean-Baptist Camille Corot, Harry was inspired to begin his experimentation with abstraction. Upon his return to the US, he took up teaching at U.C. Berkeley and the Richmond Art Center from 1961-1972. From the early to mid 1970s, Lum created mixed media lightboxes that evoke the shimmering light and expanses of California, where he spent majority of his life. During this period through the mid 1980s, Lum experimented with mixed media assemblages—combining fiberglass, handmade paper, and hardware—as well as began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings and minimalist works on canvas. In 1972, he moved to San Diego where he was offered a full-time position at Grossmont College in El Cajon—he taught at Grossmont for 23 years, retiring in 1995 to move to the small Northern California town of Nevada City.

Harry's former Grossmont student and later close friend Carole Soborovski shared her love for his fiberglass pieces and his lightboxes, as they "reminded [her] of the light and landscape around his home [in Harbison Canyon]." "His desire to have space and live in the wilderness stemmed from the opression he felt growing up in a cramped tenement with his brothers and parents in San Francisco's Chinatown," Soborovski reflected. He spent his last two decades of life tucked away in his skylit Nevada City studio, producing some of his most poignant political works. Uniting his training in Bay Area Figuration and Abstract Expressionism with his pressing political concerns and anti-war stance, Harry crafted works that addressed provided a provocative critique of the same America in a new millennium of failures and successes.

Although Harry most identified as an artist and educator, putting the bulk of his energy into those two activities, he still exhibited regularly on the West Coast throughout his six-decade painting career. He mounted solo exhibitions at Mill College Art Museum, Oakland, San Jose Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Richmond Art Center, Grossmont College, El Cajon, 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, Legion of Honor and De Young Museums, San Francisco, San Diego Museum of Art, and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.

In 2022, Harry Lum passed away, just shy of his 92nd birthday.

In the years following Harry's death, Grossmont College's Hyde Gallery Director Alex DeCosta began developing the first major retrospective of former Grossmont Professor Harry Lum's work—From Abstraction to Activism was mounted in the spring of 2025. While the exhibition ran from February 3 to March 6, the exhibition catalogue is available at hydeartgallery.com or at https://www.harrylumart.com/grossmont-pamphlet.

Remaining poignant today, Lum’s work—entrenched in his intellect, wit, and compassion—renders with fearless honesty the physicality and discomfort of residing in a profoundly harsh America. 30 years after his retirement from the community college, Harry continues to "inspire, challenge, and educate students at Grossmont."