Projects

I was asked by Scott Robertson from Fifthsyllable to write a “manifesto” for a book of artist manifestos that they will be publishing. Here is what I came up with: I recall thinking as a young art student that I would never personally experience an art movement like the ones I was learning about in… Continue reading Some thoughts on writing a manifesto

Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts 2017–19Jordan Schnitzer Museum of ArtUniversity of OregonEugene, OregonOctober 3, 2020 to January 10, 2021 Building Community: PSU Art + Design Faculty, Past + PresentJordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State UniversityPortland State UniversityPortland, OregonMarch 9, 2021 to May 9, 2021 This project might be a little hard to understand conceptually. I… Continue reading Experiential Education

Nashville, TN James Robertson PKWY N/S @ Nissan Stadium, Facing East October – November 2018 I was invited to design a billboard for the For Freedoms project: www.forfreedoms.org After hearing about Rudi Giulani’s comment that “truth isn’t truth” I couldn’t help but think about the book 1984 and the Orwellian concept of “Newspeak” where words can… Continue reading It’s Time To Read Orwell Again

Contemporary Art Gallery Lord Strathcona Elementary School Vancouver, BC 2017 -2018 Over the course of the 2017-18 school year A New Path to the Waterfall was a collaborative art project that situated a CAG satellite gallery space within MaryAnn Persoon’s grade 6/7 class at Lord Strathcona Elementary School. In 2015 the Contemporary Art Gallery invited me for… Continue reading A New Path to the Waterfall

In 1995 I came across a seed catalog (The 1995 Ethnobotanical Catalog of Seeds, by J.L Hudson, Seedsman). It had some amazing seed listings and articles (one in particular that I was really interested in challenged the concept of “native plants”) and also included a section of recommended books by various authors as well as,… Continue reading Warren Hatch: An Appreciation

Martin Luther King Jr. School 4906 NE 6th Ave.  Portland, OR 2014-ongoing KSMoCA (King School Museum of Contemporary Art) is a contemporary art museum within the walls of a functioning preK-8 public school in NE Portland, OR. It is a collaborative project with PSU faculty Lisa Jarrett, students from King elementary school and Portland State… Continue reading KSMoCA

DisjectaPortland, OR March 13 – April 24, 2016 Exhibition organized with Emma Colburn, Roz Crews, Amanda Leigh Evans, Emily Fitzgerald, Lauren Moran, Anke Schüttler, Renee Sills, and Kimberly Sutherland With Zahra Ahmed, De La Salle North Catholic High School Choir, Dorian Neira and Daniel “D.J. Max” Lasuncet, Austin Green, Robin Gordon and the Celebration Tabernacle… Continue reading The Music That Makes Us

Public Doors and Windows   UCSC Institute of the Arts & Sciences  Santa Cruz, California 2015 I worked with Molly Sherman and Nolan Calisch as part of our collaboration Public Doors and Windows on a project for The Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UCSC. We spent two years researching to produce a vast campus-wide… Continue reading Collective Museum

National Endowment for the Arts Artworks Podcast 2016 I was interviewed by Josephine Reed at the NEA Read the transcript here.  

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Open Studio 2015 I was asked to created an assignment for Mark Bradford’s Open Studio project at SFMoMA: https://www.sfmoma.org/read/open-studio-harrell-fletcher/  

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit 2014-2015 I co-curated the second version of the People’s Biennial with Jens Hoffmann in Detroit. We came up with a system of asking established artists from around the country to each select someone that they thought was doing really interesting work but wasn’t well known in the art world, and… Continue reading People’s Biennial 2014

Public Doors and Windows  FLEX IT! My Body My Temple Parthenon Museum Nashville, TN 2014   Highlander Folk School was an adult education center founded in 1932 that brought together many labor and civil rights activists including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, and Pete Seeger. The original site of Highlander was located near Monteagle,… Continue reading Highlander Spring

Public Doors and Windows Flex It! My Body My Temple Parthenon Museum Nashville, TN 2014 One Mile Loop was a series of public signs and musical performances that I created with Molly Sherman and Nolan Calisch which responded to the routine exercise habits of runners and walkers who regularly use the park’s walking trail. Six… Continue reading One Mile Loop

Public Doors and Windows  Shine A Light  Portland Art Museum Portland, OR 2014 Molly Sherman, Nolan Calisch and I (as part of our collaboration Public Doors and Windows) organized a distributed “book fair” that took place in various locations inside of the Portland Are Museum. There were twelve participating book organizations (one of them wasn’t… Continue reading Book Fair at the Museum

On Foot: An Educational Art and Social Practice Journey from Portland to Mt. Hood Portland State University Portland, Oregon 2014 This project was constructed as a summer course with Eric Steen to examine various aspects of Oregon’s regional natural history, contemporary urban and rural issues, and the art of walking. Five days were spent with… Continue reading Mt. Hood Walk

Public Doors and Windows Matisse Museum Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France 2014   To a Lifetime of Meaningful Encounters (La vie est faite de belles rencontres) was a project I did with Molly Sherman and Nolan Calisch as part of our collaboration Public Doors & Windows, which highlighted the people and land of Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France—the birthplace of… Continue reading To a Lifetime of Meaningful Encounters

Amherst College Amherst, MA 2013 Wendy Ewald asked me to work with her and a freshman seminar class she was teaching with Martha Saxton. The class was intended to address issues related to sexual assault on the Amherst campus. It was a daunting challenge. The more I learned the more difficult it became to think… Continue reading Sex and Education

“Moment to Moment” Artist Project Series The Thing Quarterly x Levi’s Made & Crafted Los Angeles, CA and Tokyo, Japan 2013 “Hello There Friend” is an ongoing series of works in which I go for a walk in an unfamiliar place with someone. On this walk, my companions collect details of their surroundings and present… Continue reading Hello There Friend

I was asked by Cue  to write a text for a catalog on the work of Carmen Papalia.   The Catalog can be viewed online and below is my text.   Essay for Carmen Papalia: Long Time No See Catalog Cue Foundation, NYC 2013 A year or so ago I was having a conversation with Carmen about… Continue reading Carmen’s Parking Lot

The Exploratorium San Francisco, CA 2013 As an Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence I created a project that involved traveling for four days with a group of participants from the end of the museum’s building across the Bay in a sail boat and then walking from Emeryville to the top of Mt Diablo. The trip covered about forty… Continue reading The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows

Project for The Past is Present Curated by Jens Hoffmann Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit Collaboration with Katherine Ball 2013 Katherine Ball and I collaborated on a project in Detroit, this is what she wrote about it: One of the reasons that Harrell and I chose the MLK speech as a topic for our project is because we both… Continue reading The Other America

 How Do You Mean?: Culture in Translation Symposium Portland Institute for Contemporary Art 2013 In this special matinee performance of Niicugni, I intermittently “pressed pause” on performer Emily Johnson, adding thoughts and questions about the artist and her work into the staged show.

Learning for Life  Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, Norway Collaboration with Ella Aandal 2012 For this project which was commissioned by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo for a show called Learning for Life, I asked that a local child or adolescent lead me on an experiential education tour of the city for several days.… Continue reading What Do We Do On Monday?

Project for the 2012 Shanghai Biennial Shanghai, China 2012 Jens Hoffmann invited me to be a part of the 9th Annual Shanghai Biennial. During a site visit to Shanghai this summer I was given a tour of the building that was being remodeled into the museum for the exhibition. The tour happened during lunch break… Continue reading An Unknown Number

Exhibition for Crisp-Ellert Art Museum St. Augustin, FL. 2012 St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuously occupied european settlement in the US. A great deal of focus has been placed on its Spanish colonial development and its more recent resort hotel history, but little is available to the immediate public and visiting tourist population about the… Continue reading Before and After 1565: A Participatory Exploration of St. Augustin’s Native American History

Project for the Tate Live Series Tate Modern, London, UK 2012 Okay, so a couple of curators, Catherine Wood and Kathy Noble, from the Tate Modern in London sent me an email asking if I’d like to take part in a new online performance series that they are organizing. I said sure. The idea is… Continue reading Where I’m Calling From

Project for Wide Open School Hayward Gallery, London 2012 The class/project focused on Art and Social Practice, a term used to describe site-specific, participatory, interdisciplinary, and publicly accessible art projects and practices. I explained and addressed a variety of topics related to Art and Social Practice, from the perspective of my own and others’ related work.… Continue reading Hayward Class

Project for Grinnell College Grinnell, IA. 2012 When asked to go to an unfamiliar place to do a lecture and workshop I often ask local people in that place to organize a walking tour where a set of people each select a location and person at that location to discuss what goes on there, we… Continue reading Participatory Walking Tour: Grinnell College

Curated for the Museum of Craft and Folk Art San Francisco, CA 2012 Exhibition that I curated about the intersection between art and farming. The project included a commissioned public project by John Cerney who makes large scale cut out paintings that are displayed in farm fields in the Salinas Valley and other locations. Catalog… Continue reading Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in this World

Project for Laura Gitlen Gallery, New York City.  Also exhibited at James Cohan Gallery, New York City. 2012 “Now this shows you the roofless motif which I think is very, very handsome. . . .This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of just tearing it down at once they tear… Continue reading Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque

Project for UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art Colorado Springs, CO Collaboration with Eric Steen 2012 Three day walk from the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs to the top of Pikes Peak organized with Eric Steen that included students, faculty, and community members. Along the way each participant gave a lecture about an aspect the environment… Continue reading A Walk to Pike’s Peak

Project for the The 10th Northwest Biennial Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma WA 2012 I gave the Tacoma Art Museum the following assignment to work with local organizations and environmental groups to create a collaborative project: Locate a local environmental organization and a local realist landscape painting organization that are willing to participate in the project. Have… Continue reading Assignment for the Tacoma Art Museum

Project for The Hammer Museum Los Angeles, CA Collaboration with Adam Moser 2012 The Hammer Yearbook investigates the inner workings of a museum including the visitors that come through it, the artists that provide the motivation to come in the first place, and the staff that make it possible, through the formate of a school… Continue reading Hammer Yearbook

Project for Dumbo Feather  2011 A magazine in Australia called Dumbo Feather asked me to do the back covers for their magazine. They are a quarterly, so I did four of them. At the time and still now I go to a park near my house with my daughter and our dogs on a regular… Continue reading Interviews with Children

Film Presented by Gareth Moore as part of his Children’s Films project November 19, 2011 – January 29, 2012 For his project “Children’s Films” Gareth Moore asked five international artists to produce short films for children. The artists invited, Ulla von Brandenburg (*1974), Keren Cytter (*1977), Geoffrey Farmer (*1967), Julia Feyrer (*1982) and Harrell Fletcher (*1967) were… Continue reading Pippi and Theonious

Saraga Market  Indianapolis, IN 2010 I was asked by a non-profit art center in Indianapolis, Indiana called Big Car to come up with a project that would happen in conjunction with a city-wide festival which was focusing on food systems. The director of Big Car, Jim Walker, took me around to various neighborhoods that he… Continue reading Learning About the World at the Grocery Store

A Project for Portland State University  Portland, OR 2010 Funded in part by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council This was a percent for art public art project located on a large blank wall at the corner of SW 5th and Hall on the Portland State University campus. I worked with Avalon Kalin on the project… Continue reading The Knowledge

Curated as part of The Magnificent Seven  CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art San Francisco, CA. 2010 Curated by Harrell Fletcher as part of The Magnificent Seven, this unique, biographical exhibition featured artworks by the artist’s mentor, family member and friend Michael Bravo. Selections From the Life and Work of Michael Bravo presents paintings, drawings,… Continue reading Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo

Curated with Jens Hoffmann Supported by Independent Curators International 2010 People’s Biennial is an exhibition that examines the work of artists who operate outside the sanctioned mainstream art world. As such it recognizes a wide array of artistic expression present in many communities across the United States. Working in cities that are not considered the primary… Continue reading The People’s Biennial

Project for the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia 2010 More information coming soon.

Curated for PDX Contemporary Art  Portland, OR 2009 In these times of economic desperation, (or even just during the desperation of everyday life in general) it is understandable that people would find escape routes into alternate realities. For some people that is as easy to do as turning on the TV or slipping into a… Continue reading Songs From The Treetops

Project for Art Gallery of Mississauga Mississauga, Canada, 2009 and IDEA Space at Colorado College Colorado Springs, CO, 2010 Collaboration with Wendy Red Star In 2007 a living room rug was purchased as a gift from a US home wares company for my house. It was ordered from the Internet. The rug took a while… Continue reading Made in India

Play written and performed for Assume Nothing: New Social Practice The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Victoria, British Columbia 2009 Script by J.D. Nasaw From interviews conducted by Harrell Fletcher and J.D. Nasaw     PDF of The Responsibility Is Shared With All The People Here

Exhibition at The Power Plant Toronto, Ontario, Canada Curated by Senior Curator of Programs, Helena Reckitt 20 September–2 November, 2008 A ten day project (and six week show) with an event series, involving an out of town artist, and various local people, translated into cake form, with photographs, text descriptions.  Another title could have been: It Will Just… Continue reading Born Out of Pleasure

Sala Diaz San Antonio, TX  Made in collaboration with Veda Epling 2006 In 2005 I was in San Antonio doing an Art Pace residency. I spent a lot of time just walking around, often times with Katrina Moorhead who was also doing a residency. At some point while on one of these walks Katrina pointed out… Continue reading Veda’s Bibles

Video for Domaine De Kerguehennec Brittany, France 2006 I was asked to do a residency at an art center in Brittany, France called Domaine De Kerguehennec that is located on an old estate in the country. I spent about a month every Summer there for about three years. The whole thing concluded with an exhibition in 2006 made up of… Continue reading Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Published in ARTL!ES Winter 2006 When I was in grad school, I TA’ed a class for a professor I liked a lot. He and I came up with various projects and field trips for the students. It was a fun class and, for the most part, it went really well, but there was one student—I think… Continue reading A Sincere Attempt at Deception

Video of people’s scars with the stories of how they got them 2003