ADAM AND EVE (1990)
Painted wood, plastic, shells and glitter. (Estate of Bessie Harvey)
Throughout Harvey's career, figures of Adam and Eve served as symbols of the balance of power between the sexes and the importance of peaceful co-existence. Harvey experimented with some two-sided figures, as demonstrated by Adam and Eve and Weight of the World (at far left), both of which express the artist's concept of dual consciousness:
The [face] on the back of the head was always the conscience of the person. On Adam and Eve, you know, Eve's conscience was very ugly and her shame, she tried to hide her stomach because of the shame and she had this other conscience too, it was on the back of the head. Well, we do too.The artist's two-sided figures bear some resemblance to those produced in a number of sub-Saharan African cultures, yet Harvey claimed to have no knowledge of African art. In some two-sided versions of Adam and Eve, the figure of Eve is deliberately placed higher than that of Adam to reflect Harvey's concept of their relative status in the eyes of God, and also her opinion that women were the strength behind men:
God made man over all things and man disobeyed God and he was brought down. Now women are lifted up. There was a time that a woman couldn't do the job you doin' now. Couldn't adopt a child if it wasn't a man. She couldn't even have credit without a man. But, see, the man fell and the woman is lifted up high. But, if she do the same thing that the man did, if she gets so in herself that she would listen to everything except what God had said for her to do, then she will be brought down. And then what will happen? There will be nobody to lift up.