Eye/Hand by Harry Clewans
- Triton Museum of Art
- Jul 9
- 2 min read
The Triton Museum of Art presents Eye/Hand (August 29, 2026 - January 3, 2027) by Harry Clewans. Harry Clewans is an Oakland-based, largely self-taught artist whose work reveals how the big picture is made up of all the little details.
Harry Clewans started out as a painter and has been working out of his studio in Oakland, CA since 1983. Clewans’s art consists of large-scale woodblock prints by assembling hundreds of smaller printed images. For the past thirty years, Clewans has been making the woodcuts for these pieces from found objects and has since built an extensive collection that he uses and reuses for his work. For every woodcut made, Clewans has a print of it that he’s pinned to the wall in his studio, serving as a sort of periodic table, each individual woodcut being an element for the larger picture.
Harry Clewans’s upcoming exhibition, Eye/Hand, is a collection of works that hope to communicate that all things, by virtue of their makeup, are connected. Because the woodcuts are made from found items, Clewans also wants to emphasize that “all things participate in a cycle of composition and decomposition, in which the old, the broken down, and the disposed of becomes material for the new.” Some of these woodcuts may consist of objects such as a broken lightbulb, a battered plastic toy, a dried piece of kelp, etc. The texture of one woodcut image may be used to depict the skin of an animal, the ground floor, or the trunk of a tree.
Exhibited extensively in California, nationally and abroad, his work has been awarded the James Phalen Award for printmaking and a fellowship at the Kala Institute of Art. His work has also been collected by The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, the Mills College Art Collection and the Judah L. Magnes Museum.
Harry Clewans’s exhibition, Eye/Hand, will be on view in the Triton Museum of Art’s John and Eve Mathias Gallery starting August 29th, 2026.
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