Board of Directors
Les Harris (Postumously)
Sally Harris

Bonnie Allan
Laurel Durenberger
Barbara Gray
Heather Harris
Holly Harris
Nancy Rouse

Believers:
Virginia Adams
Lane Berk
Nancy Patz Blaustein
Cynthia & Sidney Brower
Rufus & Herbert Davis
Nancy Dorman
Chris Dreisbach
Lois Blum Feinblatt
Neal Friedlander
Joanna Golden
Dana Harris-Trovato
Betsy & Stanley Heuisler
Joseph Holtzman
Julian Lapides
Jonna & Fred Lazarus
Amy Macht
Mr. & Mrs. Frank Martin
Stanley Mazaroff
Anne Pomykala
Marlyn Robinson
Bill Struever
Helen Szablya
Anna Trifillis
Barbara and Richard Turk
Gary Vikan
Leonard & Lindley Weinberg
Viginia West
Elaine Wolman

In 1977 Les Harris set out to explore the world within the confines of six rooms in a fallout shelter in Baltimore, MD.  His exploration was painted luxuriously over 300 canvases and sculptures in 10 years.

During the following ten years the collection grew into an awesome installation, clearly united by contemporary consciousness. His paintings grew over into their meticulously sculpted frames and beyond, demanding new corresponding walls. His floors became mere corridors, disguised by mirrors, cloth, wires, grids and tinsel, and together defrayed clear understanding.

While the old building now proudly stands renovated as the corner-stone of the new Clipper Park, Harris moved his full body of work to a new space.  He created a whole new installation without obfuscation, as an attempt to uplift and free the work of gravity.

Les Harris began somewhere in the middle of time … painting Gothic Cathedrals. Architectural genius turned to Egyptian wonder as he explored the ancient mysteries with his pen and brush and translated them into contemporary consciousness peering through the eyes of artists through the centuries. Time and space were irrelevant and non-local.

The labyrinth begins with the omega of mind, contemporary ideas and we wind our way back to the alpha and its majestic beginning.  The Labyrinth is now open on Sundays from 12-3 and by appointments.  Call for more info:  410/523-2574.

The Museum has had a very exciting year with many new and unique events:
• Visitors – Individuals, groups and events brought in nearly 1000 visitors this year;
• Study Guide – An all new Treasure Hunt was created to familiarize visitors with art by seeking images and identifying them in a self guided tour;
• Fundraiser – The second annual Hunt was the focus of our 2010 fundraiser. An Egyptian astrological chart was awarded to our winner with additional runner up prizes. Baltimore businesses gave generously to our live auction and we netted nearly $3000;
• Rheims Unveiling – Last year, hidden deep within the basement we found a new painting! We had the canvas stretched and presented it for the first time as we opened the museum last autumn. It now hangs proudly in the museum;
• Guest Speaker Series – Four wonderful speakers spoke this past Autumn including Gary Vikan, Chris Dreisbach, Herbert Bangs and Mary Brandes. Our spring speaker series included Frankie Hutton and a performance by Wayne Hankin. All came to the museum and shared ideas in meet and greet sessions; a wonderful forum for the exchange of ideas.
• America for the Arts has chosen Baltimore as the city of choice for their 50th anniversary. The Amaranthine was selected to orchestrate ARTventures, an urban tour, through the Clipper complex as part of the upcoming light rail tour on June 26, 2010;
• Journals – Years of journals have been transcribed to further understand and document the artwork. It has been a truly enlightening experience!
• Documentation – Through special task force meetings we have found a pressing need to sustain the works of Les Harris through documentation. We are now working with a photographer to capture every image within the labyrinth.
Looking to the future we have many projects on the horizon.
• Once photo documentation is complete we plan to merge images with collected thoughts and begin our search for a publisher;
• As a partner to this publication, an all cyber tour of the museum will be built;
• We are pursuing growing the speaker series into a “salon” with guest speakers musicians and artists; an idea often considered by Harris;
• Following journal transcription we plan to tackle the thousands of pages, handwritten and typed, of Harris’ book “Dwellers on the Thirteenth Floor”.
2009 was a wonderfully productive year, and 2010 is proving to be the same. However, these are challenging times and we invite you to join us to keep our vision strong with your contribution.
Thank you again for your ongoing support!
The Amaranthine Museum

The Amaranthine Museum
2010 Clipper Park Road
Baltimore, MD 21211
holoki@verizon.net
inscape2@verizon.net

Reality is occult.  By this I mean that beyond the apparent existence of our senses, there is a deeper, hidden reality, the stuff of which lends meaning to the seeming happenstance of our everyday lives.  We might call this extra-ordinary reality the product of Creative Intelligence.

Using this as a given, it becomes the function of art to express this intelligence.  To call attention to it and highlight it.  It is also art’s function to strive to become, if possible, both the synapse and the spark of understanding that bridges the gap between the self and the non-self, between the known and the unknown.  Art’s function has been to elevate and illuminate humanity.

These ideas and their realizations have been the work of my sixty some years of existence, my more than forty years as a professional artist.  In the last 13 years, these values have resulted in an artistic phenomenon as unique and endangered as the first of a species.

How does one presume to say that one is the vector through which a creation has come into being that is greater than its artist?  As singular as it is humbling, it defies explanation, demanding to be experienced.

The Labyrinth is about time and space & OTHER DIMENSIONS: The First Real Circus.  It offers the public the opportunity to view not only a work-in-progress but over a decade of effort concentrated into one whole-environmental installation.

Encompassing 2,000 square feet, and 250 individual works in 7 sub-environments, the viewer-become-participant wanders through a Labyrinth that is at the same time an Ouroborous.  Beginning and ending in the “birth canal,” the participator embarks on a journey beginning before the notion of time and winding from age to age – each glimpsed through the overlapping perceptions of artists throughout the millennia.  Glutted with its own images, the Serpent of art bites its own tail, poisoning itself so that it might be regenerated in the expanded consciousness of the participant who has progressed with the desire for understanding.

How did this come to be?  When I was very young, I did not know what an artist was, I only knew that I had to do things, make things, create things.  People began telling me I was an artist so often that I decided that I should discover just what art and being an artist was about.

As a person who came from a spiritual background, I have always held to spiritual values, if not to their religious trappings.  This put me, in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s – and even to this day, directly counter to the modern school of art.  I could not see art in terms of investments, how portfolio meant “financial assets,” or how art was to be the self-expression of crippled psyches and frustrated libidos.

But I never stopped making things.  Living in New York in my 20’s, I sold everything I painted.  (See slide 1-4. Note: the painting featured in slide 2 is in the Whitney Collection.)  I found that when I did not try to “express myself,” when I painted natural phenomenon, things worked.  But when I tried to paint “from myself”, my sense of structure would collapse and I would be left with something I could not call art.  This is not to say that my creative process was not influenced by my other occupations – designing ships interiors, dancing with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, being very much involved in theatre; acting, dancing, directing, designing & constructing sets. 

As I grew into my thirties, I had a young family, and needed a more regular income than that gained by exhibits and shows (see resume).  I still made my living through art, however, designing theatre sets and teaching art.

Over these years my paintings developed into two or more paintings filling the same canvas.  While still dealing with natural phenomenon, I now began to see, and portray, natural existence as an abstraction from the Real – the “nonlocal.”  I was not concerned, though, with eliminating the visual for pure abstraction, but of going through it.  The images which were being manifested on the canvases were the simultaneous extrapolations of the various natures of existential phenomenon through which Reality shone as a hidden counterweight. (Is there a simple way to say such a thing?!)

It was in 1976, the year of our nation’s bicentennial, that the tension between the surface appearance and substantial reality grew acute.  The next year, I retired from my teaching position to spend as much time as possible working out the expression of this tension – in painting, sculpting, constructing, whatever it demanded. My work was financed by my father-in-law, who shortly passed on, leaving me with considerable rented space filling with works which did not fit into the schemes of ordinary galleries.

While my father-in-law was still living, he took my family on a 6 week camping tour of Europe.  On this trip, I took hundreds of slides in an exploration of the aspiralling (if I might coin a phrase) ramifications of the Gothic expression of Pythagorean geometry.  Upon returning home, I discovered that almost all of the slides were overexposed!  Yet it was in those slides that I began to see how Reality could shine through the overexposed props of existential phenomenon, just as the super-brilliance of the stained glass windows blazed from the overexposed views of ribbing, groins, vaultings and buttresses.

In January, 1979, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go up the Nile by barge (slow boat).  As I stood atop the Temple of Hathor at Dendera I realized that our whole western civilization began with the Greeks as trying as best they could to imitate the unsurpassable glory that had once been ancient Egypt, and several millennia later the glory still shines through.

Shortly after returning home I lost the studio space; the landlord wanted to put his business offices there.  Because many of the paintings were too large and heavy to move, I made creates for them and just left them stacked.  However, even this apparent setback became a formative experience.  Working in my basement, I created 12 Egyptian charts.  In those charts the multi-layering of symbols of cosmology, Egyptology, numerology, astrology, color frequency and Pythagorean geometry combined into a synthesis that caused one person to remark: “It is as though the paintings were speaking directly to some deeper part of your mind, while your brain was just trying to take in the overwhelming plethora of images.”

One year later, the landlord changed his mind and I regained my studio space.  I propped up the larger paintings in their crates and found the crates became the walls that grew into the twisting corridors of a Labyrinth in which I had become a minotaur – not quite believable to some who venture there.  This project is far from complete, and were it not for the ongoing intrusion of the miraculous in my life, I would not have been able to carry my explorations as far as I have.  My children have grown, and wonder what will happen when I am gone.

Why do I do what I do?  This must be one of the questions most often asked of any artist.  And like many others, I can’t explain.  I only know I feel compelled to follow these ideas to the resolution.  But all the compulsion in the world cannot hold back the occasional tides of insecurity and doubt.  People tell me their experience of the installation has changed their perspective on life, on art.  Some say they have come away transformed, inspired, renewed.  They tell me I must maintain the Work’s integrity.  That it is imperative that it exist as one piece, a totality.  Though I have had opportunities to sell many, I have felt that it must be held together.

Charles Leslie Harris “Les“ was a renowned Maximalist and visionary artist.  Born in Baltimore, Harris spent much of his life building an enigmatic artistic vision. He grew up in Hampden/Woodberry, attended Baltimore City College, and entered the work force in the Baltimore City Ship yards skilled as a precision welder. At the start of WWII, Harris enlisted in the army and served under Patton during the Battle of the Bulge as a communications specialist working in front of the line. His wartime experience served as a catalyst for a broadening global perspective that rapidly expanded his exposure to art, architecture and theatre.

Harris studied at the American Theatre Wing in 1951 which began his professional dancing career in NY, premiering on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. While in New York he also studied with Charles Rain and exhibited and sold his art at numerous galleries including the Alexander Iolas Gallery.

Harris was a teacher. His life was spent encouraging mankind to look, think and synthesize. His first teaching position was at the Albany Academy in New York. Hired as the art teacher he inspired his students to see “beyond the vase”. His interest in teaching eventually led him back to Baltimore where he pursued his degree in Art from the Maryland Institute, College of Art followed by a Masters of Liberal Arts, from Johns Hopkins University in 1972.

He was an Interior Design Composition instructor and Maryland Institute College of Art and Art Instructor at The Park School where he not only taught art but also built lavish sets and assisted in directing the schools theatrical productions. Additionally he was a visiting artist at Villa Julie College, and lectured frequently at the Maryland Theosophical Society. Harris retired in 1977 to pursue his art full time.

Opting to install his artwork rather than sell it, his studio grew exponentially. Beginning in one room of the Pool and Hunt Foundry building and eventually becoming a massive installation, it drew visitors from throughout the world. One of his great loves was leading his guests through his 2,000 square foot museum. On these guided tours visitors were exposed to concepts ranging from the “Big Bang,” quantum, the primordial scission, numerology, astrology, the Eleusinian Mysteries and non-local reality. The labyrinth, a complex tapestry of images ranging from the rose window of Chartres cathedral to images composed of symbols and dynamic colors, to sculptures crafted from roots offer a reservoir of insight into the history of art and the creative process.

His artistic journey has been most recently realized in the reinstallation of his labyrinth exhibit, “On Time and Space and Other Dimensions” at the Amaranthine Museum which he founded in 2006 in Woodberry. The installation is a complex maze of over 300 pieces of artwork representing nearly 25 years of his career. The Amaranthine Museum was named after the unfading flower the Amaranth.  His most recent achievement lies unread in a new manuscript “Dwellers on the 13thFloor,” weaving much of his philosophy into a narrative tale.

Harris met his wife  and life partner Sally (nee Pomeran) while on a visit to Long Island, New York where they met at a service at a Christian Science church. Sally invited him to work as Choreographer and Scenic Designer at her theatre “The Gateway Playhouse” in Bellport, LI. They soon fell in love and were married. They settled in Albany, New York where they both worked as teachers and soon began their family. In 1961, Les, Sally and their three daughters, Laurel, Heather and Holly returned to Baltimore where they flourished in an atmosphere of love, light and color.