Grady Memorial Hospital the two boys.
decided to devote himself to art. He became proficient with the “stripped classical” style while attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1930 and 1933. Returning to Atlanta he opened his own studio, but in 1936 accepted a post to teach at Georgia Tech, where he remained for the next 36 years. The salary he collected was enough to support his wife and two daughters, but he also had time to create his own artwork and accept commissions.
Harris attended Carrollton High School in the years just after World War I and was voted “best dressed, most popular and the biggest flirt.” His study in art remained strong and he had hoped to go from Carrollton to New York and study illustration. His father, however, vetoed that idea, perhaps insisting that he looked for steadier financial prospects. Thus, Harris arrived on the campus of Georgia Institute of Technology where he studied architecture. It was there he found a way to combine building with a love for art. The 1920s was the heyday of architectural sculpture, in which decorative sculptural elements are made part of the building itself. The Greeks did this with friezes added to such buildings as the Parthenon, but it did not happen much in America until the Art Deco period. One of the leading influences of the time was Lee Oscar Lawrie, who created works for Rockefeller Center in New York. There were many styles of architectural sculpture floating around at the end of the Jazz Age, and Harris was soaking up these influences wherever he could. Shortly after graduating from Tech in 1928, Harris toured Europe’s museums and art centers and then travelled in Egypt, where the ancients had first developed bas-relief sculpture as a high art.
Harris was a master of many forms of art, but the style of virtually every piece harkens back to the styles he learned in his youth.
the smoothed surface of the stone. The simple and stylized human figures he found on Egyptian monuments echoed the “stripped classicism” artistic movement that was then current. These carved figures were reminiscent of classical statues, but more abstract and geometric, in keeping with Art Deco. During the Great Depression, artists with the Works Progress Administration incorporated these styles in many public buildings.
Bas-relief is a type of stone sculpture in which the shapes that form the outline of a figure are After a short stint as a draftsman with one of carved so that they are only slightly higher than the state’s leading architectural firms, Harris
One of the first pieces he did was commissioned for Georgia Tech as a gift from the Classes of 1929 and 1930: a large stained glass window for Brittain Dining Hall, a building straight out of Hogwarts located across the street from Bobby Dodd Stadium. Each morning, today’s students eat breakfast bathed in the multicolored light cast from this huge window, the panels of which represent branches of engineering, technological achievements and campus life. Harris also worked in metal, and a good many of these works are medallions – including his design for a bronze medal made for the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as 39th President of the United States. Other sculptures were bronzes, and one of his favorite subjects was St. Francis of Assisi. A tall, minimalist bronze called “Saint Francis” is one of several of his sculptures on display at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, S.C. Closer to home, “The Cross,” a May/June 2015
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