BUNNY HARVEY

risd connection: BFA in Painting, 1967; MFA in Painting, 1972

talent: Harvey creates abstract landscapes with shifting, symbolic surfaces that "layer time in the Cubist sense" (The New York Times), drawing from archaeology, philosophy, cosmology and personal observations of the natural world.

breaking in: A meticulous observer with a Renaissance drive for discovery, Harvey might have been an astronomer or a mathematician in another life. Her work has been literally grounded in the physical world of everything from sunlit Vermont pastures to archeological sites and the calligraphic tracks of sub-atomic particles. During two years in Rome as a Prix de Rome winner from 1974-76, she developed a visual vocabulary based on her travels in Italy, Tunisia and Egypt, and explored the mind's ability to assign meaning to the remains and physical landscapes of ancient cultures. Her paintings and drawings became excavation sites for symbols, memories and observations.

getting there: In 1976 Harvey had her first one-woman show in New York, received a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and joined the faculty of Wellesley College, where she is currently a professor of art. Over the years she has returned often to Rome and the American Academy (most recently as a visiting artist for two months in 2000) because she feels nourished by the intellectual community there. While in Rome she always gives a guest lecture or a crit to RISD students in the European Honors Program. By the mid- to late-'80s, the New York native began to explore her immediate environments--the jewelry district of Providence and the fields and woods around her Vermont studio--in paintings focused on the essential unity of mind and nature.

making it: Over the next decade Harvey received seven faculty awards as well as a Ford Foundation grant for projects involving travel in Egypt and Czechoslovakia, for pursuing x-rays as a drawing medium and for documenting the "street archeology" of Providence. During the 1991-92 academic year, she served as a visiting professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. In 1999 she was honored with the prestigious Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts. An active panelist, juror, lecturer and critic, Harvey has donated her time and art to various nonprofit organizations. Her work has been exhibited at the American Embassy residences of Switzerland, Iceland and Tunisia, and is included in private, corporate and museum collections throughout the US. Now represented by Berry-Hill Galleries in Manhattan, she shows regularly in NYC and enjoys both critical and popular success. In a rare appearance outside NYC, Harvey is showing a selection of large oil paintings, smaller gouache paintings on paper and charcoal and pastel drawings at Wheeler Gallery in Providence, RI, from April 6-26, 2001.

average day: ...sharing creative ideas with her husband Frank Muhly, a documentary filmmaker...researching material for her next semester at Wellesley...keeping up with her teenage son Nico, an award-winning composer now studying at Columbia University and Juilliard...plotting what to cook from the garden at the family's summer home in Vermont...

discoveries: (1) In teaching at Wellesley for the past 23 years, she has found a wonderful "family of daughters"-- women she has come to know and respect. (2) "For me painting includes the large-scale sunlit world of landscape and the quiet, mysterious spaces inside an ancient tomb or the smallest atomic particle. It's an attempt to increase what Ortega y Gasset calls 'interior planes of the mind,' those niches and surfaces upon which ideas can fall, and be held and grow."