In “Look Up, Not Down,” Ellen Harvey asks riders to pretend that they are gazing skyward at the view that exists above the station. Her series of mosaic murals depict the sky on a sunny day, with the skyline forming a thin frame at the bottom of each mosaic – representing the actual cityscape at the time it was created. The work guides travelers to the surrounding streets around this busy transportation hub. The art celebrates the romance of the skyline as seen from Queens, imagined as the center of the city. Designed in the wake of 9/11 during a time when the New York City skyline brought associations of loss, “Look Up, Not Down” shows the city skyline as an image of hope and beauty. The sun marks the former location of the World Trade Center. In years to come, as the city continues to reinvent itself, the mosaics will serve as a view of a past moment in time. 

Ellen Harvey was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings, multi-media installations, and large-scale commissions explore traditional iconography, the relationship between art and nostalgia, the idiosyncrasies of public and private collections, and the history and future of museums. Harvey is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Yale Law School, and Harvard College and she attended the Berlin Hochschule der Kunste in Germany. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She has exhibited extensively in the United Stations and internationally and has completed numerous major public art projects.