By Saul Ruiz
EL CAJON, CALIF. —Twenty years worth of Harry Lum’s art is currently on display at Grossmont College’s Hyde Art Gallery. Students can enjoy the exhibition from Feb. 3 to March 6.
Harry Lum was an art professor and activist who taught at Grossmont College from 1972 to 1995. Born in the Bay Area of San Francisco to chinese immigrant parents and raised in tenement housing, Lum grew to join the army and study chemistry. However, he found himself drawn to artistry due to its power as a tool for social activism. Once near the end of his life, the last two decades, Lum chose to create a large multitude of paintings highlighting social and political issues, fully embracing his view into humanism. Lum’s later works prioritized mediums on canvas that reflected dark tones, as if to coincide with dark points in history.
“I think [they’re] important subjects to teach students that I guess they’re not learning about in school,” said Alex DeCosta, Director of the Hyde Art Gallery, in reference to Harry Lum’s works.
Lum’s displayed artwork is gathered from his last 20 years as an active artist before his passing in 2022. The paintings depict various points in history, primarily post-9/11, that have to do with immigration and kinds of race relations. “It also touches on like historic atrocities, like the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam, or Jim Crow segregation,” said DeCosta, “so it does kind of exist all over the place but it is all American centric history.” The amount of works by Harry Lum in fact exceeds the number of pieces displayed at the Hyde Art Gallery. For DeCosta, Lum’s work collectively holds a basis grounded in reality, but the subjects are at times abstract enough to where the viewer is able to project themselves and empathize with the struggles depicted.
DeCosta had begun work on the showcase in Spring 2024 and given world events and political shifts, he feels as though the exhibition has taken on a new meaning. “A lot of students come in here not knowing about any of this history, it kind of makes you realize the kind of dangerous time we live in,” DeCosta said.
Once again, the Harry Lum exhibition will run from Feb. 3 to March 6 at the Hyde Art Gallery on campus. Students are free to enter and view the artwork Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.. In attending the exhibition, the community of Grossmont College is honoring the legacy of a former professor, as well as reflecting upon aspects of American history that may need to be retaught. Harry Lum’s work collectively brings up aspects of reality that need to be far from forgotten, no matter how difficult that reality and conversation may be. As Gallery Director Alex DeCosta put it: “because if you don’t know about it, and you don’t know that’s happened before, you may not see the signs of it happening again.”
