Bunny Harvey: Four Decades

This fall, the Davis Museum proudly presents the work of Bunny Harvey, artist and Professor of Art at Wellesley from 1976-2015. In addition to her well-known landscape paintings, Bunny Harvey: Four Decades features works from Harvey's forty years at the College, during which she has engaged with an array of diverse themes: archaeology and the ancient world; scientific observation and discovery; and the visual response to non-visual sensation in time and space. Throughout her prolific career, she has explored the concept of sustained, subjective observation and its relationship to accumulated knowledge and memory. Brought together at the Davis for the first time, this large selection from Harvey's body of work--including drawings, prints, and both small and large scale paintings--illuminates her abiding engagement with these themes, and highlights her important contribution to Wellesley as a teacher, mentor, and participant in the academic community.

Harvey's recent work has focused largely on the hidden or unseen elements of landscape, allowing viewers to lose themselves in the reveries of place and consequent emotion upon sensual input. The use of traditional form of landscape painting serves to explore and unite observation of the natural world and the nature of consciousness itself. Focuses of earlier work, however, have ranged from abstract explorations on the archaeology of lost civilizations to Renaissance philosophers to particle physics. Throughout such varying themes emerges Harvey's investment in understanding relationships between the observer and the observed in specific sites of time and place. Harvey's choices of media, including postcard-sized gouaches to 22-foot canvases, have demonstrated similar versatility.

The works of Bunny Harvey will be available in the Davis Museum's Marjorie and Gerald Bronfman Gallery/Camilla Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler Gallery. Curated by Meredith Fluke, Kemper Curator of Academic Programs, this exhibition and related programs are supported entirely through the generosity of Wellesley College Friends of Art, now celebrating 50 years of giving. The exhibition catalogue is published with the generous support of the Office of the Provost and Dean of the College.

Curated by Meredith Fluke, Kemper Curator of Academic Programs.


Free and open to the public. Museum hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 11:00am - 5:00pm.

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