USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa , Florida, USA
August 28, 2026 – March 6, 2027
PICTURE(SQUE): Ellen Harvey Works, 1999-2025 presents four major bodies of work by the celebrated Anglo-American artist that honor and question ideas around travel, memory, monuments and history making. Harvey’s artworks memorialize lost places and interrogate existing ones; additionally, they turn a warm eye toward human beings’ relationships with their lived environment, while asking us to envision new ways of being in the future.
Harvey’s 300-plus painting installation The Disappointed Tourist consists of an evolving, participatory response to the question: “Is there a place that you have always wanted to visit or revisit that no longer exists?” Harvey has posed this question on her website since 2019. Suggested answers (they exceed 400 web entries from more than 30 countries) are then turned by the artist into 18 x 24 inch oil and acrylic paintings that resemble antique black and white postcards. These evoke love and nostalgia for disappeared sites ranging from Greece’s original Parthenon to Manhattan’s fabled music venue CBGBs. A democratic exercise in accessing art and art history, The Disappointed Tourist operates at both modest and monumental scale—while carrying on an expanded, ongoing, and uniquely horizontal “conversation about our love for our physical environment.” If you have a site you’d like to submit to be painted, visit https://disappointedtourist.org/
Also included in PICTURE(SQUE) is Harvey’s large-scale work, The Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked (2020): a 100-foot-long painting based on a satellite view of Florida that depicts the state’s landmass from one end to the other. The painting’s halfway point depicts a mermaid-like bifurcation between the Everglades National Park and the greater Miami area. Harvey’s The New York Beautification Project (1999-2001) revisits the artist’s early guerrilla art project, for which she painted small, traditional oil landscapes directly onto graffiti sites across New York City (The New Yorker titled its 2001 article about the artist’s efforts “Vandal in a Volvo”). Finally, PICTURE(SQUE) includes the East Coast debut of Harvey’s most recent project: The Utopia Machine (2024-). A collaboration with the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, the work consists of more than 100 paintings depicting answers by visitors to public libraries to the question: “What would make our world into a utopia?”
PICTURE(SQUE) is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, USFCAM Curator-at-Large, and organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum. Support for the exhibition is provided by the USF College of Design, Art & Performance.
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