Biography

Artist Harry Powers has played a vital role in the Northern California artistic community for over fifty years. As a professor and coordinator of the spatial arts program at San Jose State University, he was instrumental in reviving the school’s foundry and metal sculpture program, and he has lectured and exhibited his work around the world. Over the course of his career, Powers has embraced the new materials, processes, and information sources that are a result of technological innovation. In addition, his deep reverence for historical inquiry and observation epitomize the pioneering spirit of a man whose impact has been widely felt.

Powers was born in 1927 in Boise, Idaho, where he accompanied his father on frequent fishing and camping trips, fostering his budding interest in geology, astronomy, and primal cultures. He vividly remembers gazing into the starry night sky and wondering about the vast unknown: “Existential questions of the beginnings of time, the fluid development of the earth’s surface, and man’s place on this planet must have spun in [my] dreams,” he now says of his own childhood.1 Powers earned a B.A. in painting from San Jose State College (now University) in 1951, and enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University the following year. There he received a dual M.A. degree in painting and art history and was mentored by Karl Birkemeyer, an art historian who helped to inspire Powers’s passion for architecture and art of the Italian Renaissance, especially of the painter Paolo Uccello. Powers joined the art department faculty at San Jose State in 1964, where he taught for more than thirty years.

In 1980, Powers spent a one-semester sabbatical in Florence, Italy, which reinforced his interest in art history and the technological innovators of the Renaissance—especially Galileo whose early astronomical telescopes and drawings he stumbled upon in the city’s science museum. References to Renaissance art history and cosmology began to appear in Powers’s acrylic and plastic works of the late 1960s and 1970s, and have recurred frequently in his welded steel and bronze sculptures since the 1980s. One of his most recent series honors Galileo, whose controversial discoveries led to the scientist’s eventual arrest and excommunication from the Catholic church. Sidereus Nuncius, commonly translated as “The Starry Messenger,” is the title of the essay in which Galileo documented his lunar and Jovian observations, which Powers borrowed for the title of his sculpture. As in many of Powers’s works that refer to the Renaissance, the format of his Sidereus Nuncius—Galileo’s Starry Messenger (1999) features a ribbonlike bronze pilaster, which according to the artist, has been metaphorically “peeled from the building and twisted in a dreamlike way so that it is free to stand.”2 The sculpture’s curvature also evokes the contrapposto stance idealized by Renaissance sculptors. The surface of Sidereus Nuncius is marked with astronomical drawings based on Galileo’s original illustrations, and Powers has recently begun to incorporate digital images generated from the contemporary Galileo and Hubble space telescopes into his works. Powers re-created one of Galileo’s circular orbits, coated it in gold leaf, and placed it hovering atop the sculpture.

Powers has always admired Galileo’s courageous, independent thinking and his willingness to document and publish his beliefs—even if they were not openly accepted at the time. Similarly, Powers channels his own thoughts and ideas into sculptures that encourage reflection and stimulate the imaginations of his viewers. Like philosopher Suzanne Langer, Powers believes that “art is that which makes the felt and the sensed tangible so that others might contemplate it.”3 Each of Powers’s sculptures successfully does just that. —A.W.

1. Artist’s statement, 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


An accomplished painter and sculptor, Powers was a professor in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University for more than 30 years. As coordinator of SJSU’s Spatial Arts Program, he is justly credited with reviving the faltering foundry and metal sculpture program. Powers earned his BA in Painting from San Jose State College and MA in Art History and Painting from Stanford University. This work will be the second Harry Powers piece in the Museums’ permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2000)

---

Your current search criteria is: Artist is "Harry Powers".