Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard marks the first standalone museum presentation of the fully realized indoor citrus grove conceived and designed in 1972 by artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (1932–2022.
This project explores the need for a productive and sustainable food system in an imagined future where natural farming practices are obsolete and cannot be taken for granted. Stretching across the Museum's eighth-floor gallery, this installation of eighteen live citrus trees rooted in self-contained planters with individual lighting systems reflects a survivalist alternative in the face of environmental decline.
The Harrisons began their decades-long collaboration in the early 1970s, inspired by emerging environmentalist movements and a growing social awareness of the planet's vulnerable ecosystems. They brought distinct backgrounds in education and sculpture to their shared creative practice and developed an approach to artmaking that was grounded in cross-disciplinary research and yielded projects that served simultaneously as works of art and calls to action.
Portable Orchard is one of seven Survival Pieces developed by the Harrisons in the early 1970s, each of which proposes an alternative to an existing food production system—from a hog pasture to a shrimp farm. The Harrisons planned for future implementation of these projects by making detailed instruction drawings; the Museum's recent acquisition of one such drawing was the impetus for this presentation and is on view in the galleries, along with additional archival materials.
Portable Orchard reveals the prescient quality of the Harrisons' research into food sustainability as well as the successes and failures of artificial systems built to sustain life—issues that are even more relevant today than they were fifty years ago when the project was first conceived.
Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard is organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant. Generous support for Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.
As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection--arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world--is the Museum's key resource. The Museum's signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country's leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.
Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik in 1982). Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing (with the San Jose Museum of Art) in order to increase access to its renowned collection.
Designed by architect Renzo Piano and situated between the High Line and the Hudson River, the Whitney's new building vastly increases the Museum’s exhibition and programming space, providing the first comprehensive view of its unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary American art.
