Currently on view  at the Chicago Architecture Center until April 26, 2026.

ABOUT

The Disappointed Tourist is an on-going project for which Ellen Harvey is painting places nominated by members of the public in response to the question: “Is there some place that you would like to visit or revisit that no longer exists?”

Anyone can submit a site to be painted. All paintings are 24 x 18” (61 x 46 cm) and are painted to look like old hand-colored postcards in monochrome acrylic with oil glazes on wood panels and include the name of the site and the date of the site’s destruction. The installation always includes unfinished paintings because the project is necessarily incomplete.

To date, over 400 people from over 30 countries have taken part in the project and Harvey has completed over 300 paintings. While the largest category of submissions is of happy memories, people have also used the project to call attention to the impact of  conflict, inequality and climate change or to memorialize important places. Whenever the project is shown, local outreach ensures that new local sites are included. Contributors’ stories can be found on this site.

We live in a world that often feels as though it is vanishing before our eyes. Places we love disappear. Places we have hoped to visit cease to exist. The forces of war, time, ideology, greed and natural disaster are constantly remaking places that we love but cannot control or save. The Disappointed Tourist is inspired by the urge to repair what has been broken. It makes symbolic restitution, literally remaking lost sites, at the same time that it acknowledges the inadequacy of such restitution. It is inspired both by old postcards and by the tradition of tourist painting – both the paintings produced for wealthy tourists to take home and the touring paintings that allowed pre-photographic viewers to experience far-off places. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses, while celebrating the human attachment to places both real and aspirational. It tries to create a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized and create a new conversation about our love for our physical environment, harnessing nostalgia to create empathy rather than division. 

Ellen Harvey, 2021