About

Ellen Harvey is a British-born conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions to immersive institutional installations to large-scale public artworks. Her work is painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore our relationship to the world around us. 

Her current project The Disappointed Tourist, for which she has been painting lost sites suggested by members of the public, has formed the centerpiece of a traveling retrospective that has been exhibited at the Butler Gallery (Ireland), Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Poland), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (Austria) and Turner Contemporary (UK). The exhibition at Turner Contemporary was selected by Frieze as one of the five best institutional shows in the UK in 2021.

She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally, including in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Solo museum exhibitions have included the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), the Groeninge Museum (Belgium), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Bass Museum (Miami Beach), the Center for Contemporary Art (Poland), the Pennsylvania Academy (Philadelphia) and the Whitney Museum at Altria (New York), among others. 

She has completed large-scale public artworks for the Miami Beach Convention Center, Metro-North’s Yankee Stadium station, New York’s Queen’s Plaza subway station, Chicago’s Francisco station, Boston’s South Station, the San Francisco Airport, the Philadelphia International Airport, the Andover Internal Revenue Service Offices and the Flemish National Architect, among others.

She is the author of the recently reissued New York Beautification Project and her work has been the subject of four monographs to date. 

She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Yale Law School and Harvard College and attended the Berlin Hochschule der Kunste in Germany. She is the recipient of numerous awards including most recently a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, the Wivina Demeester Prize for Commissioned Public Art and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ellen lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels & Galerie Gebruder Lehmann, Dresden.