Myrna Harrison, who studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown in the 1950s, died on Jan. 6, 2025 in Surprise, Ariz. She was 92.

Her work was deeply engaged with what she called the “tough, inhospitable environments” of the ocean and the desert.

The only child of Ben and Ruth (Hildebrand) Harrison, Myrna was born in Hollywood, Calif. on Jan. 31, 1932. Her father worked for Screen Gems, the cartoon division of Columbia Pictures, as the creator, director, and animator for Krazy Kat and Mutt & Jeff cartoons. Her mother was a hat designer. Myrna learned the art of animation from her father; drawing and painting became a central part of her life.

Her family moved to New York City in 1943. She attended the High School of Music and Art from 1946 to 1950. After a brief stint at the University of New Mexico, she returned to New York to study art, first with Morris Davidson, then with Jack Tworkov, before winning a scholarship at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. She studied with Hofmann in Provincetown from 1953 to 1957.

In a talk at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2012, Myrna said Hofmann taught painters to use the entire surface of a canvas. He was “concerned with planes and spaces,” she said, and taught “ways of seeing, ways of thinking” about painting, not simply technique.

While studying with Hofmann, Myrna met Earl Pierce, a former Hofmann student; they married in 1954 and left for New York in 1957, where they were part of the abstract expressionist movement. She participated in juried and invitational group shows, including the International Watercolor Biennial at the Brooklyn Museum. To make ends meet, Myrna worked a variety of jobs: the night shift at Western Union, sales clerk at a department store and a sandal shop, and as an office temp.

“I gave up painting for a while,” she said in her PAAM talk, and she went back to college, earning a B.A. and M.A. in English from New York University. A career in higher education followed, but she kept her hand in the painting world, studying with the abstract expressionist Philip Gaston.

Myrna was a teaching assistant in the English Dept. at the University of California, Berkeley until 1964, and she and Earl divorced the following year. She remained in California, teaching in North Richmond and at Laney College in Oakland, then becoming assistant dean of instruction at Contra Costa College and then dean of instruction at San Jose City College in 1976. In 1980, she became president of Rio Salado Community College in Phoenix, Ariz. She then served as president at Gateway Community College from 1985 and president of Phoenix College from 1988 until her retirement in 1993.

Settling in Wickenburg, Ariz., Myrna focused on her expressionist, color-saturated paintings of the Sonoran desert, canyons, and mountains. “Everything comes fanged and nettled in the desert,” she said in her PAAM talk. “I don’t use photographs when I paint. A photograph is someone else’s eye.”

Her paintings began with drawings of specific things that are a part of a larger landscape, she said. That landscape, be it ocean or desert, lived inside her.

“My work was influenced early by Cubism and the abstract expressionist painters, later by the California figurative painters, and later still by Japanese prints and Chinese landscape painting,” she said in her artist’s statement on the PAAM website.

Myrna served on the boards of the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg and the Phoenix Art Museum’s Asian Arts Council. She also endowed a scholarship at Maricopa Community College.

Myrna’s most recent solo exhibitions were held at the Sedona Art Center and Sedona Heritage Museum. Her work was also in group shows throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and has been collected by the Phoenix Art Museum, the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis.

A celebration of her life will be held on Jan. 26 at the Desert Caballeros Golf Club in Wickenburg.

Donations in Myrna’s memory may be made to the Maricopa Community College Foundation, the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, or the Myrna Harrison Endowment Scholarship Fund at Phoenix College.