Ellen Harvey (born 1967) is an American-British conceptual artist known for her painting-based practice and site-specific works in installation, video, engraved mirrors, mosaic and glass.Huldisch, Henriette. "Tempting Failure,
''Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure''
New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Miller, Nicole
"Ellen Harvey: Nostalgia,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', 19 December 2017. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Kunitz, Daniel
"Painter Ellen Harvey's Latest Public Work Is a Love Letter to the Everglades,"
''Cultured'', 11 August 2017. Retrieved 29 October 2019. She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres (landscape, portraiture) with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche.Landi, Ann. "The Real Thing," ''ARTnews'', June 2002.Wei, Lilly. "Ellen Harvey at Luxe," ''Art in America'', December 2007.Volk, Gregory. "Spring in Dystopia," ''Art in America'', May 2008. Her work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between built environment and landscape, ruins and the

Picturesque Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in ''Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year ...

aesthetic, and cultural and economic relationships between museums, artists and publics.Landi, Ann. "Breaking Laws & Mirrors," ''ARTnews'', May 2006.Hall, Emily
"Ellen Harvey/Dodge Gallery,"
''Artforum International'', May 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Hunter, Becky Huff
"Ellen Harvey: Barnes Foundation & Locks Gallery,"
''Frieze'', March 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Curator Henriette Huldisch writes of her work, "haunted as it is by the notion of art's ultimate futility, her paradoxical stake is in persistently testing art's possibility to do something in the world after all." Harvey has had solo exhibitions at the

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

at Philip Morris,Johnson, Ken
"So Here's the Concept: Copy a Whole Collection,"
''The New York Times'', 28 February 2003. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Corcoran Museum of Art,Pendle, George
"Ellen Harvey,"
''Frieze'', 11 October 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Groeninge MuseumHaq, Nav. "Crushed by Too Much Love,
''The Unloved: Ellen Harvey''
(Tessa Rosebrock, et al.), Veurne, Belgium: Hannibal, 2014, p. 23–35. and

Barnes Foundation The Barnes Foundation is an art collection and educational institution promoting the appreciation of art and horticulture. Originally in Merion, the art collection moved in 2012 to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Penn ...

,Cohen, David
"Ellen Harvey at the Barnes Foundation,"
''artcritical'', 13 December 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019. and been featured in the

Whitney Whitney may refer to: Film and television * ''Whitney'' (2015 film), a Whitney Houston biopic starring Yaya DaCosta * ''Whitney'' (2018 film), a documentary about Whitney Houston * ''Whitney'' (TV series), an American sitcom that premiered i ...

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and List of cities in the Czech Republic, largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 milli ...

and

Kwangju Gwangju () is South Korea's sixth-largest metropolis. It is a designated metropolitan city under the direct control of the central government's Home Minister. The city was also the capital of South Jeolla Province until the provincial office ...

Biennials,Levin, Kim. "Whitney Biennial," ''ARTnews'', May 2008.Hoffman, Frank. "Report from Kwangju: Monoculture and Its Discontents," ''Art in America'', November 2000. and shows at

MoMA PS1 MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution located in Court Square in the Long Island City neighborhood in the borough of Queens, New York City. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, the ...

,Herkenhoff, Paulo. "Ellen Harvey," ''Strangers/Etrangers'', New York: PS1, 2001.

Turner Contemporary Turner Contemporary is one of the UK’s leading contemporary art galleries. Celebrating Margate’s connection with the painter J.M.W. Turner (1775 – 1851), an artist who believed that art could be an agent of change, its year-round exhibition ...

,Cooke, Rachel. "Volcanoes and damp squibs," ''The Guardian'', 10 April 2011, p. 32. the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary ArtKlein, Richard. "Extended Forecast," ''Weather Report'', Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019. and

SMAK Smak ( sr-Cyrl, Смак; trans. ''The end time'') was a Serbian and Yugoslav band from Kragujevac. The group reached the peak of popularity in the 1970s when it was one of the most notable acts of the former Yugoslav rock scene. The band's l ...

.Huldisch, Henriette
''Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure''
New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2019. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.Greenberger, Alex
"John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Announces 2016 Fellowships,"
''ARTnews'', 6 April 2016. Retrieved 28 October 2019. She has been awarded public commissions in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and her 2016 Belgian project, ''Repeat'', won the Wivina Demeester Prize for Commissioned Public Art.''Sculpture Magazine''
"Mirror Networks: A Conversation with Ellen Harvey,"
''Sculpture'', 24 May 2019. Retrieved 28 October 2019.Declercq, Aline
"Bossuit Church Wins Wivina Demeester Prize,"
''Focus/WTV'', 29 November 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Her work has been the subject of several books, including ''The Unloved: Ellen Harvey'' (2014), ''Ellen Harvey: Museum of Failure'' (2015), ''New York Beautification Project'' (2005/2021), and ''Ellen Harvey: The Disappointed Tourist'' (2021).Rosebrock, Tessa et al
''The Unloved: Ellen Harvey''
Veurne, Belgium: Cannibal, 2014. Retrieved 28 October 2019.Harvey, Ellen
''New York Beautification Project''
New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2022.Harvey, Ellen
''Ellen Harvey: The Disappointed Tourist''
Köln Snoeck/Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2021. Retrieved March 11, 2019. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and career

Harvey was born in 1967 in Farnborough,

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, United Kingdom to German and British parents; her sisters are the poet Matthea Harvey and ecologist Celia Harvey.Finkelpearl, Tom and Valerie Smith. "Does the Breath Change As It Crosses the Divide: Ellen Harvey and Matthea Harvey in Conversation," ''Generation 1.5'', New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2009. Her family lived throughout Europe, before moving to the United States when Harvey was in her teens.Schwob, Olivia
"Art Is a Dark Mirror,"
''Harvard Magazine'', May–June 2016. Retrieved 18 October 2019. She attended

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

( AB, History and Literature, 1989) and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin in Germany (1990, no degree), before earning a JD from the

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by '' U.S. News & Worl ...

in 1993.Weisberg, Jonathan T
"Not Your Typical Lawyer,"
''Yale Law Review'', Summer 2003, p. 33–41. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Kunitz, Daniel. "Streets Ahead," ''Art Review'', October–November 2005. After practicing law for three years and painting in her free time, she turned to art full-time, establishing herself in solo and group shows at the Stux and De Chiara galleries,

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...

, PS1, Art in General,Valdez, Sarah. "Ellen Harvey: Painting is a Low Tech Special Effect," ''Time Out New York'', 29 June 2000.Bowles, Emily. "Ellen Harvey at De Chiara," ''Art in America'', October 2002.Glueck, Grace
"Surface Tension,"
''The New York Times'', 8 October 1999, Section E, p. 37. Retrieved 28 October 2019. and several international venues.Ewing, Margaret
"Berlin: Ellen Harvey,"
''Artforum'', May 2010. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Weh, Vitus. "Hier ist Dort 2: Internationale Malerpositionen," ''Artforum International'', April–May 2002. She also completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and participated in PS1's National Studio Program.Momin, Shamin. ''A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris'', New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003. Harvey's early work examined art production conventions and the public desire for representational art.Schwendener, Martha. "Ellen Harvey: I See Myself," ''Time Out New York'', 13 December 2001.Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', 27 July 2001, Section E, p. 25. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Johnson, Ken

''The New York Times'', 14 December 2001. Retrieved 18 October 2019. She gained wide attention with her "New York Beautification Project" (1999–2001),Harvey, Ellen

New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2005. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Ellen Harvey website

Retrieved 18 October 2019. which comprised 40 small, oval oil landscapes, illegally painted over graffiti-covered sites throughout New York City.Schneider, Daniel B

''The New York Times'', 18 February 2001, Section 14, p. 2. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Shattuck, Kathry

''The New York Times'', 14 August 2005, Section 2, p. 4. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Choosing what she called "anodyne images," she sought to investigate the criteria behind value judgments about art, including what is popular or offensive, and how an artist's demographic relates to privilege.Gennochio, Benjamin

''The New York Times'', 12 September 2004. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Honigman, Ana Finel. "Good Artist/Bad Artist: An Interview with Ellen Harvey," ''Art Journal'', Fall 2005, p. 102–118.Smith, Valerie. " Ellen Harvey," ''Generation 1.5'', New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2009. In reviews, ''The New York Times'' described these works as "hit-and-run pastoral scenes" that were painted with "the tenderness, glowing light and overlapping greens of the

Hudson River School The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area ...

" and "turn dstreet art on its head."

Work and reception

Throughout her career, Harvey has cycled between diverse media and themes. Her work can be loosely organized into recurrent motifs: self-portraits and portraiture, museum and archive works, ruins, and landscapes and mappings.Budak, Adam. "The Accident in the Mirror,
''Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure''
New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015, p. 298–303. Retrieved 18 October 2019.

Self-portraits and portraiture

Harvey's early figurative work explored the limits of representation, relationships between artist and public, memory, and the role or obsolescence of painting in a technological age. She often contrasted properties of painting (as labor-intensive, fallible, human, enduring) and photography (as immediate, indexical, machine-made, ephemeral, cheap). ''ID Card Project'' (1998) was a diaristic collection of 25 small painted self-portraits copied from age 14-to-31 ID cards. For ''I See Myself in You'' (2001), Harvey dressed and posed adult friends to imitate theatrical childhood photographs of herself, then shot Polaroids and painted portraits from them, two for each original image. ''100 Free Portraits'' and ''I Am a Bad Camera'' (both 2001) were wry explorations of the artist/sitter relationship.Wilson, Michael. "Picks: Screen," ''Artforum'', 28 August 2001. In the former, Harvey posed as a street-portraitist, offering 15-minute pencil portraits in exchange for written evaluations of the pictures; the latter was a 30-minute video of her hand drawing a portrait, projected onto a pad of paper and accompanied by the sitter's voiceover politely complaining about the likeness. She revisited these ideas in her performance ''100 Visitors to the Biennial Immortalized'' and her various "Invisible Self-Portraits" (2008, below), in which she painted her likeness in mirrors, obscured by a photographic flash.Vogel, Carol

''The New York Times'', 29 February 2008. Retrieved 18 October 2019.de la Torre, Mónica. "Artists on Artists: Ellen Harvey," ''Bomb'', Fall 2007.

Museum and archive works

Harvey has often created deadpan copies, re-translations and collections of artworks or cultural materials to comment on the politics of selection, display, meaning and legitimacy in art. For ''A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris'' (2003), she created a walk-in museum

simulacrum A simulacrum (plural: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin '' simulacrum'', which means "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, u ...

: 394 postcard-sized reproductions of the museum's permanent art collection, copied from its catalogue and painted salon-style directly on walls wrapping around the museum branch gallery, itself framed in gold. Amid her copies, Harvey cut similarly sized slots into the walls, which revealed well-lit, recently acquired, actual artworks that critic Ken Johnson wrote, hovered with "hallucinatory vividness," creating a "magical play with differing dimensions of visual experience." Harvey's rote presentation—alphabetical, with reduction of all to small, brushy paintings—enacted what critics described as a humorous but aggressive leveling of hierarchies of quality and value and the presumed status of museums. Harvey varied these strategies in two commissioned installations. ''The Nudist Museum'' (Bass Museum of Art, 2010–2) examined historical and contemporary obsessions with the body through a packed group of 54 selectively copied, gilt-framed reproductions of every nude in the Bass collection that were hung salon-style over a wall collaged with nudes from pornographic, fashion and fitness magazines.Coates, Jennifer
"Ellen Harvey,"
''Art in America'', 16 May 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Landi, Ann
"Double Exposure,"
''ARTnews'', 10 May 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.McCorquodale, Amanda
"Ellen Harvey Gives Nudity the Third Degree,"
''Miami New Times'', 30 September 2010. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Later installations of ''The Nudist Museum'' included a postcard display and the ''Nudist Museum Gift Shop'', featuring portraits of kitsch objects formed out of nudes or body parts.Dickson, Jane
"The Nudist Museum Gift Shop,"
''Artnet'', 15 March 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Feldman, Jill. "Enter through the Gift Shop," ''Artinfo'', 24 February 2012.Austin, Tom. "Naked Art," ''Miami Herald'', 10 October 2010. ''Metal Painting'' (2015)Ellen Harvey website

Projects. Retrieved 18 October 2019. was commissioned as a companion to an historical exhibition on metalwork at the

. It consisted of 887 oil-on-board,

impasto ''Impasto'' is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly, usually thick enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas. When dry, impasto provide ...

silhouette portraits of each piece of metalwork in the collection.Hine, Thomas.
"Barnes Goes Elemental with Iron,"
''Philadelphia Inquirer'', 18 October 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Idriskek, Scott.
"Ellen Harvey Irons Out the Barnes Foundation Collection,"
''Blouin ArtInfo'', 18 June 2015. Retrieved 28 October 2019. Magnetically mounted salon-style in an interlocking, movable arrangement, they reflected the museum founder's idiosyncratic curation of functional objects alongside

Neo-Impressionist Neo-Impressionism is a term coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat's most renowned masterpiece, '' A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte'', marked the beginn ...

and early

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

paintings.Gennochio, Ben
"Watch as Ellen Harvey goes Heavy Metal at the Barnes Foundation,"
''Artnet'', 28 August 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019. In her two-part ''Museum of Failure'' (2007–8, Whitney Biennial),Ellen Harvey website

Projects. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Harvey catalogued the fraught nature of artistic coherence and communication. ''Collection of Impossible Subjects'' featured a rear-illuminated mirror wall, hand-engraved with a salon-style collection of ornately framed, glowing sanded-out rectangles; visible through one opening was ''Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio'', a large trompe l’oeil painting depicting identically framed, rendered studio snippets and self-portraits based on photographs Harvey took in a mirror, with camera flashes obscuring her face. ''Art in America'' critic Gregory Volk described it as a "visually stunning" deconstruction of the creation and exhibition process that evoked things unseen, incomprehensible or unrepresented in museums.

Ruins and restoration

Harvey frequently draws on the Romantic tradition's idealization of ruins and fragments, reframing cycles of cultural production in order to explore fallacies and failures involving representation, communication, permanence, and ideology.Pendle, George
"Ellen Harvey,"
''Frieze'', April 2006, p. 173. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Baker, Alex. "Ruined Reflections: Ellen Harvey's Mirror,
''Ellen Harvey: Mirror''
Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2005, p. 1–8.Scharrer, Eva
"Critic's Picks: Ellen Harvey,"
''Artforum'', 9 September 2003. Retrieved 18 October 2019. For the public art commission ''Repeat'' (2013, Bossuit Belgium), she "de-restored" a desanctified, post-WWI village church that had fallen into disrepair and disuse, removing the roof, interior pillars, and ritual furnishings and transforming it into a multi-use public square-artificial ruin; a new terrazzo floor incorporated schematic traces of the removed elements and a grey pattern evoking the shadows of the previous, ruined church after its bombardment.Maes, Frank. "How do you replace a church? Ellen Harvey's Repeat in Bossuit," ''Art by Commission: 2006 – 2013'' (Katrien Laenen, et al. ed.), Brussels: Vlams Bouwmeester, 2013, p. 182–7.Valdez, Sarah
"Ellen Harvey's New Show is Solid Gold,"
''Garage'' (Vice), 2 November 2017. Retrieved 28 October 2019.''ArtDaily''
"A new permanent public art work for the village of Bossuit, Belgium."
2013. Retrieved 29 October 2019. In several mirrored installations, Harvey re-imagined her sites in elegiac, science-fiction-like, ruined states. ''Mirror'' (2005,

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

) recreated a Gothic Revival grand staircase as a picturesque ruin in four ghostly, rear-illuminated, hand-engraved mirror panels in a darkened rotunda. They were accompanied by video projections that documented Harvey engraving the mirror images or drawing the academy's previous buildings; upon completion, they simultaneously shattered or burst into flame. For ''Ruins Are More Beautiful'' (2009, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle), she covered the windows and doors of a renovated exhibition space with mirror engravings depicting the surrounding castle reduced to a forested shambles. ''Reforestation'' (2013) superimposed a mirrored engraving of post-digital-age ruins littered with electronic equipment over the reflected image of an actual Internal Revenue Service office; outside, Harvey installed ''Fossils'' (2013), carved white-marble sculptures featuring fossilized vestiges of the same technology. Harvey's absurdist exhibition, ''The Alien's Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C.'' (2013, Corcoran Gallery), invoked a future earth excavated by aliens left to piece together the lost culture by only its architecture.Ureña, Leslie J
"Ellen Harvey,"
''Artforum'', August 2013. Retrieved 28 October 2019.Cembalest, Robin
"D.C. for E.T.s: Sci-Fi Archeology for the Corcoran,"
''ARTnews'', August 2013. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Based on the classical and neo-classical ruins they find worldwide—on display in ''The Pillar-Builder Archive'' (2013), a room of 4,000 alien-classified postcards of such structures—they wildly misinterpret humanity as an egalitarian, three-sexed, aquatic species unified by the building of pillars.Plotz, David

''Slate'', 3 October 2013. Retrieved 28 October 2019. ''Friezes George Pendle described the show—which included a hand-painted, life-size ''Alien Souvenir Stand'', a tour guide to actual DC sites, and a pillar-influenced alien space ship—as a "less bleakly dystopian than happily deranged" examination of the ubiquity of the classical in worldwide vocabularies of power and constructions of cultural memory.Gambino, Megan. "Inside the Alien's Guide," ''Smithsonian Magazine'', 18 July 2013.

Landscape and mapping works

Harvey has employed landscape and mapping motifs in ''New York Beautification Project'', multifaceted installations and public mosaics. ''Observations Concerning the Picturesque'' (2009,

) and ''Rooms of Sublime Wallpaper'' (I & II, 2008) examined privileged notions of the picturesque landscape; the former included a pastiche guidebook supposedly written by artist-landscapist William Gilpin, an invented archive of his works, and related signs and tours in an actual park. ''Arcade/Arcadia'' (2011–7) was commissioned for the opening of

Margate Margate is a seaside town on the north coast of Kent in south-east England. The town is estimated to be 1.5 miles long, north-east of Canterbury and includes Cliftonville, Garlinge, Palm Bay and Westbrook. The town has been a significan ...

. It examined the sublime, ephemerality and loss, juxtaposing the seaside town's one-time idyllic status as a resort and haven for J. M. W. Turner and its contemporary socioeconomic decline.Herbert, Martin
"Revealed,"
''Frieze'', June 2011. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Newhall, Edie

''Philadelphia Inquirer'', 10 June 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Rice, Robin. "Ellen Harvey/Locks Gallery," ''ARTnews'', October 2012.Volk, Gregory
"An Artist's Light-Filled Tribute to Turner,"
''Hyperallergic'', 18 November 2017. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Harvey built a skeletal version of Turner's London gallery, hung with 34 rear-illuminated, hand-engraved mirrors mimicking the exhibition at the time of his death, which depicted a panoramic view of the shabbier, contemporary Margate.Swenson, Kirsten
"Ellen Harvey at Danese/Corey,"
''Art in America'', 1 March 2018. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Reviewers described it as "witty and poignant," and "a combination of funhouse and haunted house … more spiritual than secular." Harvey's later project, ''The Disappointed Tourist'' (2019– ), revisited these themes through a painted archive of sites that no longer exist—from amusement parks to classical monuments to themed restaurants remembered from childhood—that respondents submitted online as places they wished they could once again visit.Upton, George
"Ellen Harvey's Archive of Lost Architecture,"
''Frieze'', August 30, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Museum der Moderne Salzburg
"Ellen Harvey: The Disappointed Tourist,"
exhibitions. October 21, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2022. The project's installation at Turner Contemporary (2021) consisted of over 220 paintings hung in an enormous grid and placed in dialogue with works by Turner (sketches of Roman ruins and coastal views of Margate). ''Frieze'' described its effect as "something quite mournful, like a wall of faces of missing people after a disaster."''Frieze''
"The Five Best Institutional Shows to See in the UK,"
September 3, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2022. The project's installation at

Museum der Moderne Salzburg The Museum der Moderne Salzburg has two buildings at two different locations in Salzburg, Austria. The Rupertinum in the old town for new artistic concepts opened in 1983 and the Museum on the Mönchsberg for modern art in a contemporary setting op ...

(2021) was described as an attempt to "localize existential memories," mapping a spectrum that ranged from traumatic experiences (war, racism, and ecological disaster) to more mundane losses caused by technological change or gentrification. In ''The Unloved'' (2015, Groeninge Museum, Bruges) Harvey mapped competing representations of the port, Bruges, in a five-room installation that unfolded historically and geographically. One side featured Harvey's large greyscale paintings of contemporary satellite views of the city, inlayed with mirrors; opposite them, large mirrored walls pierced with rectangular openings revealed hidden walls carrying chronologically installed, historical paintings of Bruges that she "rescued" from the museum's storage depot. For ''Atlantis'' (2019, Miami Beach),Ellen Harvey website
"Atlantis, 2019,"
Projects. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Harvey installed a 10-by-100-foot, mouth-blown mirror wall engraved with her painting of a satellite view mapping a diagonal swath of Florida from the Gulf of Mexico through the Everglades to Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean; reflecting visitors, the image seems to float in response to changing light conditions, alluding to Florida's intimate and uneasy relationship with its water table.Scott, Chadd
"Miami Beach Announces Major Site-Specific Artworks Coming to Convention Center,"
''Forbes'', 19 February 2019. Retrieved 18 October 2019. She reworked the design for ''Atlantis'' into a 10 x 100-foot painting, ''Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked'' (2019), that more directly contrasts the natural with the man-made landscape. In the public work ''You Are Here'' (2013, with Jan Baracz, Philadelphia International Airport), Harvey and Baracz diagrammed the flight approach to the airport on a large bank of sandblasted and airbrushed windows; ''Network'' (2019) charts the Boston transportation network in mosaic, with nearly invisible mermaids representing the contributions of female transportation engineers.''Boston Herald''. "To The Untrained Eye…," 15 May 2019. Harvey's public mosaics ''Look Up Not Down'' (2005, Queens Plaza Subway Station) and ''Home of the Stars'' (2009, Yankee Stadium Metro-North station) employed ground-level views, respectively, of the Manhattan and Queens skylines and the Bronx sky in an 11-panel progression from cloud-filled daylight to starry night.Dunlap, David W

''The New York Times'', 21 January 2007. Retrieved 18 October 2019.New York Metro Transit Authority

MTA Arts & Design. Retrieved October 29, 2019. The mosaics ''Green Map'' (2019, San Francisco) and ''Mathematical Star'' (2013, Brooklyn, Marcy Plaza) used more metaphorical strategies, inverting traditional mapping to highlight only local protected natural spaces in the former, and representing the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in a quilt pattern of diamond designs based on photographs of eighteen neighborhood landmarks selected by the local community board in the latter.Culture Now
"Mathematical Star,"
Museum Without Walls. Retrieved 29 October 2019.

Awards and collections

Harvey has received fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2016), George A. & Eliza Gardener Howard Foundation (2019) and New York Foundation for the Arts/Lily Auchincloss Foundation (2002), as well as awards from the

New York Community Trust The New York Community Trust is the community foundation for New York City, with divisions in Westchester and Long Island. It is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the United States and one of the largest funders of New York C ...

(2007),

Pew Charitable Trust The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1948. With over 6 billion in assets, its stated mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, a ...

(2004), Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2004) and Artists Space (2001).John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
"Ellen Harvey,"
Fellows. Retrieved 29 October 2019.New York Foundation for the Arts
"Spotlight: NYFA's Strong Presence at Armory Arts Week,"
''NYFA Current'', 3 March 2014. Retrieved 29 October 2019. In addition to several artist residencies, she has been awarded public art commissions from New York Percent for Art, New York Arts in Transit, the

Chicago Transit Authority The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is the operator of mass transit in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and some of its surrounding suburbs, including the trains of the Chicago 'L' and CTA bus service. In , the system had a ridership of , ...

,Public Art in Chicago
"CTA Arts-in-Transit: Francisco Station, ''Carpet'' by Ellen Harvey."
Retrieved 28 October 2019. Philadelphia International Airport, U.S. Art in Architecture Program, San Francisco Airport, WTS (Women's Transportation Seminar) Boston, Miami Beach Convention Center, and the Municipality of Avelgem, Belgium. Harvey's work belongs to public collections from around the world, including the Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, Art Omi,

Berkeley Art Museum The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA, formerly abbreviated as BAM/PFA) are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from ...

(BAMPFA), Center for Contemporary Art (Poland), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (Spain), Gwangju Art Museum (Korea), Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Princeton Art Museum, and Wyspa Institute (Poland).Whitney Museum of American Art
"Ellen Harvey, ''Loving Object'', 2004,"
Collection. Retrieved 28 October 2019. She is represented by Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), Galerie Gebrüder Lehmann (Dresden, Germany), and Meessen De Clercq (Brussels, Belgium).

Publications

*''Ellen Harvey: Museum of Failure'' (2015) *''The Unloved: Ellen Harvey'' (2014) *''Ellen Harvey: Mirror'' (2005)Baker, Alex
''Ellen Harvey: Mirror''
Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2005. *''New York Beautification Project'' (2005, 2021)

References

External links

*
Ellen Harvey official websiteEllen Harvey
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Interview with Heidi LeeLecture at University of Michigan School of Art and DesignEllen Harvey artist page
Meessen De Clercq
Ellen Harvey artist page
Locks Gallery {{DEFAULTSORT:Harvey, Ellen 1967 births Living people American multimedia artists British multimedia artists People from Farnborough, London Harvard University alumni Yale Law School alumni British installation artists British performance artists American installation artists American performance artists