Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel @ Bolinas Museum

From October 31, 2026 through January 3, 2027, Bolinas Museum presents Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel, a retrospective celebrating the life and work of the artist and longtime Bolinas resident Paul Harris (1925–2018).

Spanning six decades, the exhibition brings together artworks and archival materials, revealing the expansive interdisciplinary practice of an artist who moved fluidly between media, figuration and abstraction, and the intimate and monumental. 

The exhibition’s title comes from art critic Robert Pincus-Witten’s memorable 1967 observation in Artforum, “The boy sews like an angel.” This phrase captures an essential aspect of Harris’s oeuvre—its technical ingenuity, idiosyncratic humor, and the use of a domestic process to transform everyday materials into something profound. 

Trained as a painter, Harris never stayed within the boundaries of a single medium, working across fabric, bronze, papier-mâché, wood, string, crayon, pencil, and lithography. After moving with his family to Bolinas in 1963, he began making colorful, hand-sewn figures from found materials. Mattresses, clothing, furniture, and other remnants of everyday life were the starting points for these imaginative sculptures that were playful, mysterious, and surreal. 

Bolinas became central to Harris’s creative life. For most of his years in the town, his home was also his studio, where artmaking unfolded alongside family life, gardening, friendships, and the rhythms of the surrounding coastal landscape. The artist’s fabric sculptures in this exhibition were made in his Bolinas Lagoon studio just steps from the museum. His bronzes were often installed in the landscape around his home and studio, while the beaches, gardens, and daily life of the community became recurring subjects in his drawings and paintings.

Organized with the Paul Harris Estate in celebration of the artist’s centennial, Paul Harris: The Boy Sews Like An Angel invites viewers to rediscover an artist whose curiosity, humor, and willingness to take risks transformed the ordinary into the unexpected. In turn, Bolinas gave Harris the space, landscape, materials, and community in which his singular vision could take root. His work remains as a lasting testament to an artist who found endless possibilities in the everyday.