Watch and Listen

Trained as both a painter and an attorney, Ellen Harvey balances an artist’s sense of faith with a lawyer’s skepticism, as she investigates art’s simultaneous potential for beauty and failure.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the msot notable American artists. This season’s series of talks features artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Ellen Harvey introduces her 2008 Biennial work, Museum of Failure, which consists of an illuminated lightbox and large painting depicting a wall of mirrored frames. She discusses the “impossibility” of self-portraiture and political subject matter in relation to this work