COPIA II celebrates new photographs that have entered the Harn Museum of Art’s collection in the last six years, with a few other photographs rarely or never shown before. Copia was the Roman Goddess of Abundance, often portrayed holding a cornucopia; the Latin word copia implies “wealth, variety, fertility,” as well as “a prized, expansive language found in the ancient rhetoricians.” It makes a fitting title for an exhibition featuring photography, a persuasive visual language; and it illustrates the museum’s photography collection which has grown in abundance and variety through the copious generosity of Harn supporters.

Plural Domains was drawn exclusively from the collection of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), a non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros to foster cultural exchange and enrichment of the arts. Plural Domains featured photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and large-scale multimedia installations by 21 established, mid-career, and emerging artists from 9 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Shadow to Substance creates a chronological arc from the past to the present into the future using historical photographs from the Harn and Smathers Library collections and through the lens of Black photographers working today.

Plants accompany every aspect of human life. Each of the 12 works featured in Plant Life was chosen because something in it provokes critical reflection on the strange entanglements of humans and plants. In these works, plants are more than props: they are—openly or cryptically—also made present to us in their own way. They show that it is possible to see our photosynthetic kin as they really exist, in this exhibition, throughout the museum, and in the world outside: as vitally, expressively, insistently with us.

A Florida Legacy: Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers is the inaugural exhibition celebrating the transformative gift to the Harn Museum of Art from Samuel and Roberta Vickers who formed one of the world’s most extensive collections of Florida-themed art. A Florida Legacy features nearly 170 paintings, watercolors and drawings representing 125 artists who drew inspiration from Florida’s history, landmarks and natural attractions. 

This exhibition features thirty-three photographs by acclaimed Chicago-based photographer, Terry Evans. It is a love letter to America’s Heartland that documents the ecological transformations of the mid-west from Texas to Canada. Evans’s micro-to-macro perspective examines the land through close-up and zoomed-out perspectives, taken on the ground and from the air (the latter not by drone). Her art comes out of a knowledge of the history of landscape photography, art history, the history of her region and America’s industrial development. Her vision is informed and distinctly humanist, at once grassroots and universal. 

Breaking the Frame marks the Harn’s 30th anniversary through an installation that celebrates the growth of its collection of work by important women artists, aligning itself with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. That victory didn’t secure voting rights for all, so the battle continues until all women are heard and counted. The exhibition reflects the museum’s robust effort since 2012 to enhance its representation of women artists’ works and includes a number of recent acquisitions. 

Maggie Taylor has garnered widespread attention for her breakthrough use of technology in her art. Taylor's contemporary photographs make aesthetically innovative use of 19th-century photography (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes), as well as scanned images of insects, dolls, period etchings, and the flora and fauna of the Victorian era to create 62 new photographs inspired by Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

This exhibition will explore the roles of metal objects in sustaining, unifying and enhancing life in African communities, while demonstrating the aesthetic and expressive power of metal arts. Peace, Power and Prestige will include a diverse range of iron, brass, bronze, gold, copper, silver, and alloyed works created by artists in West, Central, South and East Africa, between the 9th and 21st centuries.

André Kertész (1894-1985) led the Modernist movement in photography, and determined photography’s experimental joie de vivre for the 20th century. The 52 photographs in this exhibition cover seven decades of Kertész’s prolific career, beginning in 1915 and concluding in 1984. Some are well known, others are examples of his experimentation with form and light. The photographs were a gift to the Harn Museum in 2018 through the generosity of three private collectors.

Mathematicians routinely use words like “elegant” or “beautiful” to describe results in the discipline, which likely comes as a surprise to those outside the field. Indeed, these terms are right at home in the arts, where we all have an understanding of what they mean in that context. The common perception of mathematics is that it is a cold and static subject, devoid of creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This exhibition features the innovative work of the late Venezuelan artist Roberto Obregón (1946–2003) who was a key figure of global conceptualism. The works on view document his physical, bodily decay over time through the dissection of roses.

For the past 50+ years, the studio faculty from the UF School of Art & Art History have shown their work together in an annual collective exhibition that allows them to share their art practice with students, colleagues and the community. The 53rd SA+AH Studio Faculty Art Exhibition includes recent work—some on view for the first time—by about twenty-five faculty artists. Works represent a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, ceramics, mixed-media and video.

This exhibition will highlight the transition to modernity, and how urbanization affects and/or complements the natural world. With objects from China, Japan, and Korea, this exhibition reflects on how artists viewed their respective nations’ relationship with the natural landscape and the rise of urban centers. Themes include real and imagined landscapes, the body as landscape, cityscapes, seasons of change, and political histories centered around geography and place.

CENTURY is an artful look at life over a 100-year period by some of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. It features thirty-eight new photographs that have entered the Harn Museum photography collection in the last two years. Included are luminaries André Kertész, Laura Gilpin, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, W. Eugene Smith, Larry Burrows, Danny Lyon, Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, and more. Quotes from art critic, artist and activist, John Berger, act as a guide through the exhibition.

In uncanny ways, the past intrudes on our present, creating a sense of déjà vu. Familiar scenarios and challenges from the past—race, gender, equality and struggles with the notion of empire—emerge anew in our own moment, only the actors are different. History gives us the opportunity to understand the present through the past. Twenty-three artists in the exhibition consider how the past is constructed as history, focusing not just on what happened, but how we perceive it. Connecting the past with their future and our present, they make and remake history.

This exhibition celebrates contributions to the Harn Museum collection from Dr. Robert (Bob) and Nancy Magoon and honors the legacy of Bob Magoon, who passed away in January 2018. Their commitment to collecting art by young artists enabled them to curate a collection of works by many of today’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. With this exhibition, we recognize Bob and Nancy Magoon’s passion for contemporary art and their love for and generosity to the Harn and the University of Florida.

This exhibition, offered as a part of the University of Florida's campus-wide celebration of invention and creativity, will investigate and celebrate how various artists discover, question the past, re-interpret the present, and imagine the future. The exhibition explores the work of more than 55 artists from 18 countries. The wide range of media—from ceramics, light sculpture and film, to paintings, prints and drawings—allows for the convergence of diverse voices and ideas.

Established and emerging artists who reside in or have close ties to the Gainesville community have been selected to participate in the Art of Inquiry: Juried Exhibition. The exhibition includes works in most media, including painting, drawing, photography, print media, ceramic, sculpture and mixed media.

Cuban artist Pedro Pablo Oliva is known for his fantastical and provocative paintings and sculptures that reflect Cuba’s social and cultural life. This exhibition highlights five works representing two of his series, one on Fidel Castro and the other on Cuban immigration to the United States.  

Monsters and the Monstrous springs from a UF undergraduate course designed by Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig (UF Health Science Center Library), and team-taught by four undergraduates in the Honors Program in the 2018 fall semester. Its focus is on the nature of “monsters”—how society fears, defines or embraces monsters of all kinds, in many cultures and eras. 

I, Too, Am America: Civil Rights Photographs by Steve Schapiro features forty-four photographs from the late 1950s/1960s Civil Rights Movement. The exhibition includes three distinct sections with works by Steve Schapiro, Gordon Parks and a documentary film titled "James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket."

The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene chronicles an era of rapid, radical and irrevocable ecological change through works of art by 45 contemporary international artists. Our age has been identified as the Anthropocene, a controversial term used to name a new geological epoch defined by human impact.

November 11, 2018, marks the 100th Anniversary of the Armistice that ended WWI. The Great Catastrophe looks at the “art of war” through dynamic vintage WWI posters & fine art prints from 7 countries, as well as objects carried or exchanged during the war.

The art of miniatures takes many forms and exists across time and cultures. Issues of size, scale, modeling, ownership, production and historical and contemporary functions of miniatures will be examined.

Providing a glimpse of the wide diversity of genres, media and inspirations of Haitian art from the 1970s to the first decade of the 21st century, this exhibition inlcudes works which, through images of everyday life and historical scenes, reveal the resilient creative force of artists who were subjected to social, political and climactic turmoil.

Portraits of Faces|Places from the Harn Photography Collection celebrated the museum’s growing collection. It highlighted 55 photographs, many seen here for the first time. The images described the look and feel of places, and the self-possession and specificity of bodies and faces from around the world—from Mexico’s markets, to a portrait studio in Mississippi, to Coney Island’s beaches. Each coaxed us to notice more than what is visible.

The American artists featured in this exhibition represented fine examples from a large and diverse body of the movements that have defined abstraction since 1945. Artists in these decades grappled with the making of meaning through artistic expression, the science of illusion, the power of color and shape, and the experimental possibilities of form and gesture.

The Harn Museum’s collection of works by Jamini Roy ranks among the largest public collections of distinguished holdings by the artist outside of India. Inspired by Indian village artisans, Roy often used pigments made from organic matter, including rock-dust, tamarind seeds, and mercury powder, to paint his canvases.

This exhibition provided an overview of influential American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917 - 2000). Lawrence was primarily concerned with the narration of African American experiences and histories. His acute observations of community life, work, struggle and emancipation during his lifetime were rendered alongside vividly imagined chronicles of the past.

Poetic and Political explored two realms of perception often considered oppositional but more likely to work in tandem to make a rich, provocative and compelling visual impact.

In this exhibition of selected built projects and proposals for architecture, Donald Judd's connection to and freedom from architecture culture was explored, and the integral nature of his art and architecture practice was revealed.

This exhibition highlighted the Harn’s diverse collecting areas through an alphabetical exploration of subject matter, medium and formal elements. From alligator to zig-zag, the exhibition delighted children, families and the young-at-heart.

Imbued with the elemental, Joni Sternbach’s photographs capture the vast terrains of desert and ocean through a unique interplay between image and materials. Choosing wet plate collodion, analog, digital or video technologies, Sternbach’s landscapes reference history and the contemporary sublime.

The Tree of Life addressed the importance of biodiversity and the interrelation of all species on earth. The exhibition explored these themes through a selection of prints and photographs depicting Florida species, as well as a touch table with interactive and video elements.

Nearly 120 drawings, pastels, paintings and sculptures by prominent French artists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century were on loan from one of the most comprehensive and superb private collections of its kind.

Spotlight: Latin America celebrated the contributions of 37 artists from the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and South America. The works—roughly 50 in all—were drawn mostly from the Harn’s collections with additional loans from private Gainesville collectors. The exhibition included Spanish translations of the gallery interpretation.

The Same But Different celebrated the Harn’s growing photography collection. It highlighted more than 90 photographs by 50 photographers arranged in 13 themes. The images in each theme shared a visual or conceptual component that was then interpreted through each photographer’s unique sensibility. 

Blank Space invited visitors to create, respond and play in the museum. The gallery featured interactive installations; scheduled opportunities for yoga, storytelling and dance performances; and art by students.

Intra-Action celebrated 36 international women artists working from the mid-20th century to the present, including the groundbreaking, radical collective called The Guerrilla Girls. More than 70 works challenged patriarchal domination, notions of gender, identity and the art world itself.

Sahel, meaning “shore” in Arabic, refers to the region bordering the Sahara Desert. Art in the Sahel reflects assimilation of diverse cultural and visual ideas that have enriched this region for centuries. Shore Lines: Art Across the Sahel presented historical and contemporary works from the Harn’s collection made by artists who live in the Western Sahel, including the nations Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad. 

Beginning in the late 1970s, philanthropist Arthur Ross (1910–2007) avidly collected works of art by some of the most renowned printmakers of the last three centuries. The Arthur Ross Collection eventually came to comprise more than one thousand eighteenth- to twentieth-century Italian, French, and Spanish prints of the highest quality.

Cuban artist Cundo Bermúdez is best known for his use of color in his paintings, prints and murals. This exhibition highlighted four prints from the renowned artist and included Spanish translations of the gallery interpretation. 

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was among the most photographed women of her generation. What photographers found intriguing was her uninhibited humor and charm, overt sensuality and rare beauty and style.

The United Nations reports there are more displaced people in the world today than ever before due to war, conflict and persecution. Aftermath: The Fallout of War brings together the work of twelve contemporary photographers, both American and from the Middle East, who explore the effects of war on civilians and the environment.

The exhibition focuses on a masking tradition of the Islamized Zara peoples of Burkina Faso, called Lo Gue, or White Masks.

The exhibition features ceramic works by artists inspired by both traditional themes and the avant-garde. Tensions between form and functionality, traditional and modern, national and international are often evident across works in the exhibition and within individual works.

Framing Nature: the Living World in Art takes a dynamic view of the artistic engagement with nature across cultures. The exhibition offers challenging and enriching perspectives on how we see and understand the natural world through the eyes of artists and makers from around the globe.

Capturing Nature: The Insect World in Art explores the naturalist illustrations of four artists who were active in the 18th century: John Abbot, Mark Catesby, Moses Harris and Maria Sibylla Merian.

Sixty-six photographs by Michael Kenna depict nature and the manmade from countries around the world.

In 2011, acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey made portraits of ‘first-year” UF students and asked them to write of their “hopes, dreams and fears.” Five years later, the Harn displayed these images again after contacting these same students inviting them to write about their UF experience—several responded. Their comments—“Then” and “Now”—are exhibited with the original portraits.

Artists in this exhibition contest history and the definition of art itself. They push boundaries and claim new terrain, testing the parameters of aesthetic experience while creating new models of visual meaning.  Resisting the idea of aesthetic purity, they deny the separation between the realm of the artwork and the realm of the political. This exhibition traces this tendency beyond Europe and the United States in the West to include artists from Africa, Latin America and China.

Conversations: A 25^th Anniversary Exhibition provides an opportunity to mark the Harn Museum’s anniversary through an installation that celebrates the growth of its collections over the past 25 years. The exhibition features roughly 125 works representing more than 100 artists.

This film traces the history of women’s work on the development of the Modern Project in New York City and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s.

Concurrent with celebrating the Harn’s 25th Anniversary, NEXUS: Experimental Photography in Florida - Uelsmann, Fichter, Prince, Streetman & Walker takes a look at the long, prosperous and continuous careers of five key members of the UF Photography Department Faculty during the 1960s and 70s.

Objects from homes, palaces, shrines and other sacred spaces including, sculptures, paintings, ceramic vessels, textiles and architectural elements, such as doors, window frames and roof ornaments are on display in this exhibition.

Society, Studio and Street brings both sides of Hoppé’s work together for the first  time, and marks the rediscovery of Hoppé as a pivotal figure in Edwardian art and photo-modernism.

This exhibition highlights the intersections between designer fashions and traditional forms of dress in Ghanaian culture, with runway garments displayed alongside historical textiles such as a batakari tunic and kente cloth.

Monet and American Impressionism highlights twenty-five artists who launched a new way of painting in response to the influence of Monet and French Impressionism. The exhibition presents roughly fifty paintings and twenty prints dated between 1880 and 1920.

Harn Museum of Art
October 22, 2013 - March 23, 2014  |  Gainesville, FL
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum
May 15, 2014 - September 21, 2014  |  Atlanta, GA
Princeton University Art Museum
October 25, 2014 - January 25, 2015  |  Princeton, NJ
New Orleans Museum of Art
February 27, 2015 - May 25, 2015  |  New Orleans, LA

Co-organized by the Harn Museum of Art and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, the exhibition includes a broad range of media including sculpture, drawings, engravings, paintings, baskets, textiles, and musical instruments to illuminate the rich heritage of the Kongo peoples and to trace the transformations of Kongo cultural production from the colonial and post-colonial periods through the modern era.