Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Illustration, Watercolor, Artist’s books
Website: alexharris.art
Alex Harris is a graphic artist, illustrator, and occasional writer based in Oakland, California. Born and raised in Berkeley, he earned a BA in environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. That background in environmental science has shaped a practice concerned with how people encounter, name, and live alongside the natural world in cities — a subject he has described as the interface between humans and nature, approached through both art and technology.
Before working as an artist full time, Harris spent several years in the museum field as web editor and electronic communications manager at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). He has since worked independently, taking on editorial illustration, commissions, and long-form illustrated projects of his own.
His first book, Birds of Lake Merritt, was published in 2021 by Heyday, the Berkeley-based nonprofit press, as part of its Birds of California series. A watercolor field guide to fifteen waterbirds of Lake Merritt — the Oakland tidal lagoon designated in 1870 as the first official wildlife refuge in the United States — the book pairs species profiles with a history of the lake and with the voices of Oakland residents who watch its birds. Harris has also contributed illustrated natural-history writing to Bay Nature, including pieces on Bay Area fungi.
Harris works primarily in watercolor and drawing, in a register that sits between natural-history illustration and contemporary graphic art. The bird paintings in Birds of Lake Merritt are observational and unfussy: close attention to plumage pattern and the particular posture of a bird, set down with a loose, wet-edged touch rather than the hard scientific finish of a classical field guide plate. Species are rendered as individuals with a recognizable physicality — the slouch of a night heron, the paddling bustle of a coot — rather than as diagrammatic specimens.
The work is also deliberately local. Harris illustrates nature, food, and architecture, and his subjects tend to be the overlooked common things of an urban environment: the lagoon in the middle of downtown Oakland, a mushroom pushing up under a Monterey cypress, the birds most people walk past. Threading community voices through the field-guide format extends that interest — the guide documents not only a set of species but a relationship between a neighborhood and the animals it shares space with.
No gallery or museum exhibition history was located in public sources at the time of writing. Harris’s work has circulated primarily through publishing and editorial illustration.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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