TAMPA — “PICTURE(SQUE): Ellen Harvey Works, 1999-2025” opened on Aug. 24 at USF Contemporary Art Museum, 3821 USF Holly Drive, Tampa.
An artist conversation will be presented on Friday, Aug. 28, 6 p.m., in the Barness Recital Hall, USF School of Music, 3755 USF Holly Drive, Tampa. A reception follows the conversation from 7 to 9 p.m., in the museum. These events are free and open to all. Additional events will be presented throughout the exhibition. The exhibition will remain on view through March 6, 2027.
“PICTURE(SQUE),” a major exhibition of works by internationally acclaimed artist Ellen Harvey, spans more than two decades of work. The collection showcases 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.
The exhibition 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-by-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.
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 by-product 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-Fauné, USFCAM curator-at-large, and organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Lee and Victor Leavengood CAM Endowment Fund, the Allen W. and Janet G. Root CAM Endowment, and the USF College of Design, Art & Performance.
Exhibitions and events are free and open to all. Museum hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m.