Beyond the Brush opened at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville on October 27, bringing Florida into focus through 70 paintings, works on paper and sculptures. The exhibition inaugurates a new 3,600-square-foot gallery created during a year-long renovation, while an upgraded Bishop Study Center gives students and researchers more direct ways to engage with the museum’s collection.
The first public day was confirmed by WCJB’s opening-day report, which documented the completed space and its free access for the community. That matters because an earlier exhibition listing had described the date as tentative. The new gallery is no longer a project on a calendar: it is open.
A collection larger than the postcard
Drawn from the Florida Art Collection gifted by Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers in 2020, the show selects 70 works from more than 1,200. Nearly 60 artists trace the state from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, moving between beaches, wetlands, city streets, historic landmarks and the vegetation that gives the exhibition its title.
The familiar names are substantial: Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Moran, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Marguerite Zorach and William Glackens. Yet the exhibition also foregrounds artists whose histories are inseparable from Florida, including Laura Woodward, Albert Backus and Highwaymen painters Johnny Daniels and Harold Newton.
That combination changes the scale of the story. Florida is not treated as a single sunlit image but as a place shaped by tourism, settlement, labor, environmental change and competing ideas of belonging. Some works are appearing at the Harn for the first time; others have not been shown since the museum’s 2021 presentation of the Vickers gift.
A gallery designed for closer looking
The renovation does more than add wall space. Positioned near the entrance, the gallery makes the collection an immediate encounter rather than a destination deep inside the museum. Next door, the rebuilt 1,000-square-foot Bishop Study Center is equipped for university classes, object-based research and virtual teaching across locations.
Harn chief curator Dulce Román frames the exhibition as an invitation to look beyond painted surfaces and uncover overlapping histories and perspectives. One opening-day example makes that approach tangible: Herman Herzog’s Lake Alachua (Fisherman’s Creek Landing), painted around 1900, depicts the flooded landscape now known as Paynes Prairie and connects local geography with the artist’s family ties to the university.
The new rooms also expand a museum that remained open throughout construction. Founded in 1990, the Harn holds nearly 14,000 works across African, Asian, modern, contemporary and photographic collections. With admission free, the renovation turns a major private gift into a public resource for both casual visitors and sustained academic study.
Beyond the Brush: The Florida Art Collection, Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers runs through October 8, 2028. Its long duration gives the museum time to test its central proposition: that Florida’s visual history becomes richer when viewers look past the postcard and attend to the land, people and memories beneath it.
Image: Winslow Homer, Foul Hooked Black Bass, 1904, watercolor on paper, Harn Museum of Art, The Florida Art Collection, Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers. Public domain (PDM 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The museum uses this work to illustrate the exhibition; the Commons record lists it as not on view, so its inclusion in the current hang is not confirmed. No editorial modifications.
.jpg){kind=link}