Input Sought on Public Art Project Depicting Parnassus Trees
Ellen Harvey
Artist Ellen Harvey has been commissioned by UCSF to create a new public art project, titled “The Forest of Parnassus,” which will feature the longest-living inhabitants of the flagship campus in a series of paintings.
The idea is to record the past and to provide an iconic visual identity for the Parnassus campus, explains Harvey, a New York-based artist whose works are exhibited in museums and public spaces.
Harvey is proposing to create 28 paintings, 30 x 30 inches, in oil on aluminum panels for UCSF. Each painting will be a portrait of a tree or cluster of trees that exist on the Parnassus campus with the buildings as background.
The works will be clustered together and hung in prominent interior spaces throughout the campus and will be relocated when necessary. The actual sites have not yet been determined at this stage of the project.
Harvey and members of the Chancellor’s Committee on Art, Honors and Recognition, will work with Campus Planning representatives to determine the sites for the paintings, according to Lynne Baer, UCSF art consultant.
The committee, which includes members from a cross-section of the UCSF community, suggested that faculty, staff, students and trainees nominate their favorite tree or trees to be featured in the paintings, an idea wholeheartedly endorsed by Harvey. She will then select the most popular submissions as well as her own favorites to complete the series of 28 paintings.
Members of the UCSF community may send their suggestions of their favorite trees via email to Brenda Gee de Peralta.
The Chancellor’s Committee on Art, Honors and Recognition provides advice and recommendations to the chancellor regarding: the acceptance and placement of art objects which are gifts to the chancellor for the campus; new acquisitions and their placement; and the naming of rooms and facilities in common areas on campus. The committee also is charged to explore avenues for the ongoing acquisition of art for the campus. The committee strives to ensure that artists and artworks proposed for the campus reflect the diverse community of which UCSF is part.
About the Artist
Born 1967 in Kent, England and currently living in New York, Harvey was trained not only as a painter but also as an attorney. With degrees from Harvard and Yale, she received her training in art at the Independent Study Program at Whitney Museum of American Art. After completing this program in 1999, Harvey spent two years working in anonymity on her New York Beautification Project (1999–2001), a simple guerrilla intervention into public space. She “tagged” various unloved bits of city real estate with small Hudson River–style landscape vignettes, challenging accepted notions of vandalism and accepted and highly valued artistic traditions.
From her works for public spaces to her gallery-based practice, Harvey’s belief in the communicative power of art can be seen as well in her recent works. Included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, her “Collection of Impossible Subjects” consists of a rear-illuminated plexiglass mirror wall, hand-engraved with a salon-style exhibition of ornately framed, blocked out rectangles. Visible through an opening in one of them is “Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio,” a painting of an identical collection of frames, except that these hold paintings based on photographs that she took of herself in a mirror where the image is obliterated by the camera’s flash. The work probes conventional wisdom about the artist and the museum, about making and seeing, Harvey explains.
Related Link:
Chancellor’s Committee on Art, Honors and Recognition
Chancellor’s Office