Bunny Harvey is an internationally known painter whose most
recent work is a series of large semi-abstract landscapes. These works
are a natural continuation of a 30-year pursuit of the visual possibilities
inherent in combining her interests in archaeology, the philosophy of time,
cosmology and the silent world of particle physics. The landscape is a
resting place where these interests collide. She divides her studio time
between Providence, R.I., and Tunbridge, Vt.
Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, she received
a BFA, MAT and MFA. She then taught for two years in the Providence Public
School
system and since 1976 has been teaching art at Wellesley College. She has
also been a guest teacher at various places and visiting professor of visual
and environmental studies at Harvard University. At Wellesley graduation
in 2004, Harvey received the Pinanski Teaching Prize and became the second
holder of the Elizabeth Christy Kopf Chair in the Art Department.
In 1974 she won the Rome Prize in Painting, a two-year fellowship at the
American Academy in Rome. While in Rome, Harvey made the first of many
visits to Egypt in pursuit of an interest in archaeology that was initiated
in her as a small child growing up in New York City. She was once caught
roller-skating through the mummy galleries of the Metropolitan Museum.
Harvey has returned many times (during sabbatical leaves) to live and work
at the American Academy in the rich life of that academic community.
Harvey has shown regularly in New York City since 1974 and is now represented
there by the Berry-Hill Galleries. She has had many other one-woman exhibitions
in the United States and Europe including retrospective shows at the Museum
of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, the Fuller Museum in Brockton, Mass.,
and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. In addition
to the Rome prize, she has received numerous prizes and awards, including
the Pell Award for excellence in the Arts, an Individual Artist Grant from
the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and faculty awards from Wellesley
College supporting projects ranging from street archaeology in the jewelry
district of Providence to X-ray as a drawing technique. She has also received
various travel awards to destinations as different as the Bohemia of Renaissance
astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, and the Theban necropolis
in Egypt.
A gardener, mother, serious cook, and antique postcard collector, Harvey
lifts weights for fun.