CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/12/2021

Ellen Harvey's beloved 'New York Beautification Project' is Back in Stock!

From 1999 to 2001, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Ellen Harvey executed the stealth intervention New York Beautification Project, for which she painted 40 tiny oval oil landscape paintings directly onto existing graffiti sites throughout the city, inspiring small, unexpected moments of joy for anyone who happened to be paying attention at, say, 103 Franklin Street between Church Street and West Broadway—the site of this particular January 2001 foray. “This was the second time that I made a painting based on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of an oak tree,” she writes. “The first version in SoHo got covered by graffiti the day after I finished it, which made me sad because I had liked it a lot. Unfortunately, I never liked this second version as much. Maybe because it had lost the charm of novelty. Or maybe the lost first version was just better.… While I was painting here, a man came up to me and asked me to sign his portfolio. He thought that my signature might be valuable someday. His portfolio was made out of plastic, so my signature wouldn’t stick. I ended up signing his subway map in oils instead. This building finally got renovated and the painting is gone now.”