Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey (born 1967, Farnborough, Kent, U.K.) is a Brooklyn based artist working in a variety of media, including painting, video, installation and performance.

Harvey 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 several 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. 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.

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