Harrell Fletcher Convocation (Attended)

Discuss the concept about Harrell's Garage Sale Series. What kinds of relationships were identified? What was his reasoning behind it? How was this project a reflection of community arts?

 

 

      Harrell Fletcher is a creative artist who is very community based in all of his work. I thoroughly enjoyed this convocation. He was a little monotone and had thousands of projects to talk about all in about 200 slides and to be completely honest, I was expecting to be bored. However, it was quite the opposite. The projects this man has participated in and the stories of how it came to be were incredibly intruiging. I was most impressed when listening to the story about the french boy who got to create his own sculpture... a turtle. How simple?! Harrell made this little boy an atist all from an idea, as he got to follow the entire process an artist would go through.

     Although Fletcher had many interesting projects, another one he discussed was his "Garage Sale Series" where he went to a garage sale and would pick an object that was random or interesting to him and put it on display. Each trinket had a tag on it that described all about that piece, which he got from information from the family it came in. There were many relationships that could be indentified from this project ranging from the relationship between Harrell and the owner of the object, the relationship between the owner and the object and the relationship between Harrell and the object. Harrell would listen to all these stories about these objects, and he typed the stories up on a type writer and made the tags about the objects all himself. He was able to understand the owner and take one a new view point to connect to the owner. There is an obvious connection between the owner and the object. Something drew that person to buy, keep, or sell that object. It usually had lots of meaning behind it. Lastly, Harrell and the object. There was something that also went off in Harrell's mind, just like when the owner chooses to buy or keep an object, that told him to choose that particular object and make it a piece of art. His reasoning behind this project was to bring the community together. Many people see similar objects around, but all objects have a different story behind them.

      This project was a prime example to show the reflection of Harrell's projects relating to community arts. All these people he got objects from were able to come together and look at all the different momentos from each family. So many people participate in garage sales and no one ever stops to think about the stories each object entails. This exhibit Fletcher created gives people a chance to stop, read and react to each object...(something I know, I don't ever do when I walk around a typical garage sale)... and to learn all about what they are looking at.