The Disappointed Tourist
The Disappointed Tourist
Ellen Harvey - The Disappointed Tourist
January 16 - March 9, 2024
301 West High Street Gallery
Painting in a style reminiscent of vintage tourist postcards, The Disappointed Tourist is an ongoing project of 300 paintings of lost sites suggested by members of the public. It was inspired by the urge to repair what has been lost due to the forces of war, time, ideology, gentrification, and natural disasters. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses, while celebrating the human attachment to places both real and aspirational. With our partner organizations we disseminated a call for suggestions throughout the Glassboro community and received over 40 submissions. Ellen selected several suggested sites that have been added to this new iteration of the installation including the Whitney Brother’s Glass Factory, Salem Oak, Bay Point, Zee Orchards, Eighty Acres neighborhood, Palace of Depression, Vineland Speedway, Veterans Stadium, Blockbuster Video, Philadelphia Art Club, and grandparent’s backyard.
'Visiting Places That No Longer Exist', The New Yorker
'New Jersey art gallery opens an exhibit featuring places that no longer exist', WHYY News
'Ellen Harvey’s ‘Disappointed Tourist’ at Rowan University, an archive and celebration of loss', Artblog
'Ellen Harvey’s ‘Disappointed Tourist’ exhibit shows the power of postcards', NJ Arts
'Lost Landmarks', SNJ Today
NJ's places that used to be - check out the new exhibit at Rowan', New Jersey 101.5
'Artist Ellen Harvey’s “Disappointed Tourist” opens at Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum', Rowan Today
The Disappointed Tourist Gallery Guide
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Additional programming:
ABOUT PLACE: Rowan Students Respond to Ellen Harvey
January 16 - March 9, 2024
During the Fall semester 2023, Intermediate and Advanced Painting students of Professor Nancy Sophy in the Department of Art were asked to reflect on The Disappointed Tourist and to create their own painting inspired by her work around ideas of place and memory.
Artist Statement
"We live in a world that often feels as though it is vanishing before our eyes. Places we love disappear. Places we have hoped to visit cease to exist. The forces of war, time, ideology, greed and natural disaster are constantly remaking places that we love but cannot control or save. The Disappointed Tourist is inspired by the urge to repair what has been broken. It makes symbolic restitution, literally remaking lost sites, at the same time that it acknowledges the inadequacy of such restitution. It is inspired both by old postcards and by the tradition of tourist painting – both the paintings produced for wealthy tourists to take home and the touring paintings that allowed pre-photographic viewers to experience far-off places. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses, while celebrating the human attachment to places both real and aspirational. It tries to create a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized and create a new conversation about our love for our physical environment, harnessing nostalgia to create empathy rather than division." Ellen Harvey, 2021
Artist Bio
Ellen Harvey is a British-born conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions to immersive institutional installations to large-scale public artworks. Her work is painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore our relationship to the world around us.
Her current project The Disappointed Tourist, for which she has been painting lost sites suggested by members of the public, has formed the centerpiece of a traveling retrospective that has been exhibited at the Butler Gallery (Ireland), Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Poland), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (Austria) and Turner Contemporary (UK). The exhibition at Turner Contemporary was selected by Frieze as one of the five best institutional shows in the UK in 2021.
She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally, including in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Solo museum exhibitions have included the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), the Groeninge Museum (Belgium), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Bass Museum (Miami Beach), the Center for Contemporary Art (Poland), the Pennsylvania Academy (Philadelphia) and the Whitney Museum at Altria (New York), among others.
She has completed large-scale public artworks for the Miami Beach Convention Center, Metro-North’s Yankee Stadium station, New York’s Queen’s Plaza subway station, Chicago’s Francisco station, Boston’s South Station, the San Francisco Airport, the Philadelphia International Airport, the Andover Internal Revenue Service Offices and the Flemish National Architect, among others.
She is the author of the recently reissued New York Beautification Project and her work has been the subject of four monographs to date.
She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Yale Law School and Harvard College and attended the Berlin Hochschule der Kunste in Germany. She is the recipient of numerous awards including most recently a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, the Wivina Demeester Prize for Commissioned Public Art and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ellen lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels & Galerie Gebruder Lehmann, Dresden.