Assembly 2021
World of Colonial Hills: Past, Present, and Future
Monday June 7, 1pm PST
Rebecca Copper and Minus Plato (AKA Richard Fletcher)
World of Colonial Hills: Past, Present, and Future extends from the project Auditing Ohio, where Rebecca Copper worked with teacher Kevin Acton and 4th graders at Colonial Hills Elementary to audit their social studies textbook. Minus Plato (also known as Richard Fletcher) and Rebecca are joining forces through the guise of Minus’s radio project, Dear Fellow Settler Colonizer, to engage the residents of Colonial Hills community to question the naming and history of the Colonial Hills in relationship to colonization.
Minus Plato is the alias of Richard Fletcher, Associate Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at Ohio State University. Trained as a classicist, Fletcher created the blog Minus Plato as part of his research into ancient Mediterranean cultures and contemporary art. Following collaborations with artists (including Paul Chan on the book Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning, Badlands Unlimited 2015), Fletcher left classics and turned Minus Plato into a platform to develop arts education. His current work is focused on an ongoing dialogue with documenta 14, the global art exhibition that took place in Athens and Kassel in 2017, for a forthcoming exhibition and book project called Whisper into a Hole, as well as a self-critical analysis of settler colonialism through collaborations with global Indigenous artists, in Potu faitautusi, a reading room at Columbus Printed Arts Center and dear fellow settler colonizer, a radio show on Verge.Fm. Minus Plato’s first book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump was published in 2020 by AC Books.
Rebecca Copper’s art practice incorporates socially engaged art, writing, film-photography, and time-based media. Rebecca is interested in experiential knowledge, how people are influenced in different mediated ways. She works through themes such as: phenomenology, ontology, intersectional/transnational feminist politics, US child-education, unlearning, and approaches of care. She is currently an MFA candidate in Portland State University’s Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice Program. Recently, she worked as a research assistant for the Art and Social Practice Archive which is housed within PSU’s special collections and finished a fellowship with the Columbus Printed Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Assembly Kickoff: some thoughts on art and social practice
Monday June 6, 12pm PST
Harrell Fletcher & Lisa Jarrett
Join us for the kickoff of Assembly 2021! Program founder Harrell Fletcher and Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts Lisa Jarrett will have a conversation about their thoughts on art and social practice and the MFA program that they will be co-directing.
Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990 ’ s. His work has been shown at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, Apex Art, and Smack Mellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMOMA, The Hammer Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher coproduced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations.
harrellfletcher.com
Lisa Jarrett is an artist and educator. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design. She is co-founder and co-director of KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR, and the artists collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and lenses. She exists and makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions.
lisajarrett.com