Full Time Faculty
Harrell Fletcher- Associate Professor, Founder of the Art and Social Practice MFA Concentration
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 SF MoMA, 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 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, The Royal College of Art 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 Berkeley Art Museum,
The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. In 2002 Fletcher
started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. A
book version of 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 an Associate Professor of Art and Social
Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Jen Delos Reyes- Assistant Professor, Art and Social Practice
Art and Social Practice Coordinator
Jen 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. 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. Jen is the founder and director of Open Engagement, a conference on socially engaged art practice and herself speaks widely on Art and Social Practice at conferences and institutions around the world. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Portland State University where she co-directs the Art and Social Practice MFA concentration.
2011/2012 Faculty
Paul Ramírez Jonas- Adjunct Professor
Paul Ramírez Jonas' selected solo exhibitions include Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo, Brazil; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; a survey at Ikon Gallery (UK) and Cornerhouse (UK); Alexander Gray Gallery (NYC); Roger Björkholmen (Sweden); Nara Roesler Gallery (Brazil); and Postmasters Gallery (NYC). He has been included in group exhibitions at P.S.1 (NYC); The Whitechapel (UK); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Ireland); The New Museum (NYC); and Kunsthaus Zurich (Switzerland). He has participated in the Johannesburg Biennale; the Seoul Biennial, the Shanghai Biennial; the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial; the 53rd Venice Biennial and the 7th Bienal do Mercosul , Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2010 his Key to the City project was presented by Creative Time in cooperation with the City of New York.
He has been teaching for the past fifteen years at a number of institutions such as Columbia University, New York University, Cal Arts, RISD, and Bard College. He was appointed as an assistant professor at Hunter College in 2007. He holds a BA from Brown University ’87 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design ’89.
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Lee Walton- Adjunct Professor
Often regarded as an Experientialist, Walton's work takes many forms- from drawings, game/system based structures, video, web-based performances, public orchestrations and more. His work often involves collaboration with numerous participants and practitioners from diverse fields.
After a two-year affiliation with the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, Walton has received many accolades from Museum funded projects (Reykjavik Art Museum of Iceland, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, SECCA, ICA Boston), public commissions (Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rhizome at the New Museum of NY, national and international exhibition venues (Island #6, Shanghia, China, Ljubljana Museum of Art) and collections (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Martin Z. Margulies Wharehouse).
Recent lectures, panel and artist visits include MIT, Art in General, The New School, Art Institute of Boston, Columbia, Portland State Univerisity and the University of Ulster, Belfast Ireland.
Walton holds a MFA in visual arts from the California College of the Arts. His drawings are represented by Kraushaar Gallery in NY and his conceptual work is represented by "cwp" (Christopher West Presents). Walton is the co-founder (with Donovan McKnight) of the Super G Experiential Residency Program (located inside an international food mart). He is also an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
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Helen Reed- Adjunct Professor
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Hannah Jickling is from the Canadian north and currently lives and works between Portland, Toronto and the Yukon. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (2003), and her MFA (Art and Social Practice), from Portland State University (2010). Hannah is head of MFA in Paper Maché, a hand-made, accredited degree program. Current project interests also include sport, recreation and outdoor education as models for performance and participation. She is currently the artist-in-residence at the Multnomah Education Service District's Outdoor School. In recent years, Hannah has shown/presented at: Locust Projects (Miami), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Yukon), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax), YYZ Artists Outlet (Toronto), Dare-Dare (Montreal), the Or Gallery, Access Gallery, VIVO (Vancouver), apexart (New York), Portland Art Museum and the SFMOMA (San Francisco).
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Past Faculty
Mark Dion
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.
Fritz Haeg- Adjunct Professor
Fritz Haeg works between his practice Fritz Haeg Studio (including occasional designs and buildings, though his currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and other various combinations of building, curating, dancing, designing, exhibiting, gardening, organizing, talking, teaching, and writing. His home base since 2001 is a geodesic dome in the hills of Los Angeles.
Haeg studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B. Arch. He was a 2007 and 2009 MacDowell Colony Fellow, and has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine art programs at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Art Center College of Design, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Southern California. Haeg has produced projects and exhibited work at Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Casco Office of Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; Mass MoCA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht; The Indianapolis Museum of Art; and the MAK Center, Los Angeles; and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Cambridge among other institutions. His work has been published internationally, including profiles and features in The New York Times, Financial Times, Frieze, Artforum, The Independent, Dwell, Men’s Vogue, BBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and The Martha Stewart Show.
http://www.fritzhaeg.com
Pablo Helguera- Adjunct Professor
Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.
His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record.
Pablo Helguera performed individually at various museums and biennials internationally. In 2008 he was awarded theJohn Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. Helguera worked for fifteen years in a variety of contemporary art museums. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
He is the author, amongst several other books, of The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Boy Inside the Letter (2008) Theatrum Anatomicum ( and other performance lectures) (2008), the play The Juvenal Players (2009) and What in the World (2010).
