Harrell Fletcher

American artist and professor

Harrell Fletcher (born 1967 in Santa Maria, California) is an American social practice and relational aesthetics artist and professor, living in Portland, Oregon.

Harrell Fletcher was born in 1967 in Santa Maria, California and attended Santa Maria High School. Fletcher received his B. F. A. in 1990 from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and his M. F. A. in 1994 from California College of the Arts (CCA). At CCA, Fletcher studied under Suzanne Lacy. In 1995, Fletcher completed an apprenticeship at UCSC at the farm, studying ecological horticulture. In 2007, Fletcher founded the Art + Social Practice Program in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University, where he is still on faculty.

His fellow CCA student Jon Rubin, and Fletcher collaborated for several years in the Bay Area following the completion of his M. F. A., and together creating Gallery Here in nearby Oakland. In addition to its internet presentations, Learning to Love You More has been compiled for exhibitions for the Whitney Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and other hosts. A book version of the project's online art was released in 2007. The project is now part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Collection.

From 2010–2017, Fletcher co curated with Jens Hoffmann the People's Biennial. The People’s Biennial explored and presented the creative activities of individuals and collectives as expressions of society’s cultural diversity that would otherwise be overlooked, neglected, or even actively repressed.

In 2002 he won the Creative Capital award. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 he won the Alpert Awards in the Arts and a residency at ArtPace. In 2011, he was an artist in residence at Exploratorium, and won an award from Americans for the Arts for Outstanding Public Artwork. He has been in residence at Capp Street Project at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2011. In 2014, he was an artist in residence with his Portland based art collective Public Doors and Windows (PDW) which includes artists Molly Sherman, and Nolan Calisch, at Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) at University of California, Santa Cruz.