TAMPA, FLA.- PICTURE(SQUE): Ellen Harvey Works, 1999-2025 opens Monday, August 24 at USF Contemporary Art Museum, College of Design, Art & Performance, with an Artist Conversation and Exhibition Reception presented on Friday, August 28. The exhibition is on view through March 6, 2027. Admission is Free.

A major exhibition of works by internationally acclaimed artist, Ellen Harvey, will open at USFCAM. Entitled PICTURE(SQUE), the exhibition spans more than two decades of work that spotlights the artist’s lifelong quest to draw attention to the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the relationship between art and tourism, the role of art and the artist in our society, and the social and ecological implications of the picturesque.

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 316 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 500 web entries from more than 40 countries) are then turned by the artist into 18 x 24 inch acrylic and oil 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 CBGB. 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.”

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 a series of public guerrilla interventions for which the artist painted small, perfectly executed, traditional oil landscapes throughout the city of New York. Experienced at CAM as written and photographic documentation of some forty oval paintings, the work also charts the freighted social phenomenon The New Yorker pegged with the headline “Vandal in a Volvo.” According to the artist, who is White, part of the project’s premise was to knowingly “explore how the reaction to unsanctioned artworks was influenced by the aesthetics of the art and the appearance of the artist.” Harvey’s individual paintings were made without permission, in daylight, and in full public view of passers-by and police. Whenever anyone objected to the paintings’ presence, Harvey immediately removed all traces of them.

Finally, PICTURE(SQUE) includes the East Coast debut of Harvey’s most recent project: The Utopia Machine (2024-). A collaboration with the landmark 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?” One typically trenchant byproduct of this interactive artwork: the first 100 utopias were mainly sourced by Harvey from users of the Los Angeles Central Library, many of whom spend their days there because they have nowhere else to go.

These and other works in the exhibition go deep in celebrating and exploring things that exist at the crossroads between the real world and the often-rarefied world of art. Among her projects’ primary goals, Harvey writes, are to celebrate “human attachment to places both real and aspirational” and to create “a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized.”

PICTURE(SQUE) is curated by Christian Viveros-Faun�, USFCAM Curator-at-Large, and organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum.