Harrell Fletcher is an American artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

 who creates socially engaged interdisciplinary projects.

Early work

While completing his degree at California College of Arts and Crafts, Fletcher began collaborating with artist Jon Rubin

Jon Rubin

Jon Rubin is an American artist living and working in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. He's also professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His work "explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior."...

. The two secured a space in the Rockridge

Rockridge, Oakland, California

Rockridge is a residential neighborhood and commercial district in Oakland, California. Rockridge is generally defined as the area east of Telegraph Avenue, south of the Berkeley city limits, west of the Oakland hills and north of the intersection of Pleasant Valley Avenue/51st Street and...

 neighborhood of Oakland where they began to create exhibitions about the neighborhood using neighborhood residents to help create the shows. The two would go on to collaborate for several years afterward. Wrote poem I Want You To Smell Me.

Teaching and awards

Fletcher is on the faculty of the Portland State University

Portland State University

Portland State University is a public state urban university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in...

 Department of Art. He has exhibited at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is a multi-disiplinary contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California, United States. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse...

 in SF, Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways is a non-profit art space established in 1975. Located at 56 Arbor Street in the Parkville neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, Real Art Ways exhibits visual art, houses an independent cinema and presents live music, theater, and literary and community events.It has shown such...

 in Hartford, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park

Socrates Sculpture Park

Socrates Sculpture Park is an outdoor exhibition space for sculpture. It is located one block from the Noguchi Museum at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard in the neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, New York City...

 and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, PICA

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon, United States was founded in 1996 by Kristy Edmunds, formerly the Director of the Portland Art Museum's "Art on the Edge" program...

 in Portland, OR, CoCA

Coca

Coca, Erythroxylum coca, is a plant in the family Erythroxylaceae, native to western South America. The plant plays a significant role in many traditional Andean cultures...

 in Seattle, WA, and Signal in Malmo, Sweden. Fletcher is represented in San Francisco by Jack Hanley Gallery, and in NYC by Christine Burgin Gallery. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial

Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...

 at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory web site with Miranda July

Miranda July

Miranda July is a performing artist, writer, actress and film director. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she works under the surname of "July," which can be traced to a character from a "girlzine" Miranda created with high school friend Johanna Fateman, called Snarla.- Background :Miranda...

. He has also won the 2005 Alpert Awards in the Arts

Alpert Awards in the Arts

The CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts was established in the 1994 by The Herb Alpert Foundation in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts . The foundation provides $50,000 annual fellowship to five artists in the field of film and video, visual arts, theatre, dance, and music....

 in Visual Arts.

External links

• Learning To Love You More
• Interview with Harrell Fletcher
• Official site
• Harrell Fletcher in the Video Data Bank
  Video Data Bank
  Video Data Bank is an international video art distribution organization and a resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists...