The Harn Museum of Art will present Beyond the Brush: The Florida Art Collection, Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers at the close of a year-long celebration of the Museum’s 35th anniversary in 2025/2026. The exhibition is the first to be displayed in the museum’s new 3,600 square-foot gallery set to open in September. The opening date for the exhibition is tentative and will shift with the project’s completion date. Beyond the Brush explores Florida as a source of inspiration for artists, residents, and tourists. Yet the exhibition will be more than a collection of images of familiar sights such as historic landmarks, cityscapes, popular destinations, beaches, and nature views of Florida brush and vegetation. The exhibition will aim to uncover the often-hidden stories, significance, and inspiration behind the works on view. Beyond the Brush will encourage a closer look beyond the surface of the paint to uncover the overlapping narratives, histories, and perspectives of the artists and the subjects they painted.
Beyond the Brush will showcase more than 70 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures drawn from Sam and Robbie Vickers’s transformative gift in 2020. Spanning the mid-19th to the mid-20th century and representing nearly 60 artists, the exhibition will feature many works on view for the first time at the Harn, and others that have not been shown since the 2021 inaugural exhibition of the Vickers’s gift, A Florida Legacy. The checklist will include many nationally recognized figures in American art such as Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, Louis Comfort Tiffany, John Singer Sargent, Herman Herzog, Jane Peterson, Marguerite Zorach, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, and Doris Lee. Pioneering, regional artists active in Florida will include Laura Woodward, Albert Backus, Anthony Thieme, and the Highwaymen painters Johnny Daniels and Harold Newton, among many other artists.