In June, 2005, while traveling in Vietnam, artist Harrell Fletcher visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Deeply affected by the exhibit, Fletcher returned to photograph all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum with the intention of re-presenting the exhibition in the United States. Fletcher's exhibition The American War toured for two years, stopping at various U. S. venues including the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M. I. T. and White Columns in New York City. With this collection of images, Fletcher encourages his audience to reconsider opinions of the War in Vietnam and other American wars that have occurred since. Harrell Fletcher is a visual artist working in mixed media: video, installation, photography and web based works. His work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe. In Spring 2004, he taught at New York's Cooper Union. A hallmark of his work is to devise strategies for transforming the everyday experiences and objects of community residents into curated exhibitions.

"When I go to a place like Brittany or Houston, Texas, what I'm partly trying to do is go around in this very simple way, point to things and say, this is actually of value, I recognize this, it smells good, it tastes good, or something. I want you to taste this," writes Portland, Oregon-based artist Harrell Fletcher in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For". Featuring texts by artists Miranda July, Allan McCollum, Chris Johanson and Byron Kim, this volume was made during a residency at Domaine De Kerguehennec in Brittany, France. Known for collaborative, socially minded works (such as Learning to Love You More, a 2002-present Web-based project produced with July), during this residency Fletcher engaged local people in the creation of more populist works for their much-used sculpture park, resulting in the production of a bright green bronze turtle designed by an eight-year-old boy. -- From product description

Presents a collection of art and personal stories taken from the authors' Web site in which participants respond to a variety of artistic assignments, including "Take a flash photo under your bed," "Write your life story in less than a day," and "Make an encouraging banner."

Text by Miranda July, Allan McCollum, Chris Johanson, Byron Kim.

A lively conversation largely composed of anecdotes and first person narratives that addresses central and shared concerns in both artists' practice. Discussions about the pedagogy of art, social practice, story-telling, sincerity, community-oriented projects, and documentary strategies are interwoven with analysis of some of Fletcher's and Rakowitz's key works.

Workshop was designed by 12 students in Grinnell College Art 320: Advanced studio class. Visiting artist Harrell Fletcher assigned students to locate places within the Grinnell community that are "Interesting but obscure." On March 8, 2012, at each site the presenter gave a 10 minute talk about their relationship to the place and to the Grinnell community. The workshop was designed to give an outsider a tour of a place he doesn't know anything about.

People's Biennial is a celebration of the unknown, the peculiar and the disregarded. It was conceived through the curators' desire to explore the overlooked and the marginalized, and to present artistic positions usually dismissed by the mainstream art world. For the exhibition, five American art institutions present works by artists in each of the institutions' local communities, selected by the exhibition co-curators, Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann. This catalogue chronicles Fletcher and Hoffmann's research and visits to each of the five cities: Portland, Oregon; Scottsdale, Arizona; Rapid City, South Dakota; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Haverford, Pennsylvania.