CV
About
Contact
Andrew Samuel Harrison (b. 1993) is a New York based interdisciplinary artist, educator, independent curator and writer from Richmond, VA. He earned his BA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015, and from 2020 to 2023, Harrison co-founded 959D, an independent arts space where he curated numerous solo and group exhibitions for emerging artists in Richmond, VA. From 2021-2023, he was commissioned for several community activations by Richmond-based arts spaces and by the CAN Foundation, sponsored by the cities of Virginia Beach and Newport News, VA. In 2024, Harrison was nominated for The Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture and was a sculptor in residence at Vermont Studio Center. Select exhibitions include solo and group presentations at 25 East Gallery (2024), Culture Hub (2024) and All St. Gallery (2023) in New York City, and at Petersburg Area Art League (2023), Eden Airlines (2021), and 1708 Gallery (2022) in Richmond, VA.
Guided by experience with disability, neonatal surgeries, and prosthesis, Andrew Samuel Harrison’s work examining prosthesis as a sculptural concept explores tensions between strength and fragility, hardness and softness, visibility and obscurity. His sculptures use abstraction as well as familiar architectural and design materials, with an emphasis on phenomenological disorientations of scale, access, and use, allowing forms to emerge by deploying disability as torque. The steel, concrete, foam, and fabrics he uses offer vestiges of their making and handling—scratches, ruptures, fusions, rust, dust and dirt—that index intuitive gestures taken by hand, by time, and by tool. Harrison uses the labor of this mark-making to destabilize expectations of utility by drawing attention—through the potentiality of labor and of play—to what is missing or obscured. Bodily interaction is a key component: soft foam, upholstered elements and a handle-language shaped to fit his limb difference in the steel pieces, as well as rebar doubling as handles and structural reinforcement in the concrete works. Through metal work, casting, and soft sculpture, Harrison creates forms that resist conventional expectations of functionality and accompanying narratives of cure and wholeness through the potentiality of handling and making.