Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990s.
His work has been shown at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as a multitude of other national and international institutions. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMOMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, the de Young Museum, and the FRAC in Brittany, France. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You More (LTLYM), a participatory website with Miranda July. A book version of LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts and is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
For more than 15 years, Fletcher has been at the forefront of an art field called "social practice," a medium that tends to engage audiences directly through the creation of intangible, collaborative experiences. Talented social practice artists are skillful at designing the conditions for elegant situations to unfold amongst groups of people.
