Richard Fleischner

“I love the term ‘witness mark.’ That’s what a surveyor first establishes and records. These are the marks from which all other measurements and mapping are done, and that’s the nature of my finding my way.”

Place making has been at the core of Fleischner’s public projects for almost fifty years. He has worked extensively in the public and private arenas, building integrated, site-specific works in cities, parks, woods, and other natural areas. The most complex projects, interactions and interventions have evolved into proposals more commonly associated with architecture and city planning than with art. At their extreme, they have been a marriage of urban design and art. He locates and identifies elements by working on-site, drawing full scale with mason’s line and stakes. This process provides the means to find edges, axes and points from which the rest of the work develops. This fundamental measuring is at the basis for all his works from the smallest independent sculpture or work on paper to the most expansive site-specific projects.

While best known for these large-scale projects, his total body of work has always included independent sculptures, gouaches, drawings and photographs. These grow out of the details that he recognizes and acknowledges within the commonplace and universal interrelationships of intention, context and process. How they inform one another become the essential factors that are irreducible in the elegantly refined forms that he is dedicated to.

Fleischner’s work can be found in many books and publications, as well as in numerous public collections. Both the independent works and built projects have been shown nationally and internationally.

Most recently he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2016 and was Artist in Residence, through Yale University and the LeWitt Foundation, Praiano, Italy, 2011. Fleischner lives and works in Providence, RI.

Selected Work 1963-2016
Selected Gouaches 2015-2017
Richard Fleischner, Selected Projects 1967-2012
Richard Fleischner’s Resume