Interviews

Harrison Love · Artist & Author

Talks & Interviews

A running archive of interviews, lectures, and behind-the-scenes conversations with Harrison Love — multidisciplinary artist working across calligraphy, graffiti, and abstract expressionism, muralist, founder of STOA in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and author of the illustrated novel The Hidden Way. Below, in order from earliest to most recent, is the story of that work in Harrison Love's own words.

Featured Lecture · 2026

Guest Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution — Harrison Love on The Hidden Way

In 2026, Harrison Love — artist and author of the illustrated novel The Hidden Way — was invited as a guest lecturer at the historic Chautauqua Institution. Rather than revisit the book itself, Love used the stage to tell stories that never made the page, chief among them an account of accidentally introducing an indigenous community deep in the Amazon to modern technology, and the quiet upheaval that followed as the outside world pressed in on a way of life that had run, for generations, without it.

Behind the Scenes: Harrison Love in the Amazon, Peru–Brazil Border

Before Harrison Love crossed the Ucayali River into the deeper reaches of the Amazon to spend time with the Ashaninka people, he captured this footage along the Peru–Brazil border — the last images recorded before the expedition moved beyond reach of spare batteries or power. It is a document of the threshold itself: the country an artist and storyteller stood in just before the research that would eventually shape The Hidden Way began.

Amazon · Peru–Brazil Border

Last footage recorded before crossing the Ucayali River to the Ashaninka.

The Palpa Riots — The Spark Behind The Hidden Way

Not long after Harrison Love returned home to New York, riots broke out in Palpa, in the region he had just left. Watching the fallout from a distance, Love found the spark that would set him on a decade-long undertaking: writing and illustrating The Hidden Way, the novel that would eventually take him more than ten years to complete. This short video captures that inflection point — the moment an artist decided a story needed telling.

New York

Riots in Palpa spark the decade-long writing of The Hidden Way.

WEdesign Studios: Harrison Love's Sketchbook and the Road to RISD

WEdesign Studios sat down with Harrison Love to talk process — specifically, the sketchbook that became a turning point in his career. It was this body of work, pages of raw drawing and idea-testing, that helped the artist and future author of The Hidden Way earn a partial scholarship to RISD, and this conversation traces how a private habit of sketching became a public credential.

RISD

A sketchbook earns Harrison Love a partial scholarship.

Harrison Love x SCAPE — Moments of Grace in Abstract & Calligraphy Art

During the years Harrison Love ran Big Umbrella Studios, his own gallery in San Francisco, he sat down with fellow artist SCAPE for a conversation between practitioners: two calligraphy- and graffiti-influenced abstract artists comparing notes on what they each call "moments of grace" — the instants inside a piece where control gives way to something truer.

San Francisco

Founds and runs Big Umbrella Studios gallery.

SOMArts Presents: Behind The Dance Within Fleeting Dreams

SOMArts in San Francisco went behind the scenes with Harrison Love after awarding him a grant to create The Dance Within Fleeting Dreams, a performance piece fusing movement, music, and visual art. Love walks through how the piece came together — less a plan executed than a series of serendipities allowed to happen.

SOMArts Grant

Creates the performance piece The Dance Within Fleeting Dreams.

SFMOMA Artist Gallery: Inside Harrison Love's Dovetail Studio

Filmed in Harrison Love's studio at Dovetail in San Francisco, this longform conversation with SFMOMA's Artist Gallery goes deeper than most — tracing the throughline between the artist's calligraphy, graffiti, and abstract painting practice and the ideas that hold them together.

Dovetail Studio

Longform feature with SFMOMA's Artist Gallery.

The Hidden Way — First Public Reading at Triangle Lofts, NYC

This is Harrison Love's first public presentation of The Hidden Way, given at Triangle Lofts in New York City during the book's very first month in print. The illustrated novel would go on to win the Readers' Favorite Award for Excellence in Illustrated YA Fiction — but here, it's still brand new, and Love is introducing it to a room for one of the first times.

Triangle Lofts, NYC

The Hidden Way debuts; later wins the Readers' Favorite Award.

77: Harrison Love on Graffiti, Vandalism, and Reclaimed Space

In one of the early "77" events — Harrison Love's seven-minute-on-stage format built for going deep on a single idea — he took on graffiti's public image: how a mark that reads to the layperson as vandalism is, in practice, an act of reclaiming unused space and letting real art into a neighborhood that might not otherwise see any.

77 Series Begins

Seven minutes on graffiti's true meaning.

American Graffiti (Pilot) — Harrison Love as an Anonymous Graffiti Artist

For the pilot episode of the documentary American Graffiti — an exploration of graffiti as both rebellion and First Amendment expression — Harrison Love appeared as an anonymous graffiti artist, tracing New York City's long, contested relationship with the form.

American Graffiti

Appears anonymously in the documentary pilot.

Process in Motion — A Time-Lapse Journey Through Harrison Love's Studio

This video gathers years of time-lapse footage from Harrison Love's studio practice into a single reel. Stripped of interview or explanation, it makes its point through accumulation alone: brush stroke by brush stroke, layer by layer, the sheer volume of work an artist puts in over years to arrive at a single finished piece.

Studio Practice

Years of process distilled into one time-lapse reel.

The Hidden Way at AWESOME, Flatbush, Brooklyn

Harrison Love returned to present The Hidden Way a second time, now at AWESOME in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood — a homecoming of sorts for the award-winning illustrated novel, and a chance to introduce it to a different corner of the city than its Manhattan debut.

AWESOME, Brooklyn

Second presentation of The Hidden Way, in Flatbush.

Harrison Love x Google — An LLM-Assisted Conversation on Art

Conducted online in partnership with Google, this interview used the company's own large language model tools to shape an expansive conversation about Harrison Love's work — a fitting format for an artist whose career has always sat at the intersection of tradition and new tools.

Google

An LLM-assisted conversation on the work.

77: The Riots and Rioters Series

For another installment of the "77" series, Harrison Love brought a painting from his Riots and Rioters series to the stage — work born directly out of the unrest in Palpa that first set The Hidden Way in motion — and used his seven minutes to unpack it.

Riots and Rioters

A painting from the series takes the 77 stage.

77: Introducing STOA — Free Public Art in Prospect Park

In this "77" talk, Harrison Love introduced STOA, the free monthly gathering he founded in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and the mission behind it: building art literacy and access for a neighborhood that doesn't always get either.

STOA Founded

Free monthly art in Prospect Park, presented at 77.

ExhibitIQ (2026): Harrison Love on Selling and Negotiating Art

Recorded in 2026 with ExhibitIQ, this conversation moves into territory Harrison Love doesn't often discuss publicly: the business side of being a working artist. Together they unpack the techniques he uses to attract collectors and negotiate art sales.

ExhibitIQ, 2026

Talking the business of selling and negotiating art.

Full Circle

Harrison Love's Chautauqua Institution Lecture, Revisited

The talk that opens this page closes it too. Harrison Love's 2026 lecture at the Chautauqua Institution — a stage that has hosted generations of great artists and thinkers before him — remains one of the honors he holds closest, and it felt right to let it stand at both ends of this archive: a reminder of how far the journey from the Amazon to The Hidden Way has traveled.

Chautauqua, 2026

Full circle — back to where this page began.