In a New Light | Ellen Harvey on Angelica Kauffmann’s “Rinaldo and Armida”

Ellen Harvey, Yale JD 1993, talks about Angelica Kauffmann’s Rinaldo and Armida (1771) with Margaret Ewing, Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery.

About Ellen Harvey

Born in England in 1967, Harvey is an American-British conceptual artist whose work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between the built environment and landscape, ruins and the picturesque aesthetic, and the cultural and economic relationships that link museums, artists, and the public. Harvey and her family lived throughout Europe before moving to the United States when she was a teenager. She graduated from Harvard College, studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and in 1993 received her JD from Yale Law School. After practicing law for three years Harvey turned to full-time art making. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and participated in the National Studio Program at PS1 in New York. She is known for her painting-based practice and for installations and site-specific works that incorporate engraved mirrors, glass, mosaic, and video.  Recurring motifs in her work include landscapes and mappings; museum and archive works; ruins; and self-portraits and portraiture.

Harvey has completed large-scale public artworks for Boston’s South Station; the Chicago Transit Authority’s Francisco station; the Miami Beach Convention Center; New York City’s Queen’s Plaza subway station and Yankee Stadium commuter rail station; and San Francisco International Airport, among others. She has exhibited in group shows internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; the Groeninge Museum, Bruges; the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk; Museum der Moderne Salzburg; and Turner Contemporary, Margate. Harvey has received fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and the New York Foundation for the Arts/Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Her work belongs to public collections around the world. Harvey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.