Ellen Harvey
Encyclopedia
Ellen Harvey is a Brooklyn based artist working in a variety of media, including painting, video, installation and performance. She is a graduate of Harvard University
, Yale Law School
and attended both the Whitney Independent Study Program and the PS1 National Studio Program. She is the sister of the poet Matthea Harvey
.
Harvey has exhibited extensively both in the United States and internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist’s Award in 2004, a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Award in 2004, and a Lily Auchincloss Foundation Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002, among others. She is known for work that uses traditional aesthetics and media in surprising ways to call into question the social or physical situation in which it is placed. She has often stated that her goal is to “seduce people into thinking”. Her work ranges in size from intimate pieces to large scale installations and interventions and public works.
Harvey first garnered attention with the New York Beautification Project for which she painted small romantic oval landscapes in oils directly over graffiti sites without permission throughout New York City from 1999 - 2001. In 2005 Gregory Miller & Co. published New York Beautification Project in which Harvey detailed her experiences on the streets while making the project.
Many of Harvey’s larger institutional installations can be categorized as a form of "institutional critique" that attempt to make visible the desires implicit in particular situations. For Bad Boy Klimt in 2002, she decorated the Vienna Secession with graffiti based on Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze which is located in the Secession’s basement. In 2003 for A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris, she inserted an 80 ft painting consisting of copies of all the images contained in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s catalog of its collection (American Visionaries) into the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris’ gallery.
In 2005, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Philadelphia, PA received a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust as part of its Pennsylvania Exhibitions Initiative to produce Mirror, an installation consisting of a hang-engraved rear-illuminated mirrors and videos that combined to form a 360 degree 12 ft high representation of the Academy’s famous entrance as a ruin. The Academy published a catalog, Mirror, to accompany the exhibition with texts by Shamim Momin
and Alex Baker.
For The Irreplaceable Cannot be Replaced, as part of “Something from Nothing”, curated by Dan Cameron in 2008, Harvey asked people to send in images (if they had them) or descriptions of things that had been lost to Hurricane Katrina and then selected twelve entries at random to be painted. The paintings and all of the descriptions were exhibited at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center and at the end of the exhibition the paintings were given to the participants.
Harvey was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for which she exhibited her installation, Museum of Failure, as well as a site-specific video and a performance piece titled 100 Visitors to the Biennial Immortalized for which she gave away free 15-minute portraits to visitors in exchange for their evaluations of their portraits.
Recent large projects have been focused on cliches of traditional art production, in particular the picturesque landscape, in projects such as Observations Concerning the Picturesque, a commission for S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium in 2009 for which she created a guide to the Citadelpark surrounding the museum, purportedly by William Gilpin, along with a fake archive of his chronologically impossible visit and tours of the park using Claude Glasses produced by artist Alex McKay, the Rooms of Sublime Wallpaper, two installations produced in 2008 and 2009 in which the viewer sees a painted landscape fractured in a salon-style hanging of angled mirrors and Ruins are More Beautiful at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland in 2009, for which she covered all the windows of the new Laboratorium gallery with engraved mirrors depicting the surroundings as a ruined wilderness. In Nudist Museum at the Bass Museum of Art, Harvey shifted her focus to the nude, copying every nude in the museum’s collection and hanging the resulting paintings over contemporary images of nudity drawn from the mass media. For Arcadia, a commission for the opening exhibition of the Turner Contemporary, Margate,UK built on the site of Turner’s Margate residence, Harvey created a ¾ scale plywood copy of the London gallery that Turner built to promote his work replacing the paintings that were in it at his death with rear-illuminated mirrors hand-engraved in the style of 18th Century engravings to create a 360 degree panorama of contemporary Margate. The exterior of the gallery featured an amusement arcade sign reading “ARCADIA” and a projection of the Coney Island ocean creating an experience that oscillated between an exhibition and a mirrored fun house, referencing both Turner’s experience of Margate as an arcadian site and Margate’s history as an amusement destination.
Harvey has completed several public art projects including Look Up Not Down, a mosaic showing the view that would be seen by commuters if they were above rather than below ground, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit for the Queen’s Plaza subway station in Long Island City, Carpet, a mosaic of a carpet for the walkway of the Francisco El station, commissioned by the CTA Arts for Transit and Home of the Stars, a mosaic showing the sun setting over the Bronx and the stars coming out in 15 minute installments commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit for the new Metro-North Yankee Stadium station.
Harvey is represented by Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Meessen de Clercq in Brussels, Belgium, and Galerie Gebruder Lehmann in Berlin & Dresden, Germany.
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
and attended both the Whitney Independent Study Program and the PS1 National Studio Program. She is the sister of the poet Matthea Harvey
Matthea Harvey
Matthea Harvey is a contemporary American poet, writer and professor. She has published three collections, most recently, Modern Life , which earned her the 2009 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book...
.
Harvey has exhibited extensively both in the United States and internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist’s Award in 2004, a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Award in 2004, and a Lily Auchincloss Foundation Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002, among others. She is known for work that uses traditional aesthetics and media in surprising ways to call into question the social or physical situation in which it is placed. She has often stated that her goal is to “seduce people into thinking”. Her work ranges in size from intimate pieces to large scale installations and interventions and public works.
Harvey first garnered attention with the New York Beautification Project for which she painted small romantic oval landscapes in oils directly over graffiti sites without permission throughout New York City from 1999 - 2001. In 2005 Gregory Miller & Co. published New York Beautification Project in which Harvey detailed her experiences on the streets while making the project.
Many of Harvey’s larger institutional installations can be categorized as a form of "institutional critique" that attempt to make visible the desires implicit in particular situations. For Bad Boy Klimt in 2002, she decorated the Vienna Secession with graffiti based on Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze which is located in the Secession’s basement. In 2003 for A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris, she inserted an 80 ft painting consisting of copies of all the images contained in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s catalog of its collection (American Visionaries) into the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris’ gallery.
In 2005, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Philadelphia, PA received a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust as part of its Pennsylvania Exhibitions Initiative to produce Mirror, an installation consisting of a hang-engraved rear-illuminated mirrors and videos that combined to form a 360 degree 12 ft high representation of the Academy’s famous entrance as a ruin. The Academy published a catalog, Mirror, to accompany the exhibition with texts by Shamim Momin
Shamim M. Momin
Shamim M. Momin is an American art director and curator of contemporary art. Momin is head of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a non-profit art organization in Los Angeles, California. She is also an Adjunct Curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art where she co-curated the 2008 and 2004...
and Alex Baker.
For The Irreplaceable Cannot be Replaced, as part of “Something from Nothing”, curated by Dan Cameron in 2008, Harvey asked people to send in images (if they had them) or descriptions of things that had been lost to Hurricane Katrina and then selected twelve entries at random to be painted. The paintings and all of the descriptions were exhibited at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center and at the end of the exhibition the paintings were given to the participants.
Harvey was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for which she exhibited her installation, Museum of Failure, as well as a site-specific video and a performance piece titled 100 Visitors to the Biennial Immortalized for which she gave away free 15-minute portraits to visitors in exchange for their evaluations of their portraits.
Recent large projects have been focused on cliches of traditional art production, in particular the picturesque landscape, in projects such as Observations Concerning the Picturesque, a commission for S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium in 2009 for which she created a guide to the Citadelpark surrounding the museum, purportedly by William Gilpin, along with a fake archive of his chronologically impossible visit and tours of the park using Claude Glasses produced by artist Alex McKay, the Rooms of Sublime Wallpaper, two installations produced in 2008 and 2009 in which the viewer sees a painted landscape fractured in a salon-style hanging of angled mirrors and Ruins are More Beautiful at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland in 2009, for which she covered all the windows of the new Laboratorium gallery with engraved mirrors depicting the surroundings as a ruined wilderness. In Nudist Museum at the Bass Museum of Art, Harvey shifted her focus to the nude, copying every nude in the museum’s collection and hanging the resulting paintings over contemporary images of nudity drawn from the mass media. For Arcadia, a commission for the opening exhibition of the Turner Contemporary, Margate,UK built on the site of Turner’s Margate residence, Harvey created a ¾ scale plywood copy of the London gallery that Turner built to promote his work replacing the paintings that were in it at his death with rear-illuminated mirrors hand-engraved in the style of 18th Century engravings to create a 360 degree panorama of contemporary Margate. The exterior of the gallery featured an amusement arcade sign reading “ARCADIA” and a projection of the Coney Island ocean creating an experience that oscillated between an exhibition and a mirrored fun house, referencing both Turner’s experience of Margate as an arcadian site and Margate’s history as an amusement destination.
Harvey has completed several public art projects including Look Up Not Down, a mosaic showing the view that would be seen by commuters if they were above rather than below ground, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit for the Queen’s Plaza subway station in Long Island City, Carpet, a mosaic of a carpet for the walkway of the Francisco El station, commissioned by the CTA Arts for Transit and Home of the Stars, a mosaic showing the sun setting over the Bronx and the stars coming out in 15 minute installments commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit for the new Metro-North Yankee Stadium station.
Harvey is represented by Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Meessen de Clercq in Brussels, Belgium, and Galerie Gebruder Lehmann in Berlin & Dresden, Germany.
Videos
- Art Forum
- Interview with Heidi Lee
- Lecture at University of Michigan School of Art and Design
- "Something from Nothing" Exhibition