Don Harvey, Painter, born 1941

1991 Visual Arts Prize

Don Harvey experiments with techniques and materials to produce work that offers contradictory but coherent formats and themes: sculpture vs. painting; rural vs. urban, animal vs. human; the untouched environment vs. man’s intervention; and the division of nations.  His early work often juxtaposed the industrialized and agricultural worlds.  It is not surprising that he grew up in rural Iowa but makes his home in urban Cleveland and that his father was a successful inventor with a machine shop.  Harvey’s paintings have employed industrial fluids to represent lake water and manipulated digital photographs on metal to represent the industrial and natural environment. He has produced public art for urban spaces (e.g., The Habitat We Share, 1993, for the W. 25th St. Rapid Station) and politically charged art that demands attention (e.g., the series of prints entitled Cities and Walls, 2008).  He is an environmental and political activist as well as an artist and teacher. As an environmentalist and photographer he has been active in educating the public on Cleveland’s environment: in 2006 with Cleveland Public Art, he documented wildlife in the Flats for The Natural Flats: A Field Guide to Habitat in Unexpected Places.  As co-founder of Cleveland Public Art, a founding board member of SPACES, the former editor of Dialogue, and a former board member of MOCA, he has had an immense impact on Cleveland’s artistic community. As a respected public activist, he believes in making a commitment and carrying it out.

Don Harvey was born in Gruver, Iowa, where he was encouraged in his artistic inclinations by his parents. In high school he painted scenes of the changing seasons on his father’s store; in college he decided on a career in art instead of mathematics.  Harvey received a B.A. from Mankato State University in Minnesota in 1964 and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 1971.  He taught in Rochester, Minnesota before beginning his college teaching career at Akron University in 1973. Retired from Akron, he continues to teach, currently at Oberlin College as a visiting professor. Since 1983 he has lived in Cleveland, first in the Warehouse District, then in the Flats, and now on the West Side.  Harvey once said that his greatest influence was the immediate outside world around him and that he received inspiration from looking out his window at the industrial landscape of Cleveland and rowing his boat on Lake Erie to watch nature and its survival amid man’s incursion.

The artist whose work most influenced Don Harvey is Robert Rauschenberg. Harvey saw in Rauschenberg a similar instinct for constructions, for collage, and for an all-inclusive and expansive artistic vocabulary. Like Rauschenberg, Harvey pushed the boundaries of what painting and sculpture could be.  His early works incorporated text with photographs and sculpture. He used any materials at hand, such as industrial and windshield washer fluid, vinyl tubing, and steel to become part of an image that suggests the urban landscape. He experimented with an industrial three-color jet-spray process and sign painting technology. To portray the dichotomies in his subjects, Harvey often bifurcated his pieces, resulting in the “push-pull” aesthetic associated with Hans Hoffman that he admired but also with the positive and negative influences of modern man and his society.   Later, he incorporated human figures into his works, and gradually color became more dominant. As artist in residence at Zygote Press in 2008, he experimented with printmaking and photography by applying ink with a squeegee and attaching  three-dimensional objects to his monoprints.

— By Diane De Grazia
Autumn, 2008