Artist Ellen Harvey questions the boundaries of art and smashes glass in the process.
By: Ilene Dube
Multimedia artist Ellen Harvey’s questions about art’s purposes might inspire New York Times’ Ethicist Randy Cohen to respond in book- length form. Is copying classical landscape paintings by noted artists onto graffiti-covered walls in New York City theft? What about copying the grand hallway at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts into an installation in that very building?
The Harvard College and Yale Law School grad decided to write her own books exploring her questions. In the first, The New York Beautification Project (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2005), she recounts the year she spent painting small, oval old-fashioned landscapes in oil on walls, dumpsters, phone boxes and cars. Each page containing a photograph of the site and a detail of the landscape faces her diary entry about that experience.
While copying a Nicolas Poussin landscape onto a concrete pylon in a newly refurbished park in Washington Heights, she was joined by a man who masturbated in the bushes nearby. And a teenage couple found her work so romantic, they, too, took to the bushes (on a different day than the masturbating man).
Ms. Harvey tried to credit the graffiti artists whenever possible. While working on a wall in the South Bronx, she was approached by a brother of the graffiti artist who offered critique: "You’re doing it all wrong. It’s too small. You can’t even see it from a car. It takes too long. You’re never going to get anywhere like this." He was concerned that she didn’t have a crew and offered to keep a lookout for the police.
The artist, whose video installation "Mirror" is on view at the Mariboe Gallery of the Swig Arts Center at the Peddie School in Hightstown through April 21, was rarely stopped by police during the 120 days over the course of a year she painted on location. When police did question her, she said she had permission and they accepted it on her word. One cold day, while painting in the Meat Packing District, she was mistaken for a homeless person because she bundled in layers of clothing. "They let me go because I am a white woman in my 30s," she says with a slight British accent. "It was painful."
Born in England, she has lived in the U.S. since she was 15 and has lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn for the past six years. "I like it very much here, it’s very hip," she says. "I feel quite old. There are lots of cafés and places to go out." She lives with her husband in the studio space where she works.
Ms. Harvey was employed as a lawyer for a year, saving up money to become a full-time artist. She started showing almost immediately and has been earning a living as an artist ever since. But as an artist she asked herself, why am I painting wallpaper for the rich? What should art be doing in our society that separates it from interior design and architecture? Why a sunset or other cliché of art production? How does a landscape work in a bourgeois home? And thus she came up with the idea for the New York Beautification Project.
"I started thinking about graffiti and what separates it from art. Is it who is doing it?" she asks. "The function of art is to beautify, but it also has to do with consensus and aesthetics."
The idea of what is beautiful surfaced again in a recent project for the Palm Beach Cultural Council in Florida. For "Beautiful Ugly Palm Beach," she visited senior centers and asked 40 people to send her photographs of beautiful and ugly sights. "For beautiful, they sent pictures of their grandchildren and the sea. For ugly, they sent pictures of trash heaps and the Bush brothers," says Ms. Harvey. "The ugly pictures were more interesting."
From the photos, she completed 80 paintings and arranged them in a corner with beauty on one side, ugly on the other. Each wall of paintings was interspersed with mirrors "so you can see beauty in the ugly, and ugly in the beauty," she says.
In yet another installation of many small paintings, Ms. Harvey recreated the Whitney Museum of American Art at 76th Street and Madison Avenue in one of its smaller outposts opposite Grand Central Station. "Philip Morris has funded this space for younger artists having solo shows for 20 years, and I thought they probably wished they could get (Edward) Hoppers," she says. "I thought it might be nice to have a Whitney at the Whitney, but the (Marcel) Breuer building is not so iconic, like the Guggenheim. But its collection is the American canon, so I thought I’d (re-create the Whitney catalog) in that space." On a wall 80-feet-by-10-feet, she painted 394 images from the catalog. It was surrounded by a large gold frame, and the actual catalog she used while working, laminated and sewn back together, sits on a bench in the gallery.
"The paintings were not exact copies but freely interpreted," she says. In some cases, she was painting a photo of a video installation. "Having copied 400 pieces, no one complained and all the artists were delighted."
One of her most recent projects is a 2,000-square-foot glass mosaic in the Queens Plaza subway station. "It’s the largest mosaic in the subway. It’s what you’d see if you were floating above," she says. "I wanted people to know where they were."
How would she feel if graffiti artists painted over it? "I would not be happy, but it’s no big deal you can clean it off with acid. The positive side of graffiti is, it tends not to attack artwork."
As an artist, she doesn’t have to market herself. Galleries and curators she’s worked with recommend her. She met Kym Kulp, curator of the Mariboe Gallery, at the Vermont Studio Center about 10 years ago and the two kept in touch.
The installation at the Mariboe is based on a larger version for the 200th anniversary of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. "The entrance hall is so grand and amazing. I wanted to do something representational, and I thought, how can I ever compete? So I decided to steal it."
The ultimate representational piece is a mirror, and so she created a 360-degree drawing engraved by hand with a diamond point on the back of 16 Plexiglas mirrors. Each panel represents a separate video, made by putting a camera at the top of each, looking at itself in the mirror with a photo behind it. The image gradually appears in the mirror, and at the end of the one-hour drawing process, it is smashed with a hammer. The tape is a loop and then goes backward. The version at the Peddie School is 10 minutes in each direction. The artist’s second book, Ellen Harvey: Mirror (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, $25), is published and awaiting delivery.
After much thought help from Randy Cohen was not required Ms. Harvey decided it might be nice, after all, to paint "Wallpaper for the Rich." For this project, she found vintage wallpapers, mounted them, then re-created the image on a canvas and centered it on the wallpaper. She sells these to those with disposable income who can afford it.
Mirror, a video installation by Ellen Harvey, is on view at the Mariboe Gallery, Swig Arts Center, Peddie School, South Main Street, Hightstown, through April 21. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-3 p.m. For information, call (609) 490-7550. On the Web: www.peddie.org/capps. Ellen Harvey on the Web: www.ellenharvey.info

