Art Theory and Practice

Welcome to the Department of Art Theory & Practice (AT&P) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University. The department has both an undergraduate program, offering a baccalaureate degree, and a graduate program, offering a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

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Harrell Fletcher
has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. He has exhibited at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in SF, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA in Seattle, WA, and Signal in Malmo, Sweden. Fletcher is represented in San Francisco by Jack Hanley Gallery, and in NYC by Christine Burgin Gallery. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory web site with Miranda July.

The American War, 2005, Artpace, San Antonio, Tx
"In June, 2005 I was in Vietnam for a month as part of an international artists retreat. While I was there I visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, which is a memorial museum for what is referred to in Vietnam as The American War. I was so affected by what I saw at the museum that I went back several times and eventually photographed all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum - over two hundred photos. I used my digital camera and took the shots hand held at off angles to avoid reflections. The images have an oddly casual quality but are still accurate representations of the material depicted at the museum - with a similarly horrifying quality. I decided to print the photographs and exhibit them at various venues around the U.S. as a sort of re-presentation of the material I encountered in Vietnam. The photographs for this show are a selection of about half of all the pictures in the museum's main exhibition hall.

Even though many of the images were familiar to me, seeing them all together and presented from the Vietnamese perspective was very striking. It made me realize that I didn't know much about the details of the war that had consumed the U.S. for most of my early childhood. I started researching the war in an attempt to understand why it happened and what its effects were on the region and on U.S. policy. The museum and my re-presentations of it are only showing one perspective, there are many others. I encourage everyone to do their own research and find out more about The American War in Vietnam and all of the other American Wars that have been happening ever since.

Along with the exhibition I also organized several public events related to the Vietnam War--a film screening of Hearts and Minds, a series of talks by local people who had personal experience with Vietnam, and a group discussion about The Vietnam War and war in general, " Harrell Fletcher