Harrell Fletcher- Assistant Professor, Founder of the Art and Social Practice MFA Concentration
Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, 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, and Smackmellon 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, and The Royal College of Art in London. Fletcher exhibits in San Francisco and Los Angeles with Jack Hanley Gallery, in NYC with Christine Burgin Gallery, in London with Laura Bartlett Gallery, and Paris with Gallery In Situ. 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 Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory website with Miranda July. A book version LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel. 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. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Jennifer Delos Reyes- Assistant Professor, Art and Social Practice
Jennifer Delos Reyes is an artist originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Her research interests include the history of socially engaged art, group work, and artists’ social roles. She has exhibited works across North America and Europe, and has contributed writing to various catalogues and institutional publications. Most recently she contributed writing to Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture published by YYZBOOKS in 2008. In 2006 she completed an intensive workshop, Come Together: Art and Social Engagement, at The Kitchen in New York. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant. Jennifer is the founder and organizer of Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance, a conference on socially engaged art practices.
Mark Dion- Adjunct Professor
Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an ecologist, biochemist, detective, and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments, and museum caches of the great historical naturalists-following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. Dion crosses Darwin, Disney, and Hitchcock in work ranging from hundreds of photographic “specimens” documenting all the insect life in a single meter of meadow, to the meticulous gathering and labeling of the rubbish tossed out over hundreds of years from a sixteenth-century Italian castle. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes, which combine taxidermic animals, lab equipment, and artifacts-like walk-through wunderkammers, life-sized cabinets of curiosity. The artist is creating a permanent garden in Britain, an orchard of fruits facing extinction planted in the form of a tree of life-a sculptural gene pool for the future.